Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua

Description

In Myths of Modernity, Elizabeth Dore rethinks Nicaragua’s transition to capitalism. Arguing against the idea that the country’s capitalist transformation was ushered in by the coffee boom that extended from 1870 to 1930, she maintains that coffee growing gave rise to systems of landowning and labor exploitation that impeded rather than promoted capitalist development. Dore places gender at the forefront of her analysis, which demonstrates that patriarchy was the organizing principle of the coffee economy’s debt-peonage system until the 1950s. She examines the gendered dynamics of daily life in Diriomo, a township in Nicaragua’s Granada region, tracing the history of the town’s Indian community from its inception in the colonial era to its demise in the early twentieth century. Dore seamlessly combines archival research, oral history, and an innovative theoretical approach that unites political economy with social history. She recovers the bygone voices of peons, planters, and local officials within documents such as labor contracts, court records, and official correspondence. She juxtaposes these historical perspectives with those of contemporary peasants, landowners, activists, and politicians who share memories passed down to the present. The reconceptualization of the coffee economy that Dore elaborates has far-reaching implications. The Sandinistas mistakenly believed, she contends, that Nicaraguan capitalism was mature and ripe for socialist revolution, and after their victory in 1979 that belief led them to alienate many peasants by ignoring their demands for land. Thus, the Sandinistas’ myths of modernity contributed to their downfall.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua

  • 2006-01-25
  • 252 pages
  • Paperback
  • Duke University Press

Similar books

• 

  The Myth of Modernity

  By Charles Baudouin

  First published in 1950, this is a late work by Charles Baudouin, world-famous French psychologist, and takes its title from the opening chapter which examines the transformation of the myth of Progress, characteristic of the eighteenth and ...

• 

  The Enlightenment and religion: The myths of modernity

  By S. J. Barnett

  The central claim of this book is that the immense ideological appeal of the traditional birth-of-modernity myth has meant that the actual lack of Deists has been glossed over, and a quite misleading historical view has become entrenched.

• 

  Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt

  By James Ferguson

  Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline.

• 

  Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt

  By James Ferguson

  Since the 1970s the urban economy has decreased. This volume explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline.

• 

  The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences

  By Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, Jason Ananda Josephson

  See Peter König, Der Grosse Theodor-Reuss-Reader (Munich: Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Religions- und Weltanschauungsfragen, 1997), 245. 4. Max Weber, “Science as Vocation” (Wissenschaftals Beruf), originally a speech delivered at Munich ...

• 

  Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism, and Historical Teleology

  By Alison M. Moore

  This ambitious and wide-ranging study of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture and thought transverses texts of evolutionary biology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, political propaganda, fiction, historiography of Nazism, and ...

• 

  Myths and Politics in Western Societies: Evaluating the Crisis of Modernity in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain

  By John Girling

  ""In an intriguing and provocative bookan important thesis. An important addition to libraries serving both academic and general readers."" --Choice

• 

  The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination

  By Philip Ball

  We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth?

• 

  Myth and Modernity

  By Dan Edelstein, Bettina R. Lerner

  In a similar vein, Michel Schneider organizes his study of Géricault's Raft around the myth of Medusa. In Un rêve de pierre: Le radeau de la Méduse, Géricault, he argues convincingly that the Raft should not be viewed from a religious ...

• 

  Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity

  By Patrick Curry

  This thoughtful book focuses on three main aspects of Tolkien’s fiction: the social and political structure of Middle-earth and how the varying cultures within it find common cause in the face of a shared threat; the nature and ecology of ...