The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots

Download or read book The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots written by Keir Martin and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1994, the Pacific island village of Matupit was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This study focuses on the subsequent reconstruction and contests over the morality of exchanges that are generative of new forms of social stratification. Such new dynamics of stratification are central to contemporary processes of globalization in the Pacific, and more widely. Through detailed ethnography of the transactions that a displaced people entered into in seeking to rebuild their lives, this book analyses how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neoliberalism without taking either the transformative power of globalization or the resilience of indigenous culture as its starting point. It also contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster reconstruction and development projects.