provoked conflicts with the community as

well as providing much needed income for

the local population.

Finally, Guantanamo can be read as

much as Caribbean history as Cuban

history. Too often historians of Cuba

implicitly or explicitly argue that Cuba

is too exceptional from its Caribbean

neighbors to warrant useful comparison.

In contrast, Lipman describes a commu-

nity that is simultaneously profoundly

Cuban and Caribbean. Guantanamo was

not the only community in eastern Cuba

like this. At the same time, however, the

author is cautious about calling her work

‘‘transnational’’ history. Much transna-

tional scholarship down plays (often cor-

rectly) the influence of borders and

frontiers. But in Guantanamo borders

mattered a great deal and that while peo-

ple found ways to cross them, no one was

allowed to forget on which side of the bor-

der they stood, if only for a moment. And

in this way Guantanamo not only stands

on its own merit as a work of original

scholarship, but it should serve as an ex-

ample for future research on Cuban re-

gional history.

Fair Trade and a Global Commodity:

Coffee in Costa Rica. Peter Luetchford,

London: Pluto Press, 2008. 226 pp.

Kate Fischer

University of Colorado

Peter Luetchford attempts to ‘‘provide

some of the missing context to the highly

emotive subject of fair-trade coffee’’ (1).

Drawing on fieldwork in the rural town of

El Dos in Costa Rica’s Tilaran Highlands,

Luetchford’s goals are two pronged: to ex-

plore ethnographically growers’ and coop-

erative members’ engagements with Fair

Trade and to demonstrate the cultural em-

beddedness of the movement in moraliz-

ing discourses about the economy. This

slim volume thus argues for a critical read-

ing of Fair Trade, a movement deeply imb-

ricated in, but positioned by its propents

as distinct from, the neoliberal commod-

ities market. This contradictory status sug-

gests that consumers read the Fair Trade

label as both a commodityFa bag of

coffeeFand a means of giving charitably

to marginalized producers. In this way

coffee is framed as an ethical purchase

and a moral decision.

The movement is based upon the no-

tion that neoliberal transactions are inher-

ently unequal. It aims to combat that

inequality by eliminating middlemen and

guaranteeing a minimum price for agri-

cultural products. However, the various

national Fair Trade organizations are

based exclusively in the global north. There

they declaim Fair Trade’s benefits for farm-

ers as part of a strategy aimed at increasing

market share, rather than generating crit-

ical analysis or reflection by consumers.

Luetchford’s work complicates this feel-

good marketing discourse by placing the

movement’s calls for social justice and con-

sumer–producer connections alongside

analyses of alienation, fetishization, and

reciprocity in rural Costa Rica.

Luetchford’s aim is to question the as-

sumptions that activists and Fair Trade

proponents have built up around this

movement. Rightfully, he argues that there

has been almost no recognition of the var-

ied and often unequal resources and op-

tions available to Fair Trade producers.

These include landless laborers, tiny land-

owners, small landowners, and coopera-

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tive employees. In order to participate in

Fair Trade, cooperative members are re-

quired to project an image of themselves as

needy, disadvantaged, poor and peripheral

to the world economy, regardless of the

reality of their situation. Luetchford ar-

gues that this portrayal is nothing more

than ‘‘willful blindness’’ (85) on the part of

activists and it serves to obscure the means

of production they claim to be highlight-

ing. His analysis of this range of perspec-

tives and experiences within the context of

Costa Rican national identity discourse

and practice is thus an important contri-

bution to picking apart idealized Fair

Trade and Costa Rican conceptions of

coffee farming as a singular experience.

Luetchford argues that El Dos’ heter-

ogeneous group of producers understands

quite well their relationships to far-off

consumers. Such a recognition of farmer’s

vision has been noticeably absent from the

movement’s attempts to connect consum-

ers to producers via the anonymous free

market. This is therefore the most success-

ful part of the analysis, a section where

Luetchford delimits carefully the varied

ways workers and landowners respond to

the unpredictability of the labor market

and fluctuations in the international

market. Coffee in Costa Rica is not seen

simply as a commodity for consumption,

but as the backbone of the modern state,

and thus the reason for Costa Rica’s suc-

cess among Central American states.

Luetchford focuses on the ties between its

production and national narratives about

humility, the role of family farms, Catholic

social thought, and the role of the state.

