Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human ...right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses.
Unlike most books on slavery in the Americas, this social history of Africans and their enslaved descendants in colonial Costa Rica recounts the journey of specific people from West Africa to the New ...World. Tracing the experiences of Africans on two Danish slave ships that arrived in Costa Rica in 1710, the Christianus Quintus and Fredericus Quartus, the author examines slavery in Costa Rica from 1600 to 1750. Lohse looks at the ethnic origins of the Africans and narrates their capture and transport to the coast, their embarkation and passage, and finally their acculturation to slavery and their lives as slaves in Costa Rica. Following the experiences of girls and boys, women and men, he shows how the conditions of slavery in a unique local setting determined the constraints that slaves faced and how they responded to their condition.
River floods frequently occur when tropical cyclones hit land. Nonetheless, systematic, long-term discharge data remain rather scarce in many tropical countries, which prevent proper analysis of peak ...discharges occurring during floods. The Térraba catchment is the biggest and most dynamic catchment in Costa Rica. In this study, we developed regional flood-frequency analyses combining tree-ring based estimation and measurement of peak discharge at monitoring stations during tropical cyclones to derive flood quartiles. Flood quartiles were combined with the Topographic Wetness Index (TWI) to determine regional flood hazards along floodplains. The flood risk assessment was based on a high-resolution mapping of infrastructure, population density (as a measure of exposure), and a social development index (to represent vulnerability). We show that peak discharge of cyclone-induced floods can be assessed accurately with flood-frequency analyses including dendrogeomorphic reconstructions and systematic discharge measurements. We also show that regional flood risk assessments can be performed in large-scale catchments if both coarse and detailed inputs are used. The results of this study will be useful for the development of flood risk schemes promoting resilience of local populations.
In the wake of the Cold War, a diverse group of U.S. immigrants
flocked to Costa Rica, distancing themselves from undesirable U.S.
policies at home and abroad. Enchanted with Costa Rica's natural
...beauty and lured by the prospect of cheap land, these
expatriates-former government employees, businessmen and privileged
bourgeois, dissident Quakers and self-seeking hippies, farmers and
ecologists-sought a new life in a country that was often dubbed the
Switzerland of Central America. Cold War Paradise is a
social and cultural history of this little-studied immigration
flow. Based on extensive oral histories of these immigrants and
their diverse writings, ranging from women's club cookbooks to
personal letters, Atalia Shragai examines the motivations for
immigration, patterns of movement, settlements, and processes of
identity-making among U.S. Americans in Costa Rica from post-World
War II to the late 1970s. Exploring such diverse themes as gender,
nature, and material culture, this study provides a fresh
perspective on inter-American relations from the point of view of
ordinary U.S. emigrants and settlers. Shragai traces the formation
and evolution of a wide range of identifications among U.S. expats
and the varied ways they reconstructed and represented their
individual and collective histories within the broader scheme of
the U.S. presence in Cold War Central America.
The "greening" of Costa Rica Isla, Ana
The "greening" of Costa Rica,
2015, 20150203, 2015, 2015-02-03, 2015-02-05
eBook
Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in these communities, Isla exposes the duplicity of a neoliberal model in which the environment is converted into commercial assets, few of whose benefits flow to the ...local population.
In the late nineteenth century, migrants from Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, and beyond poured into Caribbean Central America, building railroads, digging canals, selling meals, and farming homesteads. ...On the rain-forested shores of Costa Rica, U.S. entrepreneurs and others established vast banana plantations. Over the next half-century, short-lived export booms drew tens of thousands of migrants to the region. In Port Limon, birthplace of the United Fruit Company, a single building might house a Russian seamstress, a Martinican madam, a Cuban doctor, and a Chinese barkeep--together with stevedores, laundresses, and laborers from across the Caribbean. Tracing the changing contours of gender, kinship, and community in Costa Rica's plantation region, Lara Putnam explores new questions about the work of caring for children and men and how it fit into the export economy, the role of kinship as well as cash in structuring labor, the social networks that shaped migrants' lives, and the impact of ideas about race and sex on the exercise of power. Based on sources that range from handwritten autobiographies to judicial transcripts and addressing topics from intimacy between prostitutes to insults between neighbors, the book illuminates the connections between political economy, popular culture, and everyday life.
Historical Dictionary of Costa Rica contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,000 cross-referenced entries on important ...personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture.
