Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"
A Feast of Flowers is a fascinating exploration of the inner workings of agro-industrial spaces, providing a compelling case study for how to approach the hidden histories behind everyday commodities. The importance of Krupa’s timely ethnographic approach lies in its careful dissection of boom-time capitalism and the complex links between race relations, regional history, and subjectivity. This book will supplement conversations across anthropology, geography, economics, and Latin American studies, as it poses important questions for those interested in industrial-labor conditions and transnational commodity networks and, for that matter, anyone who has ever purchased or received cut flowers." * Exertions *
"This brilliant, powerful study is a pioneering ethnography of capitalist production and its long history of degrading lives through racializing structures of inequity. Krupa’s genius is to focus on the chain of intertwining relations, spanning continents and industries, organizational forms and systemic structures, politics and world views that are involved in the production of delicacies prized in North America and made through the labor of Ecuadorian peasants. Because of his innovative work, we come to understand the weight and trajectory of these transformations making Indigenous, subsistence farmers into ‘modern’ workers for a burgeoning, North American flower industry. Krupa’s insights, compelling prose, personal commentaries—and wit—make us take account of our roles in these histories and realize how we are also accomplices in producing chains of inequity. After reading this book, we will never look at roses the same way." * Irene Silverblatt, Duke University *
