Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina by Vincanne Adams (review)

Introduction

“…One of several contemporary currents that emerge from Marx and stand out in anthropological debates is the notion of primitive accumulation and the related concept of accumulation by dispossession (Franquesa 2016;Hirslund 2016;Kaminer 2015;Narotzky 2016;Nonini 2015;Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2016;Salemink and Rasmussen 2016). In this regard, it is paramount to note that Marx's chapter on "Th e Original Accumulation of Capital" in the fi rst volume of Das Kapital presents this as a multilinear evolution from the end of the fourteenth century onward, a combined and uneven development driven in part by the growing demand for wool on international markets that increased wool prices and thus motivated the British gentry to expropriate dependent smallholder farmers from their lands and turn these into pastures.…”