CORRECTION:Regarding the book, The Battle for Paradiseby Jeremy Evans, the following correction has been made on page 163 in paragraph three (3) to wit:"Weston once worked in concert with government ...officials in a pre-planned sting operation, complete with marked bills: Weston, whose role in the operation involved paying a bribe to the Golfito mayor for a concession and then documenting the bribe as a way to expose the mayor as a corrupt government official, was a former cocaine dealer, according to Dan, and someone who illegally acquired possession of his sawmill property."Pavones, a town located on the southern tip of Costa Rica, is a haven for surfers, expatriates, and fishermen seeking a place to start over. Located on the Golfo Dulce (Sweet Gulf), a marine sanctuary and one of the few tropical fjords in the world, Pavones is home to a legendary surf break and a cottage fishing industry.
In 2004 a multinational company received approval to install the world's first yellowfin tuna farm near the mouth of the Golfo Dulce. The tuna farm as planned would pollute the area, endanger sea turtles, affect the existing fish population, and threaten the world-class wave. A lawsuit was filed just in time, and the project was successfully stalled. Thus began an unlikely alliance of local surfers, fishermen, and global environmental groups to save a wave and one of the most biodiverse places on the planet.
InThe Battle for Paradise, Jeremy Evans travels to Pavones to uncover the story of how this ragtag group stood up to a multinational company and how a shadowy figure from the town's violent past became an unlikely hero. In this harrowing but ultimately inspiring story, Evans focuses in turn on a colorful cast of characters with an unyielding love for the ocean and surfing, a company's unscrupulous efforts to expand profits, and a government that nearly sold out the perfect wave.
•Eight pedons described in contrasting landscapes were classified as Oxisols.•Presence of Oxisols in unsurveyed regions of Costa Rica was confirmed.•Andic Haploperox was identified in landforms with ...Quaternary volcanic materials.•Anionic Acrustox were found developing in alluvial landforms from Late Pleistocene.•Our results will contribute to improve the Oxisols knowledge in Central America.
Oxisols have been previously reported in Costa Rica. However, few studies provided specific data to corroborate their presence and explain their genesis under different soil-forming factors. This study was performed with the aim to confirm Oxisols occurrence in different landscapes and parent materials in Costa Rica. Eight pedons were sampled, described, characterized, and classified according to Soil Taxonomy in five landscapes. All pedons studied presented clay contents above 40% in surface horizons. Subsurface horizons presented red colors, high contents of low-activity clay minerals with cation exchange capacity values at pH 7 (CEC7) less than 16 cmolc kg−1 clay and less than 9.6% weatherable minerals in the sand fraction. The suborders Ustox, Udox and Perox were identified. Among the Ustox, three contrasting subgroups were identified: Kandiustalfic Eustrustox, Plinthic Kandiustox, and Anionic Acrustox. Conversely, soils classified into the suborder Udox presented the same great group: Kandiudox; with three subgroups identified: Typic Kandiudox, Plinthic Kandiudox, and Rhodic Kandiudox. In addition, one pedon was classified into the suborder Perox, with the subgroup Andic Haploperox.
The diversity in geologic materials (basaltic, pyroclastic, and sedimentary rocks), geomorphology (mountains, plains, dissected volcanic cones, and Quaternary alluvial fans), and the climatic conditions (total annual rainfall ranged from 1853 to 5780 mm year−1) observed in the studied areas made possible the diverse taxonomic classification for the eight Oxisols. Results obtained confirmed occurrence of Oxisols in Costa Rica and verify soil classification from previous literature reports. Our findings in soil genesis and forming factors enhance the knowledge in pedogenesis and properties of advanced weathering stage soils in Central America.
Shamanism-the practice of entering a trance state to experience
visions of a reality beyond the ordinary and to gain esoteric
knowledge-has been an important part of life for indigenous
societies ...throughout the Americas from prehistoric times until the
present. Much has been written about shamanism in both scholarly
and popular literature, but few authors have linked it to another
significant visual realm-art. In this pioneering study, Rebecca R.
Stone considers how deep familiarity with, and profound respect
for, the extra-ordinary visionary experiences of shamanism
profoundly affected the artistic output of indigenous cultures in
Central and South America before the European invasions of the
sixteenth century.
Using ethnographic accounts of shamanic trance experiences,
Stone defines a core set of trance vision characteristics,
including enhanced senses, ego dissolution, bodily distortions,
flying, spinning and undulating sensations, synaesthesia, and
physical transformation from the human self into animal and other
states of being. Stone then traces these visionary characteristics
in ancient artworks from Costa Rica and Peru. She makes a
convincing case that these works, especially those of the Moche,
depict shamans in a trance state or else convey the perceptual
experience of visions by creating deliberately chaotic and
distorted conglomerations of partial, inverted, and incoherent
images.
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