From reviews of the first edition: "Between Field and Cooking Pot offers details of the daily lives of marketwomen in the central Andean departmental capital of Huaraz.... A welcome addition to studies of women and international development, this book contains a wealth of firsthand material, collected through informal participant-observation as well as formal interviews and analysis of statistical data.... The book encourages us to imagine how the dynamic culture of marketwomen might intersect with the construction, representation, and effects of class and gender." —American Anthropologist "The book has a clear and readable style, moving easily between vignettes of marketwomen's lives, descriptions of the markets themselves, and surveys of the theoretical literature. Babb's long, close involvement with the Huaraz markets is apparent. As someone who has spent a lot of time in Andean markets, I found the book pleasurable to read, because it recreated the experience of the marketplace so well." —American Ethnologist This revised edition of Between Field and Cooking Pot offers an updated appraisal of what neoliberal politics and economics mean in the lives of marketwomen in the nineties, based on new fieldwork conducted in 1997. Babb also reflects on how recent currents in feminist and anthropological studies have caused her to rethink some aspects of Andean marketers in Peruvian culture and society.

From reviews of the first edition:"The book has a clear and readable style, moving easily between vignettes of marketwomen's lives, descriptions of the markets themselves, and surveys of the theoretical literature. Babb's long, close involvement with the Huaraz markets is apparent. As someone who has spent a lot of time in Andean markets, I found the book pleasurable to read, because it recreated the experience of the marketplace so well."--American Ethnologist"Between Field and Cooking Pot offers details of the daily lives of marketwomen in the central Andean departmental capital of Huaraz. . . . A welcome addition to studies of women and international development, this book contains a wealth of firsthand material, collected through informal participant-observation as well as formal interviews and analysis of statistical data. . . . The book encourages us to imagine how the dynamic culture of marketwomen might intersect with the construction, representation, and effects of class and gender."--American Anthropologist"The book has a clear and readable style, moving easily between vignettes of marketwomen's lives, descriptions of the markets themselves, and surveys of the theoretical literature. Babb's long, close involvement with the Huaraz markets is apparent. As someone who has spent a lot of time in Andean markets, I found the book pleasurable to read, because it recreated the experience of the marketplace so well."--American EthnologistThis revised edition of Between Field and Cooking Pot offers an updated appraisal of what neoliberal politics and economics mean in the lives of marketwomen in the nineties, based on new fieldwork conducted in 1997. Babb also reflects on how recent currents in feminist and anthropological studies have caused her to rethink some aspects of Andean marketers in Peruvian culture and society.

This study spans 15 years of research in several developing countries on the street food industry. The author discusses Public Policy issues of nutritional standards, sanitation, and regulation that affect this business.

Globalization and economic restructuring have decimated formal jobs in developing countries, pushing many women into informal employment such as direct selling of cosmetics, perfume, and other personal care products as a way to "make up the difference" between household income and expenses. In Ecuador, with its persistent economic crisis and few opportunities for financially and personally rewarding work, women increasingly choose direct selling as a way to earn income by activating their social networks. While few women earn the cars and trips that are iconic prizes in the direct selling organization, many use direct selling as part of a set of household survival strategies. In this first in-depth study of a cosmetics direct selling organization in Latin America, Erynn Masi de Casanova explores women's identities as workers, including their juggling of paid work and domestic responsibilities, their ideas about professional appearance, and their strategies for collecting money from customers. Focusing on women who work for the country's leading direct selling organization, she offers fascinating portraits of the everyday lives of women selling personal care products in Ecuador's largest city, Guayaquil. Addressing gender relations (including a look at men's direct and indirect involvement), the importance of image, and the social and economic context of direct selling, Casanova challenges assumptions that this kind of flexible employment resolves women's work/home conflicts and offers an important new perspective on women's work in developing countries.

With half of humanity already living in towns and cities and that proportion expected to increase in the coming decades, society - both Western and non-Western - is fast becoming urban and even mega-urban. As such, research in urban settings is evidently timely and of great importance. Anthropology in the City brings together a leading team of anthropologists to address the complex methodological and theoretical challenges posed by field-research in urban settings, clearly identifying the significance of the anthropological paradigm in urban research and its centrality both to mainstream academic debates and to society more broadly. With essays from experts on wide-ranging ethnographic research from fields as diverse as China, Europe, India, Latin and North America and South East Asia, this book demonstrates the contribution that empirically-based anthropological analysis can make to our understanding of our increasingly urban world.

A notable collection of complementary essays, largely culled from the pages of Comparative studies in society and history, examine the ways in which power (exerted by capital, markets, peasants, women, elites, and States) and culture (expressed in official policy, institutions, and communal life) h