Materializing Poverty: How the Poor Transform Their Lives (Anthropology of Daily Life) - Hardcover

Erin B. Taylor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0759124213 ISBN 13: 9780759124219

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (UK), 2013

Synopsis

Poverty is generally defined as a lack of material resources. However, the relationships that poor people have with their possessions are not just about deprivation. Material things play a positive role in the lives of poor people: they help people to build social relationships, address inequalities, and fulfill emotional needs. In Materializing Poverty, anthropologist Erin Taylor explores how residents of a squatter settlement in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, use their material resources creatively to solve everyday problems and, over a few decades, radically transform the community. Their struggles show how these everyday engagements with materiality, rather than more dramatic efforts, generate social change and build futures.

About this title

About the Author

Erin B. Taylor is an Australian anthropologist who received her PhD from The University of Sydney in 2009. She lectured there for three years before taking up a research fellowship at The University of Lisbon. During this time, she helped found the popular anthropology website PopAnth: Hot Buttered Humanity.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (UK)
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0759124213
• ISBN 13: 9780759124219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192