Indigenous Movements and Their Critics

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics PDF Author: Kay B. Warren
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691058825
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In this first book-length treatment of Maya intellectuals in national and community affairs in Guatemala, Kay Warren presents an ethnographic account of Pan-Maya cultural activism through the voices, writings, and actions of its participants. Challenging the belief that indigenous movements emerge as isolated, politically unified fronts, she shows that Pan-Mayanism reflects diverse local, national, and international influences. She explores the movement's attempts to interweave these varied strands into political programs to promote human and cultural rights for Guatemala's indigenous majority and also examines the movement's many domestic and foreign critics. The book focuses on the years of Guatemala's peace process (1987--1996). After the previous ten years of national war and state repression, the Maya movement reemerged into public view to press for institutional reform in the schools and courts and for the officialization of a "multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual" national culture. In particular, Warren examines a group of well-known Mayanist antiracism activists--among them, Demetrio Cojt!, Mart!n Chacach, Enrique Sam Colop, Victor Montejo, members of Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib', and grassroots intellectuals in the community of San Andr s--to show what is at stake for them personally and how they have worked to promote the revitalization of Maya language and culture. Pan-Mayanism's critics question its tactics, see it as threatening their own achievements, or even as dangerously polarizing national society. This book highlights the crucial role that Mayanist intellectuals have come to play in charting paths to multicultural democracy in Guatemala and in creating a new parallel middle class.

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics PDF Author: Kay B. Warren
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691058825
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this first book-length treatment of Maya intellectuals in national and community affairs in Guatemala, Kay Warren presents an ethnographic account of Pan-Maya cultural activism through the voices, writings, and actions of its participants. Challenging the belief that indigenous movements emerge as isolated, politically unified fronts, she shows that Pan-Mayanism reflects diverse local, national, and international influences. She explores the movement's attempts to interweave these varied strands into political programs to promote human and cultural rights for Guatemala's indigenous majority and also examines the movement's many domestic and foreign critics. The book focuses on the years of Guatemala's peace process (1987--1996). After the previous ten years of national war and state repression, the Maya movement reemerged into public view to press for institutional reform in the schools and courts and for the officialization of a "multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual" national culture. In particular, Warren examines a group of well-known Mayanist antiracism activists--among them, Demetrio Cojt!, Mart!n Chacach, Enrique Sam Colop, Victor Montejo, members of Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib', and grassroots intellectuals in the community of San Andr s--to show what is at stake for them personally and how they have worked to promote the revitalization of Maya language and culture. Pan-Mayanism's critics question its tactics, see it as threatening their own achievements, or even as dangerously polarizing national society. This book highlights the crucial role that Mayanist intellectuals have come to play in charting paths to multicultural democracy in Guatemala and in creating a new parallel middle class.

Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala

Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala PDF Author: Edward F. Fischer
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292708513
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
"An important collection of essays on Mayan activism. Included are pieces by native and non-native scholars reviewing Guatemalan history, ethnic violence, peasant and indigenous cultural resistance to the State, material culture, development, and literacy

Maya Resurgence in Guatemala

Maya Resurgence in Guatemala PDF Author: Richard Wilson
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806131955
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Across Guatemala, Mayan peoples are struggling to recover from decades of cataclysmic upheaval--religious conversions, civil war, displacement, military repression. Richard Wilson carried out long-term research with Q’eqchi’-speaking Mayas in the province of Alta Verapaz to ascertain how these events affected social organization and identity. He finds that their rituals of fertility and healing--abandoned in the 1970s during Catholic and Protestant evangelizations--have been reinvented by an ethnic revivalist movement led by Catholic lay activists, who seek to renovate the earth cult in order to create a new pan-Q’eqchi’ ethnic identity.

