Instituting nature Mathews, Andrew S
2011, 20111104, 2011-11-04, 2013-06-26, 20110101
eBook, Book
A study of how encounters between forestry bureaucrats and indigenous forest managers in Mexico produced official knowledge about forests and the state.
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.
Undocumented politics is a poignant ethnography of gender and political agency in North America's most excluded migrant communities. Author Abigail Andrews takes us from the indigenous villages of ...Oaxaca, Mexico into the lives of undocumented families in the barrios of Southern California and back. Drawing on two years of transnational fieldwork, archives, surveys, and the voices of migrants themselves, she compares the histories of two very distinct transnational communities. The book reveals how migrants' cross-border struggles are shaped by local practices of control, in both the places they live and the places they leave behind
In the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico's Southern Highland region, three facets of sociocultural life have been interconnected and interactive from colonial times to the present: first, community land as ...a space to live and work; second, a civil-religious system managed by reciprocity and market activity wherein obligations of citizenship, office, and festive sponsorships are met by expenditures of labor-time and money; and third, livelihood. In this book, noted Oaxacan scholar Scott Cook draws on thirty-five years of fieldwork (1965–1990) in the region to present a masterful ethnographic historical account of how nine communities in the Oaxaca Valley have striven to maintain land, livelihood, and civility in the face of transformational and cumulative change across five centuries.Drawing on an extensive database that he accumulated through participant observation, household surveys, interviews, case studies, and archival work in more than twenty Oaxacan communities, Cook documents and explains how peasant-artisan villagers in the Oaxaca Valley have endeavored over centuries to secure and/or defend land, worked and negotiated to subsist and earn a living, and striven to meet expectations and obligations of local citizenship. His findings identify elements and processes that operate across communities or distinguish some from others. They also underscore the fact that landholding is crucial for the sociocultural life of the valley. Without land for agriculture and resource extraction, occupational options are restricted, livelihood is precarious and contingent, and civility is jeopardized.
Through interviews with three generations of Yalálag Zapotecs ("Yaláltecos") in Los Angeles and Yalálag, Oaxaca, this book examines the impact of international migration on this community. It traces ...five decades of migration to Los Angeles in order to delineate migration patterns, community formation in Los Angeles, and the emergence of transnational identities of the first and second generations of Yalálag Zapotecs in the United States, exploring why these immigrants and their descendents now think of themselves as Mexican, Mexican Indian immigrants, Oaxaqueños, and Latinos-identities they did not claim in Mexico.Based on multi-site fieldwork conducted over a five-year period, Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez analyzes how and why Yalálag Zapotec identity and culture have been reconfigured in the United States, using such cultural practices as music, dance, and religious rituals as a lens to bring this dynamic process into focus. By illustrating the sociocultural, economic, and political practices that link immigrants in Los Angeles to those left behind, the book documents how transnational migration has reflected, shaped, and transformed these practices in both their place of origin and immigration.
Borderlands violence, so explosive in our own time, has deep roots in history. Lance R. Blyth's study of Chiricahua Apaches and the presidio of Janos in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands reveals how no ...single entity had a monopoly on coercion, and how violence became the primary means by which relations were established, maintained, or altered both within and between communities.
For more than two centuries, violence was at the center of the relationships by which Janos and Chiricahua formed their communities. Violence created families by turning boys into men through campaigns and raids, which ultimately led to marriage and also determined the provisioning and security of these families; acts of revenge and retaliation similarly governed their attempts to secure themselves even as trade and exchange continued sporadically. This revisionist work reveals how during the Spanish, Mexican, and American eras, elements of both conflict and accommodation constituted these two communities, which previous historians have often treated as separate and antagonistic. By showing not only the negative aspects of violence but also its potentially positive outcomes,Chiricahua and Janoshelps us to understand violence not only in the southwestern borderlands but in borderland regions generally around the world.
