Boomtown
Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Release date: 2018-07-20
Sitting next to the Great Barrier Reef, marinated in coal and gas, the industrial boomtown of Gladstone, Australia embodies many of the contradictions of the 'overheated' world: prosperous yet polluted; growing and developing yet always on the precipice of uncertainty.
Capturing Gladstone at the peak of its accelerated growth in 2013-14, Thomas Hylland Eriksen dissects the boomtown phenomenon in all its profound ambivalence. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores the tensions and resentments surrounding migrant workers, and examines local identity, family life, infrastructure and local services.
Writ large in Boomtown are the clashes of scale at the heart of the town's contradictions - where the logic of big industry and the state compete with that of the individual, local communities and ecology, revealing the current crisis of political legitimacy across the world.
Other books by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Anthropology, Culture and Society
What is Anthropology? - Second Edition
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
A new edition of the classic anthropology textbook which shows how anthropology is a revolutionary way of thinking about the human world.
Anthropology, Culture and Society
Small Places, Large Issues - Fourth Edition
An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
The classic introduction to social and cultural anthropology, now updated.
Anthropology, Culture and Society
Ethnicity and Nationalism - Third Edition
Anthropological Perspectives
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
New edition of this core text for all students of social anthropology. Additions include cultural property rights and commercialisation of identity.
Overheating
An Anthropology of Accelerated Change
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
A major new intervention on the overarching challenges of modernity from one of the world’s leading anthropologists