A Vital Frontier by Andrea Muehlebach
In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization. Traversing social, political, legal, and hydrological terrains, Muehlebach situates water as a political fault line at the frontiers of financialization, showing how the seemingly relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relentless and often successful insurgence of political organizing. Drawing on ethnographic research, Muehlebach presents water protests as a vital politics that comprises popular referenda, barricades in the streets, huge demonstrations, the burning of utility bills, and legal disputes over transparency and contracts. As Muehlebach documents, Europe’s water activists articulate their own values of democracy and just price, raising far-reaching political questions about private versus common property and financing, liberal democracy, sovereignty, legality, and collective infrastructural responsibility in the face of financialization and commodification. Muehlebach shows that water-rights activists can successfully resist financial markets by exposing the commodification of water as the theft of life itself.
"This book will be helpful for faculty and students interested in social movements, neoliberalism, and/or international water management practicesRecommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." -- E. Bridger Wilson * Choice *
"A Vital Frontier offers the reader a rich, grounded ethnography on the many tactics used by European water insurgencies against private encroachment into public life. . . in our increasingly financialised world, Muehlebach provides a timely intervention on groups fighting against the fundamental contradiction of valuing priceless resources like water." -- Claudia Díaz-Combs * Antipode *
"In this tour de force, Andrea Muehlebach offers readers ethnographic insight into the vital issue of water sovereignty, at the intersection of two historical and ongoing processes: the financialization of public water utilities and the subsequent struggles that ensue over the control of water, or life itself as many of her interlocutors call it." -- Kailey Rocker * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *
"This book is exemplary, closely researched, and yet very accessible. It reveals the predatory nature of capitalism encroaching ever more on people’s daily lives, but it also demonstrates their ability to fight back, to ensure priority of the public over the private, of life over profit maximization. In short, it is also a message of hope. A must read—I most strongly recommend it!" -- Andreas Bieler * Journal of Anthropological Research *
"Muehlebach got me with [her] first sentences, and I was reading the 250 page book almost without a break." -- Roland Brunner * Blue Community *
"A Vital Frontier offers the reader a rich, grounded ethnography on the many tactics used by European water insurgencies against private encroachment into public life. . . in our increasingly financialised world, Muehlebach provides a timely intervention on groups fighting against the fundamental contradiction of valuing priceless resources like water." -- Claudia Díaz-Combs * Antipode *
"In this tour de force, Andrea Muehlebach offers readers ethnographic insight into the vital issue of water sovereignty, at the intersection of two historical and ongoing processes: the financialization of public water utilities and the subsequent struggles that ensue over the control of water, or life itself as many of her interlocutors call it." -- Kailey Rocker * Political and Legal Anthropology Review *
"This book is exemplary, closely researched, and yet very accessible. It reveals the predatory nature of capitalism encroaching ever more on people’s daily lives, but it also demonstrates their ability to fight back, to ensure priority of the public over the private, of life over profit maximization. In short, it is also a message of hope. A must read—I most strongly recommend it!" -- Andreas Bieler * Journal of Anthropological Research *
"Muehlebach got me with [her] first sentences, and I was reading the 250 page book almost without a break." -- Roland Brunner * Blue Community *
Andrea Muehlebach is Professor of Maritime Anthropology and Cultures of Water at the University of Bremen and author of The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy.
| SKU | Nicht verfügbar |
| ISBN 13 | 9781478017134 |
| ISBN 10 | 1478017139 |
| Titel | A Vital Frontier |
| Autor | Andrea Muehlebach |
| Buchzustand | Nicht verfügbar |
| Bindungsart | Hardback |
| Verlag | Duke University Press |
| Erscheinungsjahr | 2023-05-19 |
| Seitenanzahl | 272 |
| Hinweis auf dem Einband | Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden. |
| Hinweis | Nicht verfügbar |