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This chapter draws on comparative ethnographic research in Kentucky, Mexico, and Sri Lanka that is focused on how residents make sense of global capitalism and its inequities over the long term and in relation to place-based discussions of future livelihoods. “Placing” people and ideas—a practice common in the author’s rural Kentucky home community—is explored, bringing place to the fore in discussing the lived effects of global capitalist processes by those whose landscapes and livelihoods are organized around global commodities, such as tobacco, coal, and tea. Appalachia is understood in this chapter as intensely entangled with global capitalist circuits and histories, rather than as isolated from them, and examples are provided of how people are imagining sustainable futures in regions long marginalized economically and socially.

Strategic alterity is defined here as a process of shifting between different assertions of devalued group identity in order to valorize free-trading citizens of the market and to mask the labor of those making that free market participation possible (by moralizing the devalorization). The examples provided here - based on ethnographic, oral history, and archival research in an eastern Kentucky, US community - focus on the ways that different markers of identity have characterized the farmworkers providing the low-wage or non-wage labor in tobacco over the past two centuries that has made it possible for those whose crops they work in to see themselves as independent, family farmers. Tobacco is viewed, here, as having always been a global crop produced by a ‘globalized’ labor force. The ideological arguments, most recently neoliberal, justifying the differential power (and ‘market citizenship’) of farmers and farm-workers are examined within a US context, with suggestions for comparative and historical approaches to interpreting current strategies of inclusion and exclusion related to neoliberal capitalist globalization.

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