The Ch'ol Maya of Chiapas

The Ch'ol Maya of Chiapas PDF Author: Karen Bassie-Sweet
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806149256
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The Ch’ol Maya who live in the western Mexican state of Chiapas are direct descendants of the Maya of the Classic period. Exploring their history and culture, volume editor Karen Bassie-Sweet and the other authors assembled here uncover clear continuity between contemporary Maya rituals and beliefs and their ancient counterparts. With evocative and thoughtful essays by leading scholars of Maya culture, The Ch’ol Maya of Chiapas, the first collection to focus fully on the Ch’ol Maya, takes readers deep into ancient caves and reveals new dimensions of Ch’ol cosmology. In contemporary Ch’ol culture the contributors find a wealth of historical material that they then interweave with archaeological data to yield surprising and illuminating insights. The colonial and twentieth-century descendants of the Postclassic period Ch’ol and Lacandon Ch’ol, for instance, provide a window on the history and conquest of the early Maya. Several authors examine Early Classic paintings in the Ch’ol ritual cave known as Jolja that document ancient cave ceremonies not unlike Ch’ol rituals performed today, such as petitioning a cave-dwelling mountain spirit for health, rain, and abundant harvests. Other essays investigate deities identified with caves, mountains, lightning, and meteors to trace the continuity of ancient Maya beliefs through the centuries, in particular the ancient origin of contemporary rituals centering on the Ch’ol mountain deity Don Juan. An appendix containing three Ch’ol folktales and their English translations rounds out the volume. Charting paths literal and figurative to earlier trade routes, pre-Columbian sites, and ancient rituals and beliefs, The Ch’ol Maya of Chiapas opens a fresh, richly informed perspective on Maya culture as it has evolved and endured over the ages.

The Ch'ol Maya of Chiapas

The Ch'ol Maya of Chiapas PDF Author: Karen Bassie-Sweet
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806149256
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Ch’ol Maya who live in the western Mexican state of Chiapas are direct descendants of the Maya of the Classic period. Exploring their history and culture, volume editor Karen Bassie-Sweet and the other authors assembled here uncover clear continuity between contemporary Maya rituals and beliefs and their ancient counterparts. With evocative and thoughtful essays by leading scholars of Maya culture, The Ch’ol Maya of Chiapas, the first collection to focus fully on the Ch’ol Maya, takes readers deep into ancient caves and reveals new dimensions of Ch’ol cosmology. In contemporary Ch’ol culture the contributors find a wealth of historical material that they then interweave with archaeological data to yield surprising and illuminating insights. The colonial and twentieth-century descendants of the Postclassic period Ch’ol and Lacandon Ch’ol, for instance, provide a window on the history and conquest of the early Maya. Several authors examine Early Classic paintings in the Ch’ol ritual cave known as Jolja that document ancient cave ceremonies not unlike Ch’ol rituals performed today, such as petitioning a cave-dwelling mountain spirit for health, rain, and abundant harvests. Other essays investigate deities identified with caves, mountains, lightning, and meteors to trace the continuity of ancient Maya beliefs through the centuries, in particular the ancient origin of contemporary rituals centering on the Ch’ol mountain deity Don Juan. An appendix containing three Ch’ol folktales and their English translations rounds out the volume. Charting paths literal and figurative to earlier trade routes, pre-Columbian sites, and ancient rituals and beliefs, The Ch’ol Maya of Chiapas opens a fresh, richly informed perspective on Maya culture as it has evolved and endured over the ages.

The Ancient Maya

The Ancient Maya PDF Author: Heather McKillop
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1576076970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
Thanks to powerful innovations in archaeology and other types of historical research, we now have a picture of everyday life in the Mayan empire that turns the long-accepted conventional wisdom on its head. Ranging from the end of the Ice Age to the flourishing of Mayan culture in the first millennium to the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, The Ancient Maya takes a fresh look at a culture that has long held the public's imagination. Originally thought to be peaceful and spiritual, the Mayans are now also known to have been worldly, bureaucratic, and violent. Debates and unanswered questions linger. Mayan expert Heather McKillop shows our current understanding of the Maya, explaining how interpretations of "dirt archaeology," hieroglyphic inscriptions, and pictorial pottery are used to reconstruct the lives of royalty, artisans, priests, and common folk. She also describes the innovative focus on the interplay of the people with their environments that has helped further unravel the mystery of the Mayans' rise and fall.