An exploration of the Totonac native community of Papantla, Veracruz, during the last half of the eighteenth century. Told through the lens of violent revolt, this is the first book-length study ...devoted to Papantla during the colonial era. The book tells the story of a native community confronting significant disruption of its agricultural tradition, and the violence that change provoked. Papantla's story is told in the form of an investigation into the political, social, and ethnic experience of an agrarian community. The Bourbon monopolisation of tobacco in 1764 disturbed a fragile balance, and pushed long-term native frustrations to the point of violence. Through the stories of four uprisings, Jake Frederick examines the Totonacs increasingly difficult economic environment, their view of justice, and their political tactics. Riot! argues that for the native community of Papantla, the nature of colonial rule was, even in the waning decades of the colonial era, a process of negotiation rather than subjugation. The second half of the eighteenth century saw an increase in collective violence across the Spanish American colonies as communities reacted to the strains imposed by the various Bourbon reforms. Riot! provides a much needed exploration of what the colony-wide policy reforms of Bourbon Spain meant on the ground in rural communities in New Spain. The narrative of each uprising draws the reader into the crisis as it unfolds, providing an entree into an analysis of the event. The focus on the community provides a new understanding of the demographics of this rural community, including an account of the as yet unexamined black population of Papantla.
Powerful and beautifully written, this is the story of the Isthmus Zapotecs of southern Mexico and their unbroken chain of ancestors and collective memory over the generations. Mortuary beliefs and ...actions are collective and pervasive in ways not seen in the United States, a resonant deep structure across many domains of Zapotec culture. Anthropologist Anya Peterson Royce draws upon forty years of participant research in the city of Juchitán to offer a finely textured portrait of the vibrant and enduring power of death in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec of Mexico. Focusing especially on the lives of Zapotec women, Becoming an Ancestor highlights the aesthetic sensibility and durability of mortuary traditions in the past and present. An intricate blending of Roman Catholicism and indigenous spiritual tradition, death through beliefs and practices expresses a collective solidarity that connects families, binds the living and dead, and blurs the past and present. A model of ethnographic research and presentation, Becoming an Ancestor not only reveals the luminescent heart of Zapotec culture but also provides important clues about the cultural power and potential of mortuary traditions for all societies.
The power of mockingbirds and the enduring significance of indigenous ceremonial speeches are deftly revealed in this brilliant analysis of ritual orations created and delivered by the O'odham people ...(also known as the Pima- Papago). Making their homes along the Akimel rivers and across the arid expanses and mountains of the desert of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, the O'odham people traditionally lived in small villages with scattered brush- walled round houses. Public ceremonies involved many villages and centered around small brush-walled "rainhouses." One hundred years ago, two very different versions of a speech delivered during rain ceremonies were heard at these rainhouses. The Pimas (Akimel O'odham) told of nearly silent and stately events—the calming of a heaving earth, the building of a house on the stilled land, the breathing out of smoke, and the coming of gentle rain. In marked contrast, the Papagos (Tohono O'odham) told of how raucous, drunken people caused clouds to rise and explode with rain like vomiting drunks. Both stories featured mockingbirds and both involved the coming of rain. Today, the gentler, Pima version is extinct while the wilder Papago story endures. Why? Drawing upon a rich reservoir of O'odham oral traditions and ceremonial performances, a meticulous deciphering of particular texts, and an insightful assessment of the impact of Christianity upon the O'odham people, Donald Bahr offers a brilliant analysis of why some indigenous stories cease to be relevant and told. The clues lie in the very different trajectories of the Pima and Papago communities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, trajectories resulting in part with how Christianity fared in the respective communities.
Adoring the Saints Lastra, Yolanda; Sherzer, Joel; Sherzer, Dina
2009
eBook
Mexico is famous for spectacular fiestas that embody its heart and soul. An expression of the cult of the saint, patron saint fiestas are the centerpiece of Mexican popular religion and of great ...importance to the lives and cultures of people and communities. These fiestas have their own language, objects, belief systems, and practices. They link Mexico’s past and present, its indigenous and European populations, and its local and global relations. This work provides a comprehensive study of two intimately linked patron saint fiestas in the state of Guanajuato, near San Miguel de Allende—the fiesta of the village of Cruz del Palmar and that of the town of San Luis de la Paz. These two fiestas are related to one another in very special ways involving both religious practices and their respective pre-Hispanic origins. A mixture of secular and sacred, patron saint fiestas are multi-day affairs that include many events, ritual specialists, and performers, with the participation of the entire community. Fiestas take place in order to honor the saints, and they are the occasion for religious ceremonies, processions, musical performances, dances, and dance dramas. They feature spectacular costumes, enormous puppets, masked and cross-dressed individuals, dazzling fireworks, rodeos, food stands, competitions, and public dances. By encompassing all of these events and performances, this work displays the essence of Mexico, a lens through which this country’s complex history, religion, ethnic mix, traditions, and magic can be viewed.
