Continuities in Highland Maya Social Organization

Continuities in Highland Maya Social Organization PDF Author: Robert M. Hill II
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512802743
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Continuities in Highland Maya Social Organization innovatively combines ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and archaeological research to present the first study of the Maya community from preconquest to modern times.

Continuities in Highland Maya Social Organization

Continuities in Highland Maya Social Organization PDF Author: Robert M. Hill II
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512802743
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
Continuities in Highland Maya Social Organization innovatively combines ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and archaeological research to present the first study of the Maya community from preconquest to modern times.

Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala

Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala PDF Author: Robinson A. Herrera
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292779496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
The first century of Spanish colonization in Latin America witnessed the birth of cities that, while secondary to great metropolitan centers such as Mexico City and Lima, became important hubs for regional commerce. Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital of Central America, was one of these. A multiethnic and multicultural city from its beginning, Santiago grew into a vigorous trading center for agrarian goods such as cacao and cattle hides. With the wealth this commerce generated, Spaniards, natives, and African slaves built a city that any European of the period would have found familiar. This book provides a more complete picture of society, culture, and economy in sixteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala than has ever before been drawn. Robinson Herrera uses previously unstudied primary sources, including testaments, promissory notes, and work contracts, to recreate the lives and economic activities of the non-elite sectors of society, including natives, African slaves, economically marginal Europeans, and people of mixed descent. His focus on these groups sheds light on the functioning of the economy at the lower levels and reveals how people of different ethnic groups formed alliances to create a vibrant local and regional economy based on credit. This portrait of Santiago also increases our understanding of how secondary Spanish American cities contributed vitally to the growth of the colonies.

Indigenous Religion and Cultural Performance in the New Maya World

Indigenous Religion and Cultural Performance in the New Maya World PDF Author: Garrett W. Cook
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826353185
Category : Cofradías (Latin America)
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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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.

Our Elders Teach Us

Our Elders Teach Us PDF Author: David Carey
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 081731119X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
By casting a wide net for his interviews - from tiny hamlets to bustling Guatemala City - Carey gained insight into more than a single community or a single group of Maya."--BOOK JACKET.

New Theories on the Ancient Maya

New Theories on the Ancient Maya PDF Author: Elin C. Danien
Publisher: UPenn Museum of Archaeology
ISBN: 9780924171130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Papers from the 1987 Maya Weekend conference at the University of Pennsylvania Museum present current views of Maya culture and language. Also included is an article by George Stuart summarizing the history of the study of Maya hieroglyphs and the fascinating scholars and laypersons who have helped bring about their decipherment. Symposium Series III University Museum Monograph, 77

Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World

Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World PDF Author: John M. Watanabe
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292786735
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The Maya of Santiago Chimaltenango have experienced increasingly rapid, even violent, integration into Guatemalan society in the last fifty years, yet they still distinguish themselves ethnically from Spanish-speaking Guatemalans and other Maya. Why this sense of ethnic identity persists—and also changes—over time is the focus of Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World, a beautifully written ethnography of a Mam-speaking Maya town in the western highlands of Guatemala. John Watanabe uniquely explores how Chimaltecos themselves define their local distinctiveness. This approach uncovers significant continuities in lifeways and world view that might otherwise remain imperceptible to an outsider. Another important feature of the study is that it updates Charles Wagley's pioneering research in the community during the 1930s. Watanabe identifies both the external, historical factors that have prompted change in the community since Wagley's time and the people's responses to these changes.

American Holocaust

American Holocaust PDF Author: David E. Stannard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199838984
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
For four hundred years--from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s--the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched--and in places continue to wage--against the New World's original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. At once sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate.

Ritual, Violence, and the Fall of the Classic Maya Kings

Ritual, Violence, and the Fall of the Classic Maya Kings PDF Author: Gyles Iannone
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813063809
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Maya kings who failed to ensure the prosperity of their kingdoms were subject to various forms of termination, including the ritual defacing and destruction of monuments and even violent death. This is the first comprehensive volume to focus on the varied responses to the failure of Classic period dynasties in the southern lowlands. The contributors offer new insights into the Maya "collapse," evaluating the trope of the scapegoat king and the demise of the traditional institution of kingship in the early ninth century AD--a time of intense environmental, economic, social, political, and even ideological change. A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase

Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, Volume 6

Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, Volume 6 PDF Author: Barbara W. Edmonson
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 029279178X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
In 1981, UT Press began to issue supplemental volumes to the classic sixteen-volume work, Handbook of Middle American Indians. These supplements are intended to update scholarship in various areas and to cover topics of current interest. Supplements devoted to Archaeology, Linguistics, Literatures, Ethnohistory, and Epigraphy have appeared to date. In this Ethnology supplement, anthropologists who have carried out long-term fieldwork among indigenous people review the ethnographic literature in the various regions of Middle America and discuss the theoretical and methodological orientations that have framed the work of areal scholars over the last several decades. They examine how research agendas have developed in relationship to broader interests in the field and the ways in which the anthropology of the region has responded to the sociopolitical and economic policies of Mexico and Guatemala. Most importantly, they focus on the changing conditions of life of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. This volume thus offers a comprehensive picture of both the indigenous populations and developments in the anthropology of the region over the last thirty years.

Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala

Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala PDF Author: Edward F. Fischer
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292789238
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala marks a new era in Guatemalan studies by offering an up-to-the-minute look at the pan-Maya movement and the future of the Maya people as they struggle to regain control over their cultural destiny. The successful emergence of what is in some senses a nationalism grounded in ethnicity and language has challenged scholars to reconsider their concepts of nationalism, community, and identity. Editors Edward F. Fischer and R. McKenna Brown have brought together essays by virtually all the leading U.S. experts on contemporary Maya communities and the top Maya scholars working in Guatemala today. Supplementing scholarly analysis of Mayan cultural activism is a position statement originating within the movement and more wide-ranging and personal reflections by anthropologists and linguists who have worked with the Maya over the years. Among the broader issues that come in for examination are the complex relations between U.S. Mayanists and the Mayan cultural movement, efforts to promote literacy in Mayan languages, the significance of woven textiles and native dress, the relations between language and national identity, and the cultural meanings that the present-day Maya have encountered in ancient Mayan texts and hieroglyphic writing.