Unwriting Maya Literature

Unwriting Maya Literature PDF Author: Paul M. Worley
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816534276
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Unwriting Maya Literature provides an important decolonial framework for reading Maya texts that builds on the work of Maya authors and intellectuals such as Q’anjob’al Gaspar Pedro González and Kaqchikel Irma Otzoy. Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios privilege the Maya category ts’íib over constructions of the literary in order to reveal how Maya peoples themselves conceive of artistic creation. This offers a decolonial departure from theoretical approaches that remain situated within alphabetic Maya linguistic and literary creation. As ts’íib refers to a broad range of artistic production from painted codices and textiles to works composed in Latin script, as well as plastic arts, the authors argue that texts by contemporary Maya writers must be read as dialoguing with a multimodal Indigenous understanding of text. In other words, ts’íib is an alternative to understanding “writing” that does not stand in opposition to but rather fully encompasses alphabetic writing, placing it alongside and in dialogue with a number of other forms of recorded knowledge. This shift in focus allows for a critical reexamination of the role that weaving and bodily performance play in these literatures, as well as for a nuanced understanding of how Maya writers articulate decolonial Maya aesthetics in their works. Unwriting Maya Literature places contemporary Maya literatures within a context that is situated in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through ts’íib, the authors propose an alternative to traditional analysis of Maya cultural production that allows critics, students, and admirers to respectfully interact with the texts and their authors. Unwriting Maya Literature offers critical praxis for understanding Mesoamerican works that encompass non-Western ways of reading and creating texts.

Handbook of Middle American Indians, Volumes 7 and 8

Handbook of Middle American Indians, Volumes 7 and 8 PDF Author: Robert Wauchope
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477306714
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 992

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Book Description
Ethnology comprises the seventh and eighth volumes in the Handbook of Middle American Indians, published in cooperation with the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University under the general editorship of Robert Wauchope (1909–1979). The editor of the Ethnology volumes is Evon Z. Vogt (1918–2004), Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social Relations, Harvard University. These two books contain forty-three articles, all written by authorities in their field, on the ethnology of the Maya region, the southern Mexican highlands and adjacent regions, the central Mexican highlands, western Mexico, and northwest Mexico. Among the topics described for each group of Indians are the history of ethnological investigations, cultural and linguistic distributions, major postcontact events, population, subsistence systems and food patterns, settlement patterns, technology, economy, social organization, religion and world view, aesthetic and recreational patterns, life cycle and personality development, and annual cycle of life. The volumes are illustrated with photographs and drawings of contemporary and early historical scenes of native Indian life in Mexico and Central America. The Handbook of Middle American Indians was assembled and edited at the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University with the assistance of grants from the National Science Foundation and under the sponsorship of the National Research Council Committee on Latin American Anthropology.

Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology

Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology PDF Author: Carol R. Ember
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0306477548
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1103

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Book Description
Medical practitioners and the ordinary citizen are becoming more aware that we need to understand cultural variation in medical belief and practice. The more we know how health and disease are managed in different cultures, the more we can recognize what is "culture bound" in our own medical belief and practice. The Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology is unique because it is the first reference work to describe the cultural practices relevant to health in the world's cultures and to provide an overview of important topics in medical anthropology. No other single reference work comes close to marching the depth and breadth of information on the varying cultural background of health and illness around the world. More than 100 experts - anthropologists and other social scientists - have contributed their firsthand experience of medical cultures from around the world.

