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Nestor Garcia Canclini, the best-known and most innovative cultural studies scholar in Latin America, maps the critical effects of urban sprawl, global media, and commodity markets on citizens. The complex results mean not only a shrinkage of certain traditional rights (particularly those of the welfare or client state) but also indicate new openings for expanding citizenship.
Since the 1950s, the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, Mexico, has drawn a strange assortment of visitors and pilgrims—schoolteachers and government workers, North American and European spelunkers exploring the region's vast cave system, and counterculturalists from hippies (John Lennon and other celebrities supposedly among them) to New Age seekers, all chasing a firsthand experience of transcendence and otherness through the ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms "in context" with a Mazatec shaman. Over time, this steady incursion of the outside world has significantly influenced the Mazatec sense of identity, giving rise to an ongoing discourse about what it means to be "us" and "them." In this hi...
In 1981, UT Press began to issue supplemental volumes to the classic sixteen-volume work, Handbook of Middle American Indians. These supplements are intended to update scholarship in various areas and to cover topics of current interest. Supplements devoted to Archaeology, Linguistics, Literatures, Ethnohistory, and Epigraphy have appeared to date. In this Ethnology supplement, anthropologists who have carried out long-term fieldwork among indigenous people review the ethnographic literature in the various regions of Middle America and discuss the theoretical and methodological orientations that have framed the work of areal scholars over the last several decades. They examine how research agendas have developed in relationship to broader interests in the field and the ways in which the anthropology of the region has responded to the sociopolitical and economic policies of Mexico and Guatemala. Most importantly, they focus on the changing conditions of life of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. This volume thus offers a comprehensive picture of both the indigenous populations and developments in the anthropology of the region over the last thirty years.
9/11 and its aftermath have shown that our ideas about what constitutes sovereign power lag dangerously behind the burgeoning claims to rights and recognition within and across national boundaries. New configurations of sovereignty are at the heart of political and cultural transformations globally. Sovereign Bodies shifts the debate on sovereign power away from territoriality and external recognition of state power, toward the shaping of sovereign power through the exercise of violence over human bodies and populations. In this volume, sovereign power, whether exercised by a nation-state or by a local despotic power or community, is understood and scrutinized as something tentative and unst...
In this modern-day anthropological manifesto, Roger Magazine proposes a radical but commonsense change to the study of people whose understanding of the world differs substantially from our own. Specifically, it argues for a major shift in the prevailing approach to the study of rural highland peoples in Mexico. Using ethnographic material, Roger Magazine builds a convincing case that many of the discipline’s usual topics and approaches distract anthropologists from what is truly important to the people whose lives they study. While Western anthropologists have usually focused on the production of things, such as community, social structure, cultural practices, identities, and material goo...
This book examines the Mexican nationalist rhetoric that promoted race mixing as a cultural ideal, placing it within its broader contemporary polemic between vitalist and scientific thought. Part of its analysis compares the attitudes of anthropologist Manuel Gamio and educator José Vasconcelos with those of the European primitivist D. H. Lawrence, and concludes that although Gamio and Vasconcelos made lasting contributions to the construction of popular notions of mexicanidad, their paradigms were fatally flawed because they followed European prescriptions for the development of national identity. This ultimately reinforced the belief that indigenous cultural expression must be assimilated into the dominant mestizo culture in order for Mexico to progress. Consequently, these thinkers were unsuccessful in resolving the cultural dilemma Mexico suffered in the years immediately following the Revolution.
Historians, anthropologists, and sociologists examine how race and racism have mattered in Andean and Mesoamerican societies from the early colonial era to the present day.
Greening the Media rethinks media technologies from an ecological perspective, developing a new approach to historical and social analysis of information and communication technology.
Pensar la ciudad desde el marco conceptual del espacio público y redefinir el concepto de espacio público desde nuestras ciudades, tal es la propuesta del libro. Ello obliga a los autores aquí reunidos a aventurarse simultáneamente en el terreno de las precisiones teóricas y en el de los análisis de casos, a trabajar con conceptos y con actores, con espacios imaginarios y con espacios territorialmente delimitados. A mostrar, a través de diversas experiencias urbanas (los condominios, los comités vecinales, el diseño urbano, las ONG citadinas, los servicios de salud) cómo transcurre la vida pública en las megaciudades contemporáneas; y cómo en el encuentro en esos espacios, ciudadanos, autoridades, expertos, y movimientos sociales pugnan por redefinir, en cada caso, los límites entre lo público y lo privado.