Understanding Commodity Cultures: Explorations in Economic Anthropology with Case Studies from Mexico »

Scott Cook is professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut where his last position (1996-2000) was interim director of the Institute for Puerto Rican and Latino Studies. He is the author of six books, including Mexican Brick Culture in the Building of Texas, 1800s-1980s and Obliging Need: Rural Petty Industry in Mexican Capitalism.

This book explores how lived experience is informed by and shapes the diversifying funds of knowledge that enable people under economic stress to make culturally-informed choices in their material interest. By selectively reviewing the economic anthropological record and critically examining specific studies in several of Mexico's (and Guatemala's) key regions, as well as the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the new trans-border space in the U.S. and Canada for Mexican migrant labor, the author encourages readers to critically rethink their views of economic otherness in Mexico (and, by extension, elsewhere in Latin America and the Third World), and presents a new framework for reconciling the continuing attraction of concepts like 'penny capitalism' with the realities of a world ever more subjected to continental and global market projects of 'Dollar Capitalism'.