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Author: Chelsea Blackmore
Publisher: BAR International Series
ISBN: 9781407312842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Research at the Northeast Group explores how the malleability of commoner identity is crucial to interpretations of ancient Maya society. This volume has two main aims: first to demonstrate how residents of the Northeast Group used materials and architecture to distinguish themselves from others in the neighborhood, and second to examine the implications of commoners as agents of history. Fundamental to this is the deconstruction of what archaeologists mean by commoner and the theoretical and methodological assumptions built into these definitions. Regardless of extensive research in settlement and household studies, interpretations of ancient Maya society continued to be framed with reference to elites. As elites are defined as the motor of change within civilization, commoners, in contrast, are characterized as static and passive. This books seeks to demonstrate that these models do not accurately reflect who commoners were and their impact in the construction of ancient Maya society as a whole.
Author: Chelsea Blackmore
Publisher: BAR International Series
ISBN: 9781407312842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Research at the Northeast Group explores how the malleability of commoner identity is crucial to interpretations of ancient Maya society. This volume has two main aims: first to demonstrate how residents of the Northeast Group used materials and architecture to distinguish themselves from others in the neighborhood, and second to examine the implications of commoners as agents of history. Fundamental to this is the deconstruction of what archaeologists mean by commoner and the theoretical and methodological assumptions built into these definitions. Regardless of extensive research in settlement and household studies, interpretations of ancient Maya society continued to be framed with reference to elites. As elites are defined as the motor of change within civilization, commoners, in contrast, are characterized as static and passive. This books seeks to demonstrate that these models do not accurately reflect who commoners were and their impact in the construction of ancient Maya society as a whole.
Author: Chelsea Blackmore
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Belize
Languages : en
Pages : 668
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Book Description
Author: Bethany J. Beyette
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607325675
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
"The Only True People" is a timely and rigorous examination of ethnicity among the ancient and modern Maya, focusing on ethnogenesis and exploring the complexities of Maya identity—how it developed, where and when it emerged, and why it continues to change over time. In the volume, a multidisciplinary group of well-known scholars including archaeologists, linguists, ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and epigraphers investigate ethnicity and other forms of group identity at a number of Maya sites and places, from the northern reaches of the Yucatan to the Southern Periphery, and across different time periods, from the Classic period to the modern day. Each contribution challenges the notion of ethnically homogenous "Maya peoples" for their region and chronology and explores how their work contributes to the definition of "ethnicity" for ancient Maya society. Contributors confront some of the most difficult theoretical debates concerning identity in the literature today: how different ethnic groups define themselves in relation to others; under what circumstances ethnicity is marked by overt expressions of group membership and when it is hidden from view; and the processes that transform ethnic identities and their expressions. By addressing the social constructs and conditions behind Maya ethnicity, both past and present, "The Only True People" contributes to the understanding of ethnicity as a complex set of relationships among people who lived in real and imagined communities, as well as among people separated by social boundaries. The volume will be a key resource for Mayanists and will be of interest to students and scholars of ethnography, anthropology, and cultural studies as well. Contributors: McCale Ashenbrener, Ellen E. Bell, Marcello A. Canuto, Juan Castillo Cocom, David A. Freidel, Wolfgang Gabbert, Stanley P. Guente, Jonathan Hill, Charles Andrew Hofling, Martha J. Macri, Damien B. Marken, Matthew Restall, Timoteo Rodriguez, Mathew C. Samson, Edward Schortman, Rebecca Storey
Author: Scott Hutson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780759119208
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Dwelling, Identity, and the Maya offers a new perspective on the ancient Maya that emphasizes the importance of dwelling as a social practice. Contrary to contemporary notions of the self as individual and independent, the identities of the ancient Maya grew from their everyday relations and interactions with other people, the houses and temples they built, and the objects they created, exchanged, cherished, and left behind. Using excavations of ancient Chunchucmil as a case study, it investigates how Maya personhood was structured and transformed in and beyond the domestic sphere and examines the role of the past in the production of contemporary Maya identity.
Author: Maria Stern
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719071164
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Based on the experiences of Mayan women, Stern critically re-considers the connections between security, subjectivity and identity. By engaging in a careful reading of how Mayan women "speak" security in relation to the different contexts that inform their lives, she explores the multiplicity of both identity and security, and questions the main story of security imbedded in the modern "paradox of sovereignty."
