You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In recent years the Cochuah region, the ancient breadbasket of the north-central Yucatecan lowlands, has been documented and analyzed by a number of archaeologists and cultural anthropologists. This book, the first major collection of data from those investigations, presents and analyzes findings on more than eighty sites and puts them in the context of the findings of other investigations from outside the area. It begins with archaeological investigations and continues with research on living peoples. Within the archaeological sections, historic and colonial chapters build upon those concerned with the Classic Maya, revealing the ebb and flow of settlement through time in the region as peoples entered, left, and modified their ways of life based upon external and internal events and forces. In addition to discussing the history of anthropological research in the area, the contributors address such issues as modern women’s reproductive choices, site boundary definition, caves as holy places, settlement shifts, and the reuse of spaces through time.
The dramatic January 1, 1994, emergence of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico, brought the state's indigenous peoples to the attention of the international community. Yet indigenous peoples in Chiapas had been politically active and organized for years prior to the uprising. This compelling volume examines in detail these local and regional histories of power and resistance, powerfully bolstered by gripping and heartrending details of oppression and opposition. Situated broadly within the field of political anthropology, the authors trace the connections between indigenous culture and indigenous resistance. Their case studies include the Tzotzils and Tzeltals...
Riley and her group of expert contributors supply a unique set of worldwide case studies and policy analyses as guidance for indigenous communities and their partners, in attempting to protect their intellectual property. Much of the existing literature already addresses the poor fit between western regimes of intellectual property rights and the requirements for safeguarding indigenous cultural resources. The manuscript gets beyond these negative claims in depicting positive efforts at protecting indigenous knowledge and cultures, notwithstanding these legal limitations. The reader is exposed to a wide array of legal, political, organizational, and contractual strategies deployed by indigenous groups to protect their intellectual property interests. It will be an important resource for social scientists, advocates for indigenous and human rights, bioprospecting, indigenous leaders, NGOs and law libraries.
Maya sacbeob, or raised Òwhite roads,Ó are often considered a single class of features, with a sole purpose. In this first systematic examination of their functions, meanings, arrangements, and construction styles, Justine Shaw reveals that these causeways served a variety of cultural and natural functions. In White Roads of the Yucat‡n, author Justine Shaw presents original field data collected with the Cochuah Regional Archaeological Survey at two ancient Maya sites, Ichmul and YoÕokop. Both centers chose to invest enormous resources in the construction of monumental roadways during a time of social and political turmoil in the Terminal Classic period. Shaw carefully examines why it w...
Theirs was one of the few complex societies to emerge in and to adapt successfully to a tropical-forest environment. Their architecture, sculpture, and painting were sophisticated and compellingly beautiful.
The forty-two stories presented in this book were told to Robert Laughlin in Tzotzil by Francisca Hernández Hernández, an elderly woman known as Doña Pancha, the only speaker of Tzotzil left in the village of San Felipe Ecatepec in Chiapas, Mexico. Laughlin and Doña Pancha’s running conversation is the source for the stories, which means they are told in much the same way that stories are told in traditional native settings. Doña Pancha is bilingual in Tzotzil and Spanish, and the stories are presented here in English, Tzotzil, and Spanish. They range from mythological sacred stories to quasi-historical legends to historical accounts of life in the twentieth century.
This book, written by global experts, provides a comprehensive and topical analysis on the economics of chocolate. While the main approach is economic analysis, there are important contributions from other disciplines, including psychology, history, government, nutrition, and geography. The chapters are organized around several themes, including the history of cocoa and chocolate — from cocoa drinks in the Maya empire to the growing sales of Belgian chocolates in China; how governments have used cocoa and chocolate as a source of tax revenue and have regulated chocolate (and defined it by law) to protect consumers' health from fraud and industries from competition; how the poor cocoa producers in developing countries are linked through trade and multinational companies with rich consumers in industrialized countries; and how the rise of consumption in emerging markets (China, India, and Africa) is causing a major boom in global demand and prices, and a potential shortage of the world's chocolate.
A significant work by one of anthropology's most important scholars, this book provides an introduction to the Chiapas Mayan community of Mexico, better known for their role in the Zapatista Rebellion.
Shannan Matiace looks at political consciousness amongst Indians of the Chiapas in Mexico, tracing how it has developed from the founding of peasants' associations in the 1930s to the recent Zapatista uprising.
From Classical antiquity to the present, tobacco has existed as a potent ritual substance. Tobacco use among the Maya straddles a recreational/ritual/medicinal nexus that can be difficult for Western audiences to understand. To best characterize the pervasive substance, this volume assembles scholars from a variety of disciplines and specialties to discuss tobacco in modern and ancient contexts. The chapters utilize research from archaeology, ethnography, mythic narrative, and chemical science from the eighth through the twenty-first centuries. Breath and Smoke explores the uses of tobacco among the Maya of Central America, revealing tobacco as a key topic in pre-Columbian art, iconography, and hieroglyphics. By assessing and considering myths, imagery, hieroglyphic texts, and material goods, as well as modern practices and their somatic effects, this volume brings the Mayan world of the past into greater focus and sheds light on the practices of today.