Anthropology and History in Yucatán


Book Description

Anthropology and History in Yucatán is a collection of ten essays that offer new evidence and interpretations of the survival and adaptation of lowland Maya culture from its earliest contact with the Spanish to the 1970s. These case studies reflect a growing interest in the use of historical approaches in the development of models of cultural change that will integrate archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data. The portrait of the Maya emerging from this collection is that of a remarkably vital people who have skillfully resisted total incorporation with their neighbors and who continue even today to emphasize their cultural independence and historical uniqueness. In his introduction, Grant D. Jones synthesizes previous studies of the anthropological history of Yucatán and summarizes the theoretical issues underlying the volume. Section I, which focuses on continuity and change in the boundaries of Maya ethnicity in Yucatán, includes contributions by the late Sir Eric Thompson, France V. Scholes, and O. Nigel Bolland. Section II presents comparative regional perspectives of Maya adaptations to external forces of change and contains essays by D. E. Dumond, Grant D. Jones, James W. Ryder, and Anne C. Collins. In the closing section, three articles, by Victoria Reifler Bricker, Allan F. Burns, and Irwin Press, treat Maya concepts of their own history. Throughout the book, the authors demonstrate that models far more complex than Robert Redfield’s folk-urban continuum must be developed to account for the great regional variations in responses by the Maya to the pressures of economic, cultural, and political control as exerted by Spanish, Mexican, Guatemalan, and British authorities over the past four centuries. The essays demonstrate a variety of methodological approaches that will be of interest to historians, ethnohistorians, ethnologists, archaeologists, and those who have a general interest in the survival of Maya culture.




In the Name of El Pueblo


Book Description

The term “el pueblo” is used throughout Latin America, referring alternately to small towns, to community, or to “the people” as a political entity. In this vivid anthropological and historical analysis of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, Paul K. Eiss explores the multiple meanings of el pueblo and the power of the concept to unite the diverse claims made in its name. Eiss focuses on working-class indigenous and mestizo populations, examining how those groups negotiated the meaning of el pueblo among themselves and in their interactions with outsiders, including landowners, activists, and government officials. Combining extensive archival and ethnographic research, he describes how residents of the region have laid claim to el pueblo in varied ways, as exemplified in communal narratives recorded in archival documents, in the performance of plays and religious processions, and in struggles over land, politics, and the built environment. Eiss demonstrates that while el pueblo is used throughout the hemisphere, the term is given meaning and power through the ways it is imagined and constructed in local contexts. Moreover, he reveals el pueblo to be a concept that is as historical as it is political. It is in the name of el pueblo—rather than class, race, or nation—that inhabitants of northwestern Yucatán stake their deepest claims not only to social or political rights, but over history itself.




The Ancient Maya of Mexico


Book Description

The archaeological sites of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula are among the most visited ancient cities of the Americas. Archaeologists have recently made great advances in our understanding of the social and political milieu of the northern Maya lowlands. However, such advances have been under-represented in both scholarly and popular literature until now. 'The Ancient Maya of Mexico' presents the results of new and important archaeological, epigraphic, and art historical research in the Mexican states of Yucatan, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. Ranging across the Middle Preclassic to the Modern periods, the volume explores how new archaeological data has transformed our understanding of Maya history. 'The Ancient Maya of Mexico' will be invaluable to students and scholars of archaeology and anthropology, and all those interested in the society, rituals and economic organisation of the Maya region.




Sugarcane and Rum


Book Description

While the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico may conjure up images of vacation getaways and cocktails by the sea, these easy stereotypes hide a story filled with sweat and toil. The story of sugarcane and rum production in the Caribbean has been told many times. But few know the bittersweet story of sugar and rum in the jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula during the nineteenth century. This is much more than a history of coveted commodities. The unique story that unfolds in John R. Gust and Jennifer P. Mathews’s new history Sugarcane and Rum is told through the lens of Maya laborers who worked under brutal conditions on small haciendas to harvest sugarcane and produce rum. Gust and Mathews weave together ethnographic interviews and historical archives with archaeological evidence to bring the daily lives of Maya workers into focus. They lived in a cycle of debt, forced to buy all of their supplies from the company store and take loans from the hacienda owners. And yet they had a certain autonomy because the owners were so dependent on their labor at harvest time. We also see how the rise of cantinas and distilled alcohol in the nineteenth century affected traditional Maya culture and that the economies of Cancún and the Mérida area are predicated on the rum-influenced local social systems of the past. Sugarcane and Rum brings this bittersweet story to the present and explains how rum continues to impact the Yucatán and the people who have lived there for millennia.




