Taking Southeast Asia to Market

Commodities, Nature, and People in the Neoliberal Age

Edited by Joseph Nevins, Nancy Lee Peluso

Recent changes in the global economy and in Southeast Asian national political economies have led to new forms of commodity production and new commodities. Using insights from political economy and commodity studies, the essays in Taking Southeast Asia to Market trace the myriad ways recent alignments among producers, distributors, and consumers are affecting people and nature throughout the region.

In case studies ranging from coffee and hardwood products to mushroom pickers and Vietnamese factory workers, the authors detail the Southeast Asian articulations of these processes while also discussing the broader implications of these shifts. Taken together, the cases show how commodities illuminate the convergence of changing social forces in Southeast Asia today, as they transform the terms, practices, and experiences of everyday life and politics in the global economy.

Press Reviews

"What unites these case studies is their view that commodification processes under the 'new' global order are increasingly complex and their critical stance toward the kinds of sociopolitical transformations that are wrought by a neoliberal market economy. The intractability of 'neoliberalist tendencies' is explained by, inter alia, the neoliberal market economy's ability to localize and contain fallouts; its effectiveness in limiting transnational resistance to its spread; and the particular

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Experts

"As one leans on a lovely Indonesian table, slips into a stylish T-shirt, sips a rare arabica coffee, or munches on delicious shrimp, one is in the new circuits of Southeast Asian economies. Most U.S. readers have largely forgotten about this region and hear of it mainly in references to the Vietnam war or threatened tigers. But the region has reconfigured itself, its politics, and its economies in highly complex, often unpredictable ways under this round of neoliberal globalization. Taking

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"Taking Southeast Asia to Market is a timely theoretical intervention in political ecology, but it is more, too: a sparkling set of reflections on the social production of nature, as well as on nature's products and their transformations. Ranging from jewel mining in Burma to the market for live seafood in Hong Kong, and from Islamic spiritual training for factory workers in Indonesia to mushroom hunters in the Pacific Northwest, these essays never fail to exceed expectations. This is the kind of productive surprise that one finds in the best ethnographic writing, and which is the source of much of ethnography's power."—Mary Margaret Steedly, Harvard University

Also of interest

China's Ascent

Power, Security, and the Future of International Politics

Subjects

Social Science : Anthropology

Interdisciplinary Studies : Asian Studies

Social Science : Geography

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