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Totems and Teachers
This classic volume, edited by Sydel Silverman, presents the insiders' reflection of distinguished contemporary anthropologists on nine prominent figures who helped shape the discipline. This is one of few books that traces the theoretical development of anthropology through the lives of the well-known figures who have influenced its historical trajectory.
Rethinking Mexican Indigenismo
Mexico’s National Indigenist Institute (INI) was at the vanguard of hemispheric indigenismo from 1951 through the mid-1970s, thanks to the innovative development projects that were first introduced at its pilot Tseltal-Tsotsil Coordinating Center in highland Chiapas. This book traces how indigenista innovation gave way to stagnation as local opposition, shifting national priorities, and waning financial support took their toll. After 1970 indigenismo may have served the populist aims of president Luis Echeverría, but Mexican anthropologists, indigenistas, and the indigenous themselves increasingly challenged INI theory and practice and rendered them obsolete.
Unfinished Conversations
A century ago, European and North American archaeologists first came upon the extraordinary ruins of Chichen Itza and Tulum—and started to converse with the Mayas who inhabited the forests of the Yucatan. In this thought-provoking history of a century-long "unfinished conversation" between the indigenous Indians and the white intruders, paul Sullivan shows how each party to the dialogue shaped the cross-cultural encounters to their own ends. North American anthropologists preferred to see the Mayas as a primitive people and studied them, they claimed, with scientific neutrality. Yet the anthropologists hid their real intentions and lied to the Mayas, pretending to be chicle dealers or expl...
Time and Reality in the Thought of the Maya
In this second English-language edition of one of his most notable works, Miguel León-Portilla explores the Maya Indians’ remarkable concepts of time. At the book’s first appearance Evon Z. Vogt, Curator of Middle American Ethnology in Harvard University, predicted that it would become "a classic in anthropology," a prediction borne out by the continuing critical attention given to it by leading scholars. Like no other people in history, the ancient Maya were obsessed by the study of time. Their sages framed its cycles with tireless exactitude. Yet their preoccupation with time was not limited to calendrics; it was a central trait in their evolving culture. In this absorbing work León-Portilla probes the question, What did time really mean for the ancient Maya in terms of their mythology, religious thought, worldview, and everyday life? In his analysis of key Maya texts and computations, he reveals one of the most elaborate attempts of the human mind to penetrate the secrets of existence.
Calculating Brilliance
This book contextualizes the discovery of a Venus astronomical pattern by a female Mayan astronomer at Chich'en Itza and the discovery's later adaptation and application at Mayapan. Calculating Brilliance brings different intellectual threads together across time and space, from the Classic to the Postclassic, the colonial period to the twenty-first century to offer a new vision for understanding Mayan astronomy.
Indian Wars of Canada, Mexico and the United States, 1812-1900
Fully illustrated, this unique and fascinating study sheds new light on familiar events. Drawing on anthropology and ethnohistory as well as the 'new military history', this book interprets and compares the way Indians and European Americans waged wars in Canada, Mexico, the USA and Yucatán during the nineteenth century.
The Indian Christ, the Indian King
Victoria Bricker shows that "history" sometimes rests on mythological foundations and that "myth" can contain valid historical information. Her book, which is a highly original critique of postconquest historiography about the Maya, challenges major assumptions about the relationship between myth and history implicit in structuralist interpretations. The focus of the book is ethnic conflict, a theme that pervades Maya folklore and is also well documented historically. The book begins with the Spanish conquest of the Maya. In chapters on the postconquest history of the Maya, five ethnic conflicts are treated in depth: the Cancuc revolt of 1712, the Quisteil uprising of 1761, the Totonicapan r...
The Two Milpas of Chan Kom
Chan Kom is a Maya community in the Yucatán peninsula that is currently undergoing a process of transformation due to increasing migration to Cancún, Mexico. The author demonstrates the significance of the Mayas' socio-economic and ideological strategies to adapt to the changes brought about by this migration.
Weaving the Past
Weaving the Past is the first comprehensive history of Latin America's indigenous women. While concentrating mainly on native women in Mesoamerica and the Andes, it also covers indigenous peoples in a variety of areas of South and Central America. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, it argues that change, not continuity, has been the norm for indigenous peoples whose resilience in the face of complex and long-term patterns of cultural change is due in no small part to the roles, actions, and agency of women.
Birth in Four Cultures
While the process of childbirth is, in some sense, everywhere the same, it is also everywhere different in that each culture has produced a birthing system that is strikingly dissimilar from the others. Based on her fieldwork in the United States, Sweden, Holland, and Yucatan, Jordan develops a framework for the discussion and investigation of different birthing systems. Illustrated with useful examples and lively anecdotes from Jordan’s own fieldwork, the Fourth Edition of this innovative comparative ethnography brings the reader to a deeper understanding of childbirth as a culturally grounded, biosocially mediated, and interactionally achieved event.
