I noticed this posting on the ETHNOHIS list, and while there does not seem to be much cross-posting between that list and HISTARCH, this looks like something that HISTARCHers would find interesting: _________________________________________________________ Original Post by: Orlove, Ben <[log in to unmask]> I thought I'd tell you about a new book, The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods in Postcolonial Latin America. I'm the editor, University of Michigan Press is the publisher, and I think that the emphasis on anthropology and history of consumption and identity would be of particular interest to people on the list, along with the issues of material culture, nationalism, and daily life. Please note that the book has a striking website. The book focuses on the craze for foreign goods that struck Latin Americans in the decades after independence that has continued to the present. People of all classes and backgrounds abandoned traditional, locally made goods that had satisfied needs and wishes for centuries: merchants in Costa Rica replaced wooden benches with sofas; Indians in the remote interior of Bolivia used imported British cottons instead of homemade cloth; wealthy and poor alike in Chile began to drink coffee rather than herbal teas. The chapters in The Allure of the Foreign are balanced by discipline (anthropology and history), century (19th and 20th) and region (South America, Central America and Mexico). They all trace instances of the demand for imported goods and their patterns of use--as well as the smaller number of cases in which local goods retained their popularity--to investigate why foreign goods became so popular only after the creation of independent Latin American republics. The basic argument is that this fascination stemmed from the cultural dilemmas of the new Latin American nations. Latin Americans were caught between a desire to separate themselves from their former rulers and the wish to join in a new global modernity, and so they developed ways of using European and North American goods to show off newly invented national identities. The introduction offers a comparison to other post-colonial societies in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The book addresses a variety of issues in consumption, daily life, national identity and post-coloniality. It aims to integrate cultural history with political economy, and to be entirely jargon-free. If you'd like to find out more about the book, look at the website: http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/orlove/home.htm ================================ Benjamin Orlove Division of Environmental Studies University of California Davis, CA 95616 voice: 916/752-6756 fax: 916/752-3350 [log in to unmask] http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/orlove.htm ================================ addresses in New York, from August 12 1997 to July 1998, e-mail: [log in to unmask] office: Columbia Earth Institute 535 W. 116th Street, 405 Low New York, NY 10027 phone: 212/854-9463 fax: 212/854-6309