Made in Madagascar: Sapphires, Ecotourism, and the Global Bazaar (Teaching Culture: UTP Ethnographies for the Classroom)
As the first line [of the preface] suggests, this is primarily a 'teaching' book, which is to say, Walsh grounds abstract ideas in ethnographic anecdotes and explains connections with crystal clarity. The book is engaging, accessible, and short, and it manages to clarify in a mere 112 pages of text several key anthropological concepts, including cultural relativism, globalization, social construction, place-making, nature versus culture, the sacred and the profane, 'the gift,' and commodity fetishism.Walsh has crafted a very useful and timely book. I can see it working well in introductory courses in cultural anthropology, not to mention higher-level courses on globalization. The book gives a nice impression of the current state of fieldwork and ethnography and of the current state of global/capitalist/neoliberal connections and flows. It is a success as ethnography, as a description of world cultural and economic forces, and as a teaching tool.This is a terrific book. It is aimed at students and is written in an accessible and engaging style, but I think it should appeal to the wider scholarly community because it has a lot to offer in empirical and conceptual terms. The apparent simplicity of the book makes it an immensely powerful and lively statement on the ways that global dynamics shape and reshape human communities and the environments they inhabit.