Cheap Meat

Book excerpt: "Gewertz and Errington unpack the aspirations and anxieties, calculations and controversies that inhabit an inexpensive cut of fatty meat. Following the trail of sheep bellies from slaughterhouses in Australia and New Zealand to the plates of Pacific Islanders, they evenhandedly map the divergent perspectives of commercial traders, government officials, and ordinary consumers acting within a contested material and moral economy. Cheap Meat provides a startling view of how global food markets fashion the bodies and identities of people everywhere."--Robert J. Foster, author of Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea "Cheap Meat is a compelling example of how ethnography concerned with Oceania can elucidate broader questions in anthropology and the social sciences in general. Gewertz and Errington show the complexity of globalization by focusing on the most unlikely commodity. This work at once demonstrates how unfettered capitalism is able to use global circulation to literally convert one person's trash to another's treasure and how resilient Pacific Islanders refashion Western commodities to their own ends."--Paige West, Curator for the Pacific American Museum of Natural History