Ethnic Entrepreneurs

Monica DeHart is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puget Sound.

"Ethnic Entrepreneurs represents a key contribution to studies of development and to the anthropological canon. DeHart successfully illuminates the myriad ways in which state power is being reformulated through diverse development actors." - Nicole Coffey Kellett, Journal of Anthropological Research "Ethnic Entrepreneurs provides an innovative analysis of how the flexibility of ethnic difference is mobilized as a resource both by indigenous, Latino, and Latin American subjects as well as by development institutions and organizations. By highlighting how the contradictions and assumptions behind categories such as indigenous, Latino, Latin American, migrant, and immigrant are related to global practices of corporate marketing and corporate responsibility, DeHart helps us rethink the links between community and corporation. This book offers an ethnographically rich window on global processes of ethnic identity and entrepreneurship." - Lynn Stephen, University of Oregon "Once the very idea of the Ethnic Entrepreneur would have been an oxymoron. Local knowledge, kinship, and communal ties were seen as primary obstacles to modernization. Now, in Latin America, ethnic subjects are widely regarded as essential agents of development. In exploring the shifts that have made this transformation possible, Monica DeHart provides an enlightening account of the ways in which ethnic identity, market forces, and development strategy are reshaping each other in neoliberal times." - Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago