Description
Book SynopsisA compelling chronicle of economic, political, and social development in Cuenca.
Trade ReviewUnraveling Time shows the anthropologist working on her craft. Through long-term, sensitive ethnography, Ann Miles captures the passing of time and the texture of change. She reveals her Cuencan partners as men and women grappling with economic shocks, a city transformed by migration, and the drama of sustaining transnational family ties. With her careful observations, Miles shows how they find meaning in all that has happened over the decades. It's a wonderful work of ethnographic reflection. -- Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, University of North Carolina, coauthor of Fast, Easy, and In Cash: Artisan Hardship and Hope in the Global Economy
A thoroughly engrossing examination of gender, migration, and the evolving sociopolitical landscape of Cuenca, Ecuador, over the last three decades. With the attention, deep insight, and kinship with her interlocutors that can come only from long-term ethnographic engagement, Ann Miles introduces us to the complicated lives of the women and men she has followed for years. Through the sensitively told stories of these Cuencanos, we come to understand both the important (and conflicting) ways that transnationalism has shaped an entire country and the approaches through which one anthropologist has tried to make intellectual and emotional sense of a lifetime of ethnographic accruals. A superb book and must a read for scholars of transnationalism, Latin American migration, and gender in South America. -- Jason De León, UCLA, author of The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail
This book joins a growing number of ethnographies by authors who reflect on their field work and research, grappling with the dynamic nature of temporal-spatial interactions that proceed apace as ethnographers and their interlocutors continue making their own histories and cultures far beyond the life of the anthropologist. * Journal of Anthropological Research *
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1. The Ethnography of Accrual: 1988–2020
- Dateline 1990: Remembering and Forgetting
- Chapter 2. Making a Cosmopolitan City
- Dateline 1988–1989: The Virgin of Cajas
- Chapter 3. Single Women in the City
- Dateline 1988–2020: Alejandra
- Chapter 4. Ni de Aqui, Ni de Allá
- Dateline 1988–2020: Blanca
- Chapter 5. The Gringo Invasion
- Dateline 2015–2019: Soon the Tourists Will Have the Place to Themselves
- Chapter 6. Thinking about Endings
- Notes
- References
- Index
