Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith
ISBN: 9780822379195
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Duke University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Privatization; Emergency management; Social justice; Disaster relief; Hurricane Katrina 2005.;

While Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and many surrounding areas, an even larger disaster occurred when survivors returned and tried to rebuild their lives. In this sometimes plodding and jargon-filled but still compelling ethnographic account of the recovery process, medical anthropologist Adams recounts the stories of numerous survivors who are rebuilding in an "economy of recovery [that] both responded to and drew on suffering in order to reproduce itself...." Katrina's aftermath is at once a story of triumph in the midst of disaster, but it also continues to be a story dominated by the tale of private-sector corporations and the federal government acting irresponsibly and creating "vulnerable people who were then made more vulnerable by the recovery machinery deployed to help them... [creating] markets of sorrow in which the production of profits, like the production of indebtedness among the already poor, are integral to the survival of the market itself." (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Vincanne Adams is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She has written and edited numerous books in medical anthropology, including Sex and Development: Science, Sexuality and Morality in Global Perspective (coedited with Stacy Leigh Pigg) also published by Duke University Press.


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