Cultural Memory

Cultural Memory PDF Author: Jeanette Rodríguez
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292774591
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Sangre llama a sangre. (Blood cries out to blood.)—Latin American aphorism The common "blood" of a people—that imperceptible flow that binds neighbor to neighbor and generation to generation—derives much of its strength from cultural memory. Cultural memories are those transformative historical experiences that define a culture, even as time passes and it adapts to new influences. For oppressed peoples, cultural memory engenders the spirit of resistance; not surprisingly, some of its most powerful incarnations are rooted in religion. In this interdisciplinary examination, Jeanette Rodriguez and Ted Fortier explore how four such forms of cultural memory have preserved the spirit of a particular people. Cultural Memory is not a comparative work, but it is a multicultural one, with four distinct case studies: the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the devotion it inspires among Mexican Americans; the role of secrecy and ceremony among the Yaqui Indians of Arizona; the evolving narrative of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador as transmitted through the church of the poor and the martyrs; and the syncretism of Catholic Tzeltal Mayans of Chiapas, Mexico. In each case, the authors' religious credentials eased the resistance encountered by social scientists and other researchers. The result is a landmark work in cultural studies, a conversation between a liberation theologian and a cultural anthropologist on the religious nature of cultural memory and the power it brings to those who wield it.

Maya Narrative Arts

Maya Narrative Arts PDF Author: Karen Bassie-Sweet
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1607327422
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In Maya Narrative Arts, authors Karen Bassie-Sweet and Nicholas A. Hopkins present a comprehensive and innovative analysis of the principles of Classic Maya narrative arts and apply those principles to some of the major monuments of the site of Palenque. They demonstrate a recent methodological shift in the examination of art and inscriptions away from minute technical issues and toward the poetics and narratives of texts and the relationship between texts and images. Bassie-Sweet and Hopkins show that both visual and verbal media present carefully planned narratives, and that the two are intimately related in the composition of Classic Maya monuments. Text and image interaction is discussed through examples of stelae, wall panels, lintels, benches, and miscellaneous artifacts including ceramic vessels and codices. Bassie-Sweet and Hopkins consider the principles of contrast and complementarity that underlie narrative structures and place this study in the context of earlier work, proposing a new paradigm for Maya epigraphy. They also address the narrative organization of texts and images as manifested in selected hieroglyphic inscriptions and the accompanying illustrations, stressing the interplay between the two. Arguing for a more holistic approach to Classic Maya art and literature, Maya Narrative Arts reveals how close observation and reading can be equally if not more productive than theoretical discussions, which too often stray from the very data that they attempt to elucidate. The book will be significant for Mesoamerican art historians, epigraphers, linguists, and archaeologists.

Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Ethnoarchaeology in the Maya Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico

Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Ethnoarchaeology in the Maya Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Archaeology
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description


Mexico

Mexico PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mexico
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description


The Maya Tropical Forest

The Maya Tropical Forest PDF Author: James D. Nations
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292778775
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
The Maya Tropical Forest, which occupies the lowlands of southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, is the closest rainforest to the United States and one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Western Hemisphere. It has been home to the Maya peoples for nearly four millennia, starting around 1800 BC. Ancient cities in the rainforest such as Palenque, Yaxchilan, Tikal, and Caracol draw thousands of tourists and scholars seeking to learn more about the prehistoric Maya. Their contemporary descendants, the modern Maya, utilize the forest's natural resources in village life and international trade, while striving to protect their homeland from deforestation and environmental degradation. Writing for both visitors and conservationists, James Nations tells the fascinating story of how ancient and modern Maya peoples have used and guarded the rich natural resources of the Maya Tropical Forest. He opens with a natural history that profiles the forest's significant animals and plants. Nations then describes the Maya peoples, biological preserves, and major archaeological sites in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of conservation work in the Maya Tropical Forest, Nations tells first-hand stories of the creation of national parks and other protected areas to safeguard the region's natural resources and archaeological heritage. He concludes with an expert assessment of the forest's future in which he calls for expanded archaeological tourism to create an ecologically sustainable economic base for the region.