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My research focuses on a few broad questions: How can we understand culture and society in global terms when human behavior is shaped by the immediate relationships and everyday circumstances in which people live? What are the theories, myths, or cultural frameworks that people use to think about their place in a totality called “the global market,” and how are these frameworks shaped by their own unique cultural situations?
My current book project, Broken Idols: Migration, Globalization, and Cultural Change in Honduras is an ethnography of a Honduran coffee-growing town in the midst of abrupt cultural change: The coffee economy is being replaced by emigration to the United States, and a new social order is emerging around the migrant economy. New religious movements, including Pentecostals and an anti-Pentecostal sect called Ministerio Internacional Creciendo en Gracia (Growing in Grace International Ministries) have challenged the dominance of the Catholic church. My work focuses on the ways that members of different social and political groups (in Honduras and the United States) articulate their changing relationship to the global economy. I explore how different forms of agency can inform the ways that social theorists think about globalization.
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