Taking Southeast Asia to Market

Recent changes in the global economy and in Southeast Asian national political economies have led to new forms of commodity production and new commodities. Using insights from political economy and commodity studies, the essays in Taking Southeast...

Joseph Nevins is Associate Professor of Geography at Vassar College and the author of A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor, also from Cornell, among other books. Nancy Lee Peluso is Professor of Environmental Social Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the coeditor of Violent Environments, also from Cornell, and the author of Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java.

What unites these case studies is their view that commodification processes under the 'new' global order are increasingly complex and their critical stance toward the kinds of sociopolitical transformations that are wrought by a neoliberal market economy. The intractability of 'neoliberalist tendencies' is explained by, inter alia, the neoliberal market economy's ability to localize and contain fallouts; its effectiveness in limiting transnational resistance to its spread; and the particular historical, political contingencies in specific places that sustain such tendencies. Its resilience is also partly explained by its constant morphing into more (outwardly) benign forms. This edited volume is thus an important and much appreciated addition that deepens our understanding of pertinent social, economic, and political processes in Southeast Asia. It is especially significant and timely in illuminating how neoliberalizing processes make new commodities and remake old ones.

Mary Margaret Steedly, Harvard University:

Taking Southeast Asia to Market is a timely theoretical intervention in political ecology, but it is more, too: a sparkling set of reflections on the social production of nature, as well as on nature's products and their transformations. Ranging from jewel mining in Burma to the market for live seafood in Hong Kong, and from Islamic spiritual training for factory workers in Indonesia to mushroom hunters in the Pacific Northwest, these essays never fail to exceed expectations. This is the kind of productive surprise that one finds in the best ethnographic writing, and which is the source of much of ethnography's power.

Susanna Hecht, Professor, Regional and International Development, Institute of the Environment, School of Public Affairs, UCLA:

As one leans on a lovely Indonesian table, slips into a stylish T-shirt, sips a rare arabica coffee, or munches on delicious shrimp, one is in the new circuits of Southeast Asian economies. Most U.S. readers have largely forgotten about this region and hear of it mainly in references to the Vietnam war or threatened tigers. But the region has reconfigured itself, its politics, and its economies in highly complex, often unpredictable ways under this round of neoliberal globalization. Taking Southeast Asia to Market does a superior job of showing how globalization is mediated by local institutions and actors. This is a useful and definitive collection on politics, socionatures, and globalization.