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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...
In the late 1830s an uprising of mestizos and Maya destroyed Guatemala's Liberal government for imposing reforms aimed at expanding the state, assimilating indigenous peoples, and encouraging commercial agriculture. Liberal partisans were unable to retake the state until 1871, but after they did they successfully implemented their earlier reform agenda. In contrast to the late 1830s, they met only sporadic resistance. Reeves confronts this paradox of Guatemala's nineteenth century by focusing on the rural folk of the western highlands. He links the area of study to the national level in an explicitly comparative enterprise, unlike most investigations of Mesoamerican communities. He finds that changes in land, labor, and ethnic politics from the 1840s to the 1870s left popular sectors unwilling or unable to mount a repeat of the earlier anti-Liberal mobilization. Because of these changes, the Liberals of the 1870s and beyond consolidated their hold on power more successfully than their counterparts of the 1830s. Ultimately, Reeves shows that community politics and regional ethnic tensions were the crucible of nation-state formation in nineteenth-century Guatemala.
This is the first complete version in English of the "Book of the People" of the Quiche Maya, the most powerful nation of the Guatemalan highlands in pre-Conquest times and a branch of the ancient Maya, whose remarkable civilization in pre-Columbian America is in many ways comparable to the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean. Generally regarded as America's oldest book, the Popol Vuh, in fact, corresponds to our Christian Bible, and it is, moreover, the most important of the five pieces of the great library treasures of the Maya that survived the Spanish Conquest. The Popol Vuh was first transcribed in the Quiche language, ·but in Latin characters, in the middle of the sixteenth cen...