Lilies of the field : marginal people who live for the moment
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Lilies of the field : marginal people who live for the moment
（Studies in the ethnographic imagination）
Westview Press, 1999
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-250) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Lilies of the Field presents a broad range of ethnographic studies which share one common feature: They deal with people who try to live in the present moment. Some of these people work as wage laborers, some forage in the forest or in the sea, and still others trade or till the land. In the midst of this almost bewildering diversity, a common commitment to the present moment and the short term becomes all the more striking. This involves an exceptional inversion of mainstream practice.The individuals examined here are prepared to try to do without arrangements for their own reproduction through time, rather than enmesh themselves in a politically coercive world, where they can only find a place as dependents. The authors consider the multiple political uses to which these cultural attitudes have been put, both by the people immediately concerned and also by (more powerful) others. Framed by various theoretical debates, Lilies of the Field shows how the cultural ethos associated with immediate return social systems can be found in very different economic and social contexts.
} Lilies of the Field presents a broad range of ethnographic studies which share one common feature: They deal with people who try to live in the present moment. Some of these people work as wage laborers, some forage in the forest or in the sea, and still others trade or till the land. In the midst of this almost bewildering diversity, a common commitment to the present moment and the short term becomes all the more striking. This involves an exceptional inversion of mainstream practice.The people found in this book imagine the present as other people imagine the future or the past: It is a source of joy and satisfaction. Through their fundamental commitment to living each day as it comes, they invert their marginal status and put themselves at the center of their own moral universe. They also achieve a remarkable voluntarism in their sense of identity: The less you are concerned with the past and future, the more true it is to say, You are what you do. This orientation constitutes a powerful tool of resistance and opposition to surrounding neighbors and institutions.The individuals examined here are prepared to try to do without arrangements for their own reproduction through time, rather than enmesh themselves in a politically coercive world, where they can only find a place as dependents.
The authors consider the multiple political uses to which these cultural attitudes have been put, both by the people immediately concerned and also by (more powerful) others. Framed by various theoretical debates, Lilies of the Field shows how the cultural ethos associated with immediate return social systems can be found in very different economic and social contexts. }
Table of Contents
- Introduction (Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart)
- * Life Without Thought For The Morrow
- Brothers and Orphans: Images of Equality Among Hungarian Rom (Michael Stewart)
- Incorporation and Exclusion in the Podhale (Frances Pine)
- Prey at the Center: Resistance and Marginality in Amazonia (Laura Rival)
- * Two Marginal Individuals
- At the Center of the Market: A Vezo Woman (Rita Astuti)
- Two Beautiful Untouchable Women: Processes of Becoming in Southern India (Yasushi Uchiyamada)
- * Single-Sex Worlds
- Wage Hunting at the Margins of Urban Japan (Tom Gill)
- Hustling: Individualism Among London Prostitutes (Sophie Day)
- A Contest with Money: Gambling and the Politics of Disinterested Sociality in Aegean Greece (Evthymios Papataxiarchis)
- * Writing About Marginality
- Verging on the Marginal: Modern Amazonian Peasantries (Stephen Nugent)
- The Brazilian Floodplains: Where Cholera Does Not Kill Caboclos
- (Mark Harris)
- A Doctor by a Canal: A Presentation of a Person, From Nasser to Foucault (Fanny Colonna)
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