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Book Review
| Goods, Power, History: Latin America's Material Culture. By ARNOLD J. BAUER. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 245 pp. + maps, figures, index. $19.00 (paper).
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Arnold Bauer offers us a beautifully composed and sweeping overview of the past thousand years of Latin American history, the present included, from the vantage of its "material culture." Perhaps some specialists on the region will find little absolutely "new" here in terms of research or facts or even in the book's conceptual grasp of Latin America. But this is an artful synthesis, one that sows a field never before plowed in quite this way. For world historians, especially the materially inclined, Goods, Power, History will serve as a valuable and intellectually engaging introduction to Latin America. |
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Bauer's book is mainly about the trinity of food, clothing, and shelter, though along the way it touches upon virtually every other realm of economic and cultural life (such as music, architecture, and fashion). The book is more about consumption cultures than the story of market commodities or exports, though production, technology, and commerce are always there peeking though the curtain. Bauer blazes a complex social and cultural trail through the world of goods, as discussed in the introduction. Above all he builds here upon sociologist Norbert Elias's notion of "civilizing goods"—that the social function of goods is to provide a sense of belonging to elites and masses, a civic "identity," and natural obedience to dominant mores and power structures. The other key concept is the "hybridity" of Latin American's material culture, a sensible middle ground given the region's unique half millennium of immersion in the West. Stronger by the decade, Europeanizing and now Americanizing commodities and styles inevitably inspire how Latin Americans eat, dress, and live. |
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