The Caste War of Yucatán


Book Description

This is the classic account of one of the most dramatic episodes in Mexican history--the revolt of the Maya Indians of Yucatán against their white and mestizo oppressors that began in 1847. Within a year, the Maya rebels had almost succeeded in driving their oppressors from the peninsula; by 1855, when the major battles ended, the war had killed or put to flight almost half of the population of Yucatán. A new religion built around a Speaking Cross supported their independence for over fifty years, and that religion survived the eventual Maya defeat and continues today. This revised edition is based on further research in the archives and in the field, and draws on the research by a new generation of scholars who have labored since the book's original publication 36 years ago. One of the most significant results of this research is that it has put a human face on much that had heretofore been treated as semi-mythical. Reviews of the First Edition "Reed has not only written a fine account of the caste war, he has also given us the first penetrating analysis of the social and economic systems of Yucatán in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." --American Historical Review "In this beautifully written history of a little-known struggle between several contending forces in Yucatán, Reed has added an important dimension to anthropological studies in this area." --American Anthropologist "Not only is this exciting history (as compelling and dramatic as the best of historical fiction) but it covers events unaccountably neglected by historians. . . . This is a brilliant contribution to history. . . . Don't miss this book." --Los Angeles Times "One of the most remarkable books about Latin America to appear in years." --Hispanic American Report




The Folk Culture of Yucatan


Book Description




Culture, Environment and Health in the Yucatan Peninsula


Book Description

This book adopts a human ecology approach to present an overview of the biological responses to social, political, economic, cultural and environmental changes that affected human populations in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, since the Classic Maya Period. Human bodies express social relations, and we can read these relations by analyzing biological tissues or systems, and by measuring certain phenotypical traits at the population level. Departing from this theoretical premise, the contributors to this volume analyze the interactions between ecosystems, sociocultural systems and human biology in a specific geographic region to show how changes in sociocultural and natural environment affect the health of a population over time. This edited volume brings together contributions from a range of different scientific disciplines – such as biological anthropology, bioarchaeology, human biology, nutrition, epidemiology, ecotoxicology, political economy, sociology and ecology – that analyze the interactions between culture, environment and health in different domains of human life, such as: The political ecology of food, nutrition and health Impacts of social and economic changes in children’s diet and women’s fertility Biological consequences of social vulnerability in urban areas Impacts of toxic contamination of natural resources on human health Ecological and sociocultural determinants of infectious diseases Culture, Environment and Health in the Yucatan Peninsula – A Human Ecology Perspective will be of interest to researchers from the social, health and life sciences dedicated to the study of the interactions between natural environments, human biology, health and social issues, especially in fields such as biological and sociocultural anthropology, health promotion and environmental health. It will also be a useful tool to health professionals and public agents responsible for designing and applying public health policies in contexts of social vulnerability.




In the Museum of Maya Culture


Book Description

"Very interesting discussion of the ways in which anthropology, tourism, archaeology, and popular culture all contribute to the creation of the Maya as a social unit and Chichen Itza as a place"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.




Violence and The Caste War of Yucatán


Book Description

This book analyzes the extent and forms of violence in one of the most significant indigenous rural revolts in nineteenth-century Latin America. Combining historical, anthropological, and sociological research, it shows how violence played a role in the establishment and maintenance of order and leadership within the contending parties.




Indigenous Dispossession


Book Description

Following the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land reform. For Indigenous peoples, access to affordable housing remains crucial to alleviating poverty. But as palapas, traditional thatch and wood houses, are replaced by tract houses in the Yucatán Peninsula, Indigenous peoples' relationship to land, urbanism, and finance is similarly transformed, revealing a legacy of debt and dispossession. Indigenous Dispossession examines how Maya families grapple with the ramifications of neoliberal housing policies. M. Bianet Castellanos relates Maya migrants' experiences with housing and mortgage finance in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest-growing cities. Their struggle to own homes reveals colonial and settler colonial structures that underpin the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. But even as Maya people contend with predatory lending practices and foreclosure, they cultivate strategies of resistance—from "waiting out" the state, to demanding Indigenous rights in urban centers. As Castellanos argues, it is through these maneuvers that Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism.