Author: Suzanne Cook
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1461491118
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
The Forest of the Lacandon Maya: An Ethnobotanical Guide, with active links to audio-video recordings, serves as a comprehensive guide to the botanical heritage of the northern Lacandones. Numbering fewer than 300 men, women, and children, this community is the most culturally conservative of the Mayan groups. Protected by their hostile environment, over many centuries they maintain autonomy from the outside forces of church and state, while they continue to draw on the forest for spiritual inspiration and sustenance. In The Forest of the Lacandon Maya: An Ethnobotanical Guide, linguist Suzanne Cook presents a bilingual Lacandon-English ethnobotanical guide to more than 450 plants in a tripartite organization: a botanical inventory in which main entries are headed by Lacandon names followed by common English and botanical names, and which includes plant descriptions and uses; an ethnographic inventory, which expands the descriptions given in the botanical inventory, providing the socio-historical, dietary, mythological, and spiritual significance of most plants; and chapters that discuss the relevant cultural applications of the plants in more detail provide a description of the area’s geography, and give an ethnographic overview of the Lacandones. Active links throughout the text to original audio-video recordings demonstrate the use and preparation of the most significant plants.
Author: Brian Gollnick
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816550484
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Before massive deforestation began in the 1960s, the Lacandón jungle, which lies on the border of Mexico and Guatemala, was part of the largest tropical rain forest north of the Amazon. The destruction of the Lacandón occurred with little attention from the international press—until January 1, 1994, when a group of armed Maya rebels led by a charismatic spokesperson who called himself Subcomandante Marcos emerged from jungle communities and briefly occupied several towns in the Mexican state of Chiapas. These rebels, known as the Zapatista National Liberation Army, became front-page news around the globe, and they used their notoriety to issue rhetorically powerful communiqués that denounced political corruption, the Mexican government’s treatment of indigenous peoples, and the negative impact of globalization. As Brian Gollnick reveals, the Zapatista communiqués had deeper roots in the Mayan rain forest than Westerners realized—and he points out that the very idea of the jungle is also deeply rooted, though in different ways, in the Western imagination. Gollnick draws on theoretical innovations offered by subaltern studies to discover “oral traces” left by indigenous inhabitants in dominant cultural productions. He explores both how the jungle region and its inhabitants have been represented in literary writings from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present and how the indigenous people have represented themselves in such works, including post-colonial and anti-colonial narratives, poetry, video, and photography. His goal is to show how popular and elite cultures have interacted in creating depictions of life in the rain forest and to offer new critical vocabularies for analyzing forms of cross-cultural expression.
Author: Victor Perera
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520053090
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
The Last Lords of Lalenque is an extraordinary firsthand account of life among the Lacandon Indians of Nah in southern Mexico. A community of 250 whose genealogy has been obscured by the absence of a written tradition, the Lacandones may nevertheless be traced back linguistically and culturally to the great Maya civilization. They are the sole inheritors of an oral tradition that preserves-more than 400 years after the Spanish Conquest-a cosmology, a morality and a psychology as sophisticated as our own. Journalist and novelist Victor Perera and linguist Robert Bruce have lived among the Lacandones, chronicling their imperiled Mayan culture.
Author: James Nations
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781548794316
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
The Lacand�n Maya are heirs to a wealth of traditional knowledge gleaned from hundreds of years of daily life in the rainforest of southern Mexico. Lacand�n Maya: The Language and Environment is a grammar and vocabulary of their native tongue, as well as a pathway into the tropical ecosystems that surround them.
Author: Didier Boremanse
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Hach Winik may be the last comprehensive study of traditional Lacandon Maya society based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork. In the 1970s and 1980s, Boremanse collected cultural data and textual materials from two groups of Lacandon who still remained relatively isolated. Topics presented here include the history of Lacandon contact with other peoples, settlement patterns, the life cycle, social control, residence and marriage, the kinship system, and the ritual expression of these social domains.
Author: Anabel Ford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315417928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
Using studies on contemporary Maya farming techniques and important new archaeological research, the authors show that the ancient Maya were able to support, sustainably, a vast population by farming the forest—thus refuting the common notion that Maya civilization devolved due to overpopulation and famine.
Author: Joel W. Palka
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813028163
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
In 1946, explorers stumbled upon two unexpected discoveries in the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico: a treasure of well-preserved Classic Maya murals and a thriving society of indigenous Maya peoples living in the lowland rainforest. Over subsequent decades, these Lacandon Maya were assumed to be the direct descendants of the Classic Maya, who created the spectacular temples and monumental art of the region. As impressive as this lineage may be, Joel Palka argues that many scholars have romanticized it at the expense of documenting the substantive social changes the Lacandon experienced after the Spanish Colonial Period. The Lacandon are unique among the Maya of Mesoamerica because they remained free while others were conquered; the Lacandon Maya were the only Maya people never completely colonized by Spain, which led to specific cultural adaptations to contact. Using new cultural, historical, and archeological evidence, Palka offers the most comprehensive and balanced study of the Lacandon to date. His groundbreakingargument is that other Maya, and not just the Spanish, brought extensive changes to the Lacandon way of life. The unearthing of neglected areas of Lacandon ethnohistory, the synthesis of data from archival and ethnographic studies, and the addition of compelling archaeological information from newly discovered sites all add to this complete and richly elucidated treatise of Lacandon cultural change. Palka's study is a fine and significant contribution to the story of the Lacandon Maya and is of interest to archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists of the Maya and Mesoamerica as a whole.
Author: Mary Jo McConahay
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569765480
Category : Mayas
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Author: Julie Sloan Denslow
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520062955
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Looks at the depiction of tropical rain forests in movies and art, discusses government policy, business exploitation, and the future of the rain forest, and describes the lives of forest people in South America, Africa, and Asia
Author: Suzanne Cook
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496216377
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 829
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Book Description
Xurt'an (the end of the world) showcases the rich storytelling traditions of the northern Lacandones of Naha' through a collection of traditional narratives, songs, and ritual speech. Formerly isolated in the dense, tropical rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico, the Lacandon Maya constitute one of the smallest language groups in the world. Although their language remains active and alive, their traditional culture was abandoned after the death of their religious and civic leader in 1996. Lacking the traditional contexts in which the culture was transmitted, the oral traditions are quickly being forgotten. This collection includes creation myths that describe the cycle of destruction and renewal of the world, the structure of the universe, the realms of the gods and their intercessions in the affairs of their mortals, and the journey of the souls after death. Other traditional stories are non-mythic and fictive accounts involving talking animals, supernatural beings, and malevolent beings that stalk and devour hapless victims. In addition to traditional narratives, Xurt'an presents many songs that are claimed to have been received from the Lord of Maize, magical charms that invoke the forces of the natural world, invocations to the gods to heal and protect, and work songs of Lacandon women, whose contribution to Lacandon culture has been hitherto overlooked by scholars. Women's songs offer a rare glimpse into the other half of Lacandon society and the arduous distaff work that sustained the religion. The compilation concludes with descriptions of rainbows, the Milky Way as "the white road of Our Lord," and an account of the solstices. Transcribed and translated by a foremost linguist of the northern Lacandon language, the literary traditions of the Lacandones are finally accessible to English readers. The result is a masterful and authoritative collection of oral literature that will both entertain and provoke, while vividly testifying to the power of Lacandon Maya aesthetic expression.