Author: Christina Halperin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000904466
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Assessing key questions such as who the foreigners and outsiders in ancient Maya societies were and how was the foreign a generative component of identity, Foreigners Among Us reassess the arrival of foreigners as part of archaeological understandings of Pre-Columbian Maya and questions not only who these foreigners might have been but who were making such designations of difference in the first place. Drawing from identity studies, standpoint theory, and ideas on alterity, Foreigners Among Us highlights the diverse ways being foreign was constituted, imitated, and marked – from quotidian practices of making corn tortillas to ceremonial acts between king and captive and their memorialization in scenes on sculpted stone monuments. Rather than treat the foreign as axiomatically determined by geographical distance or fixed at birth, the book considers the foreign as much performed as inherited. It examines practices of captivity, cuisine, body ornamentation and dress, diasporic objects, relationships with deities, migration, and pilgrimage. The book focuses, in particular, on diverse peoples in the Maya area during the Classic and Postclassic periods, but also necessarily peers into contacts, engagements and relations throughout Mesoamerica, the Americas more broadly, and with Europeans during the Colonial period – all the while insisting that outsider status must be approached as multi-scalar, relational, and intersectional rather than as neutral, intrinsic, and static. Contributing broadly to intellectual investigations on foreign identities from an anthropological perspective, this book enriches the understanding of Maya society for students and researchers of Mesoamerican archaeology and art history.
Author: Traci Ardren
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292768117
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands plumbs the archaeological record for what it can reveal about the creation of personal and communal identities in the Maya world. Using new primary data from her excavations at the sites of Yaxuna, Chunchucmil, and Xuenkal, and new analysis of data from Dzibilchaltun in Yucatan, Mexico, Traci Ardren presents a series of case studies in how social identities were created, shared, and manipulated among the lowland Maya. Ardren argues that the interacting factors of gender, age, familial and community memories, and the experience of living in an urban setting were some of the key aspects of Maya identities. She demonstrates that domestic and civic spaces were shaped by gender-specific behaviors to communicate and reinforce gendered ideals. Ardren discusses how child burials disclose a sustained pattern of reverence for the potential of childhood and the power of certain children to mediate ancestral power. She shows how small shrines built a century after Yaxuna was largely abandoned indicate that its remaining residents used memory to reenvision their city during a time of cultural reinvention. And Ardren explains how Chunchucmil's physical layout of houses, plazas, and surrounding environment denotes that its occupants shared an urban identity centered in the movement of trade goods and economic exchange. Viewing this evidence through the lens of the social imaginary and other recent social theory, Ardren demonstrates that material culture and its circulations are an integral part of the discourse about social identity and group membership.
Author: Lowell S. Gustafson
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
The first book to examine how the ancient Maya defined gender. Contributors explain what it meant to be male and female. They show how gender was experienced and what the bases were for gender designations. They demonstrate how gender relations affected other areas of Mayan life, such as the arts, cosmology, economics, politics, religion, and social structure. And they analyze the changes in Mayan gender relations and identities that were fostered by evolving historical systems. There was no single Mayan polity nor was there a unitary cultural approach. Certain similarities in culture account for the observation of a general commonality among the ancient Maya, but there clearly were significant differences between Mayan sites, within the same site over time, and even between social sectors at the same site in any given time—this is no less true for ancient Maya gender identity and relations. Thus, the authors seek to explain why emphasis upon bilateral inheritance of power and prerogative was emphasized in artwork at some periods and some sites and not at others. Avoiding the vain attempt to provide a single explanation, they seek to offer a clearer sense of the richness of their topic.
Author: Garrett W. Cook
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826353193
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
Based on more than thirty years of ethnographic fieldwork in Highland Guatemala, this study of Maya diviners, shamans, ritual dancers, and religious brotherhoods describes the radical changes in traditional Maya religious practice wrought by economic globalization and political turmoil. Focusing on the primary participants in the annual festival in the K’iche’ Maya village of Santiago Momostenango, the authors show how older religious traditionalists and the new generation of “cultural activist” religious practitioners interact within a single local community, and how their competing agendas for adapting Maya religiosity to a new and continually changing political economy are perpetuating and changing Maya religious traditions.
Author: Thomas H. Guderjan
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816551871
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 445
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Book Description
This volume focuses on how powerful people of the ancient, historical, and contemporary periods in the Maya world used features such as walls, roads, rails, and symbolic boundaries to control those without power--and how the powerless pushed back.
