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Mexico's Indigenous Communities
A rich and detailed account of indigenous history in central and southern Mexico from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, Mexico's Indigenous Communities is an expansive work that destroys the notion that Indians were victims of forces beyond their control and today have little connection with their ancient past. Indian communities continue to remember and tell their own local histories, recovering and rewriting versions of their past in light of their lived present. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano focuses on a series of individual cases, falling within successive historical epochs, that illustrate how the practice of drawing up and preserving historical documents-in particular, maps, oral acc...
Sorcery in Mesoamerica
Approaching sorcery as highly rational and rooted in significant social and cultural values, Sorcery in Mesoamerica examines and reconstructs the original indigenous logic behind it, analyzing manifestations from the Classic Maya to the ethnographic present. While the topic of sorcery and witchcraft in anthropology is well developed in other areas of the world, it has received little academic attention in Mexico and Central America until now. In each chapter, preeminent scholars of ritual and belief ask very different questions about what exactly sorcery is in Mesoamerica. Contributors consider linguistic and visual aspects of sorcery and witchcraft, such as the terminology in Aztec semantic...
Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonnas
The face of the divine feminine can be found everywhere in Mexico. One of the most striking features of Mexican religious life is the prevalence of images of the Virgin Mother of God. This is partly because the divine feminine played such a prominent role in pre-Hispanic Mexican religion. Goddess images were central to the devotional life of the Aztecs, especially peasants and those living in villages outside the central city of Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City). In these rural communities fertility and fecundity, more than war rituals and sacrificial tribute, were the main focus of cultic activity. Both Aztec goddesses and the Christian Madonnas who replaced them were associated, and sometimes identified, with nature and the environment: the earth, water, trees and other sources of creativity and vitality. This book uncovers the myths and images of 22 Aztec Goddesses and 28 Christian Madonnas of Mexico. Their rich and symbolic meaning is revealed by placing them in the context of the religious worldviews in which they appear and by situating them within the devotional life of the faithful for whom they function as powerful mediators of divine grace and terror.
William Robertson Smith
The life and career of one of anthropology’s most important ancestors, William Robertson Smith in the context of the history of anthropology. William Robertson Smith’s influence on anthropology ranged from his relationship with John Ferguson McLennan, to advising James George Frazer to write about “Totem” and “Taboo” for the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he edited. This biography places a special emphasis on the notes and observations from his travels to Arabia, as well as on his influence on the representatives of the “Myth and Ritual School.” With his discussion of myth and ritual, Smith influenced generations of scholars, and his insistence on the connection between the pe...
Indigenous Mexico Engages the 21st Century
This innovative, interactive ethnography employs a range of media to explore the lives of the residents of a village set in the rugged mountains overlooking Mexico City, focusing on how these villagers react and adapt to a rapidly globalized world. Students can view the evolving life of San Jerónimo Amanalco and its region over the past four decades through print, web-embedded, and e-reader enabled resources. This book-offers a multimedia approach, including archival images and documents, original photographs, audio recordings, and extensive video;-incorporates ethnographic information gathered during the author’s four decades of research in the region;-includes community members’ responses to the author’s research through social media, email, and video-taped comments.
Cutting the Vines of the Past
To illuminate how a group of equatorial Africans understands environmental change, Giles-Vernick (history, City U. of New York- Baruch College) examines the changing intellectual tools and content of environmental and historical perceptions and knowledge among Mpiemu people who lived in the middle and upper Sangha River basin of the Central African Republic during the 20th century. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The Dialogue of Earth and Sky
In Mexico’s Sierra Norte de Puebla, beliefs that were held before the coming of Europeans continue to guide the lives of modern Aztecs. For residents of San Martín Zinacapan, life in and on the earth is animated by the same forces, through which people seek to maintain a cohesive view of the relationship of mankind, the cosmos, and the natural world. This delicate balance of the human spirit maintains the health and well-being of villagers, and is an essential part of the social and ideological framework that makes a person’s life whole. This book describes the basic elements of a belief system that has survived the onslaught of Catholicism, colonialism, and the modern world. Timothy Kn...
New Age in Latin America
This book is at the crossroads where a New Age sensibility, advancing like an ecumen of worldwide spirituality without national, cultural, or ecclesiastical frontiers, meets Latin America's syncretic religions, practiced by groups of people wiht African or indigenous roots or developed from the tradition of popular Catholicism. The Syncretic character of the two sensibilities makes both the New Age and popular religion behave like two, syncretizing and syncreticizable matrices of meaning. This book opens up a rich vein of debate with new dilemmas and discussions, that will provide a framework for a new field of study in anthropology. What new ways of signifying living and experiencing religion is the New Age generating in Latin America? What are its limits? Contributors are: Alejandra Aguilar Ros, Santiago Bastos, Lizette Campechano, Sylvie Pédron Colombani, Alejandro Frigerio, Jacques Galinier, Silas Guerriero, Cristina Gutiérrez Zúñiga,Nahayeilli B. Juárez Huet, José Guilherme C.Magnani, Antoinette Molinié, María Teresa Rodríguez, Deis Siqueira, Carlos Alberto Steil, Engel Tally, Renée de la Torre, and Marcelo Zamora.
Foucault's Orient
Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the “Orient” constitute the “limit” of Western rationality. Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, this book examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as contradictions of Foucault’s experience with non-Western cultures. Beyond tracing Foucault’s journey into the world of otherness, the book reveals the personal, political as well as methodological effects of a radical conception of cultural difference that extolled the local over the cosmopolitan.
Hopis and the Counterculture
This book addresses how the Hopi became icons of the followers of alternative spiritualities and reveals one of the major pathways for the explosive appropriation of Indigenous identities in the 1960s. It reveals a largely unknown network of Native, non-Indian, and neo-Indian actors who spread misrepresentations of the Hopi that they created through interactions with the Hopi Traditionalist faction of the 1940s through 1980s. Significantly, many non-Hopis involved adopted Indian identities during this time, becoming "neo-Indians." Exploring the new social field that developed to spread these ideas, Hopis and the Counterculture meticulously traces the trajectories of figures such as Ammon Hen...