Cooperatives in rural Costa Rica,

Luetchford argues, face the double edge

of needing to play by the rules of the mar-

ket, to make a profit for members in a

highly unpredictable industry, and at the

same time to operate as if humility and

subsistence are preferable to profit and

economic success. Fair Trade ignores this

duality by failing to understand that moral

and economic arguments so effective for

middle-class consumers in the global

north take place on different grounds in

producer countries. In fact, Luetchford ar-

gues that his data presents an ‘‘anticapital-

ist’’ subtext for the residents of El Dos, ‘‘in

which campesinos value their exclusive

right to the worth they get from the soil

and take exception to those who appro-

priate from their efforts’’ (150). Addition-

ally, people in El Dos worry about being

cut off from God, about the breakdown of

social ties in an increasingly capitalist

economy, and how they themselves enact

relationships with objects. Luetchford’s

Marxian analysis of commodities and the

commodity fetish is thus grounded deeply

in very real concerns and vocabularies

which have their source in the changes

brought on by deeper entanglement with

the international coffee market.

Indeed, in order to succeed, Fair Trade

must distinguish itself from other com-

modities while still operating within that

market. Luetchford concludes his ethno-

graphy by arguing that fairly traded prod-

ucts are more than simple commodities: it

is the element of charity, of gift giving, that

causes consumers to choose the fairly

traded coffee over an ostensible equiva-

lent. Western consumers, many of whom

have benefitted substantially from the in-

equality of the market they are attempting

to combat, feel a connection to the smiling

faces on their coffee bags; the higher price

they pay is a gift to that face. Fair Trade

marketing thus revolves around the notion

that this form of participation in the

Book Reviews 211

market is less anonymous and more real

than ‘‘unfair’’ forms of trade. The higher

cash price of their coffee is not seen as

money but as a personal, albeit one way,

connection to an underprivileged farmer

in a far-off country.

By focusing on the variation and dis-

juncture within the category of ‘‘coffee

farmers’’ in Costa Rica, and by examining

their motivations and alternatives,

Luetchford breaks apart the totalizing

Fair Trade discourse. Luetchford’s analy-

sis is thus quite welcome as it not only

explores Fair Trade, but it provides

ethnographic insights into Costa Rica

that are not predicated on analyses of eco-

tourism or protest movements, the sub-

jects of a majority of recent ethnographies

in the relatively small body of anthropo-

logical work about this nation. Nonethe-

less, and in spite of its genesis in long-term

fieldwork, Luetchford’s analysis and de-

pictions felt thin at times. Individuals are

sketched only briefly and then rarely re-

ferred to again. Claims, such as one man’s

incredulity that oranges could be bought

and sold in Costa Rica today, are difficult

to place without a greater sense of El Dos as

a place and space in time. Luetchford is

careful to discuss the historical context of

Costa Rica as a whole, as well as the gaps

between Costa Rican national myths and

perceived reality in the highlands, but he

leaves the reader wanting more details and

rarely places actors in the flow of a more

nuanced history. Nonetheless, Fair Trade

and a Global Commodity provides a critical

analysis which contrasts the movement’s

claims and promises with what it is able to

deliver. In doing so it locates the contested

processes and shifting forms of that deliv-

ery in a discussion of a contested capital-

ism’s often glaring contradictions.

Slipping Away: Banana Politics and Fair

Trade in the Eastern Caribbean. Mark

Moberg, New York: Berghahn Books, 2008.

Xv, 250 pp.

Andres Leon

CUNY Graduate Center

Mark Moberg’s recent addition to the lit-

erature on bananas might be read as an

example of how different elements com-

bine to make the study of this industry an

important part of anthropologists’ contri-

butions to political economic investiga-

tions today. In fact, bananas have been one

of the commodities most commonly stud-

ied by anthropologists over the last two or

three decades. This may have to do with

two of the fruit’s main characteristics:

First, as a banana traverses time and space

from sites of production to those of con-

sumption, it links diverse and antagonistic

realities and spaces and brings to the fore

classical discussions within anthropology

about imperialism, development, and ex-

ploitation, among others. Second, although

banana farming is a standardized industry

dominated by a few transnational compa-

nies, the fruit’s production process reveals a

great diversity of forms of production.

These models range from ‘‘enclave econo-

mies’’ in Central America to small farm

production in the Windward Islands, two

systems that involve diverse labor forces

and quite different peasant livelihoods.

As Moberg warns from the outset, his

is not a traditional ethnographic account

of community but a multisited approach

that focuses on the commodity chain itself:

‘‘Although most of the story is told from

the experiences of rural St. Lucians, it is

impossible to explain how neoliberal

economic policies are experienced in the

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