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Materializing Ritual Practices explores the deep history of ritual practice in Mexico and Central America and the ways interdisciplinary research can be coordinated to illuminate how rituals create, destroy, and transform social relations. Ritual action produces sequences of creation, destruction, and transformation, which involve a variety of materials that are active and agential. The materialities of ritual may persist at temporal scales long beyond the lives of humans or be as ephemeral as spoken words, music, and scents. In this book, archaeologists and ethnographers, including specialists in narrative, music, and ritual practice, explore the rhythms and materiality of rituals that acco...
Economic liberalization, modern mass media, and new religious and political movements have touched even the most remote areas in Mexico, and the Northern Highlands of the state of Puebla are no exception. When this coincides with recent infrastructures such as roads and electricity and new income sources from cash crop production and urban migration, the nature of rural communities rapidly changes. This study shows how the people of the Totonac mountain village of Nanacatln deal with their increasingly pluriform and differentiated local world. By performing stories, rituals, and exchanges they have countered centrifugal cultural and social forces. Rather than leading to the demise of the com...
The chilling true story of the Spahalski brothers, who looked alike, acted alike—and killed alike . . . Robert Bruce Spahalski and Stephen Spahalski were identical twins. Same hair, same eyes, same thirst for blood. Stephen was the first brother to kill—by viciously bashing in storeowner Ronald Ripley’s head with a hammer. Unlike Stephen, Robert didn’t stop with just one victim. With the cord of an iron, Robert strangled prostitute Morraine Armstrong during sex. With his bare hands, he choked his girlfriend Adrian Berger. He brutally bludgeoned to death businessman Charles Grande. Even his friend Vivian Irizarry didn’t escape his lurid killing spree. Robert ultimately confessed to the four murders in vivid detail. But police suspected there were many more. The twins’ twisted story became even more bizarre as the true nature of their sick psyches came to light. In Killer Twins, through extensive interviews, Michael Benson reveals for the first time the horrific details of Robert Spahalski’s life and crimes in a disturbing look at the inner workings of a homicidal mind.
The Pan American Games, second only to the Olympics as the biggest international sports competition in the world, are held every four years (during the year prior to the Summer Olympics) under the sponsorship of the International Olympic Committee. This book lists the results of the Pan American Games from their commencement in 1951 through 1999. Los Juegos Panamericanos, los segundos mas importantes del mundo tras los Olimpicos, se han venido celebrando cada cuatro anos desde 1951. Se incluye en el presente trabajo bilingue un recuento de los resultados reflejados en dichos juegos a lo largo de su historia, desde los comienzos hasta los mas recientes, celebrados en 1999.
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.
This epistemological study, which is based on ancient chronicles and stories, hymns and ritual discourses, epics and poetics, as well as contemporary ethnographic studies of Mesoamerica, has as its salient issues: gender fluidity, eroticism linked to religion, permeable corporeality, embodied thought and the amblings of oral thought