Description
Book SynopsisOver the last decade, Peru has experienced a spectacular mining boom and astronomical economic growth. Yet, for villagers in Peru's southern Andes, few have felt the material benefits. With this book, Eric Hirsch considers what growth means—and importantly how it feels. Hirsch proposes an analysis of boom-time capitalism that starts not from considerations of poverty, but from the premise that Peru is wealthy. He situates his work in a network of villages near new mining sites, agricultural export markets, and tourist attractions, where Peruvian prosperity appears tantalizingly close, yet just out of reach.
This book centers on small-scale development investments working to transform villagers into Indigenous entrepreneurs ready to capitalize on Peru's new national brand and access the constantly deferred promise of national growth. That meant identifying as Indigenous, where few actively did so; identifying as an entrepreneur, in a place where single-minded devotion to a business went against the tendency to diversify income sources; and identifying every dimension of one's daily life as a resource, despite the unwelcome intimacy this required. Theorizing growth as an affective project that requires constant physical and emotional labor, Acts of Growth follows a diverse group of Andean residents through the exhausting work of making an economy grow.
Trade Review"With
Acts of Growth, Eric Hirsch beautifully navigates the shifting terrain of southern Peru as he critically examines neoliberal capitalism's prescriptions for local performances of plenitude and growth amid dispossession. His brilliant ethnography of development initiatives offers rich new insights into the region and broader contexts of change."—Florence E. Babb, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Acts of Growth is a compelling account of how 'extractive care' insinuates itself into everyday structures of feeling in Andean Peru. Reframing conversations about extraction, Indigenous entrepreneurship, and Indigenous theorizations of non-human relations, Eric Hirsch sees one of the oldest stories in the Americas with fresh eyes. Powerful and insightful."—María Elena García, University of Washington
