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Publisher's Note: Many of us depend on a morning cup of coffee, but we don't often think about where that coffee comes from and about the people who produced it. Farmers of the Golden Bean explores the network of local economies that connects coffee farmers with distant consumers in industrialized societies. In Costa Rica coffee is grown primarily by small household producers who form the country's large, middle-class peasantry. In Farmers of the Golden Bean, Sick examines how these coffee-producing households in Costa Rica cope with the complexities of a globalizing world economy. The analysis of individual and collective responses to the challenges of coffee production addresses issues of gender, family cycles, formal and informal economic activities, and the world coffee market. Sick has created a multilayered ethnography, linking relatively isolated, distant, and exotic places with major markets and metropolitan centers. Her unique, integrated analysis of household, regional, and global processes challenges previous assumptions about the nature of economic change and the sustainability of household producers in the global economy. Illustrating her anthropological research with poignant narratives, she invites the reader into the lives of Costa Rican farmers and their families. Viewing coffee as part of people's larger efforts to build better lives, she reveals how farming families, acting together and alone, cope with their realities and their dreams in a rapidly changing, unpredictable, and often hostile world. Her ethnographic portrait of Costa Rican coffee farmers will appeal to anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and those interested in Latin American development.