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics PDF Author: Kay B. Warren
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691225303
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
In this first book-length treatment of Maya intellectuals in national and community affairs in Guatemala, Kay Warren presents an ethnographic account of Pan-Maya cultural activism through the voices, writings, and actions of its participants. Challenging the belief that indigenous movements emerge as isolated, politically unified fronts, she shows that Pan-Mayanism reflects diverse local, national, and international influences. She explores the movement's attempts to interweave these varied strands into political programs to promote human and cultural rights for Guatemala's indigenous majority and also examines the movement's many domestic and foreign critics. The book focuses on the years of Guatemala's peace process (1987--1996). After the previous ten years of national war and state repression, the Maya movement reemerged into public view to press for institutional reform in the schools and courts and for the officialization of a "multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual" national culture. In particular, Warren examines a group of well-known Mayanist antiracism activists--among them, Demetrio Cojt!, Mart!n Chacach, Enrique Sam Colop, Victor Montejo, members of Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib', and grassroots intellectuals in the community of San Andr s--to show what is at stake for them personally and how they have worked to promote the revitalization of Maya language and culture. Pan-Mayanism's critics question its tactics, see it as threatening their own achievements, or even as dangerously polarizing national society. This book highlights the crucial role that Mayanist intellectuals have come to play in charting paths to multicultural democracy in Guatemala and in creating a new parallel middle class.

Contemporary Maya Spirituality

Contemporary Maya Spirituality PDF Author: Jean Molesky-Poz
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292778627
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
An authoritative study of the indigenous religion still practiced in Guatemala based on extensive original research and participant observation. Jean Molesky-Poz draws on in-depth dialogues with Maya Ajq’ijab’ (keepers of the ritual calendar), her own participant observation, and inter-disciplinary resources to offer a comprehensive, innovative, and well-grounded understanding of contemporary Maya spirituality and its theological underpinnings. She reveals significant continuities between contemporary and ancient Maya worldviews and spiritual practices. Molesky-Poz opens with a discussion of how the public emergence of Maya spirituality is situated within the religious political history of the Guatemalan highlands, particularly the pan-Maya movement. She investigates Maya cosmovision and its foundational principles, as expressed by Ajq’ijab’. At the heart of this work, Ajq’ijab’ interpret their obligation, lives, and spiritual work. Molesky-Poz then explores aspects of Maya spirituality, including sacred geography, sacred time, and ritual practice. She confirms contemporary Maya spirituality as a faith tradition with elaborate historical roots that has significance for individual, collective, and historical lives, reaffirming its own public space and legal right to be practiced.

The Blood of Guatemala

The Blood of Guatemala PDF Author: Greg Grandin
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822380331
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the Guatemalan state slaughtered more than two hundred thousand of its citizens. In the wake of this violence, a vibrant pan-Mayan movement has emerged, one that is challenging Ladino (non-indigenous) notions of citizenship and national identity. In The Blood of Guatemala Greg Grandin locates the origins of this ethnic resurgence within the social processes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century state formation rather than in the ruins of the national project of recent decades. Focusing on Mayan elites in the community of Quetzaltenango, Grandin shows how their efforts to maintain authority over the indigenous population and secure political power in relation to non-Indians played a crucial role in the formation of the Guatemalan nation. To explore the close connection between nationalism, state power, ethnic identity, and political violence, Grandin draws on sources as diverse as photographs, public rituals, oral testimony, literature, and a collection of previously untapped documents written during the nineteenth century. He explains how the cultural anxiety brought about by Guatemala’s transition to coffee capitalism during this period led Mayan patriarchs to develop understandings of race and nation that were contrary to Ladino notions of assimilation and progress. This alternative national vision, however, could not take hold in a country plagued by class and ethnic divisions. In the years prior to the 1954 coup, class conflict became impossible to contain as the elites violently opposed land claims made by indigenous peasants. This “history of power” reconsiders the way scholars understand the history of Guatemala and will be relevant to those studying nation building and indigenous communities across Latin America.

Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala

Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala PDF Author: Hannah Burdette
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816538654
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
From the rise of the Pan-Maya Movement in Guatemala and the Zapatista uprising in Mexico to the Water and Gas Wars in Bolivia and the Idle No More movement in Canada, the turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed a notable surge in Indigenous political action as well as an outpouring of texts produced by Native authors and poets. Throughout the Americas—Abiayala, or the “Land of Plenitude and Maturity” in the Guna language of Panama—Indigenous people are raising their voices and reclaiming the right to represent themselves in politics as well as in creative writing. Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala explores the intersections between Indigenous literature and social movements over the past thirty years through the lens of insurgent poetics. Author Hannah Burdette is interested in how Indigenous literature and social movements are intertwined and why these phenomena arise almost simultaneously in disparate contexts across the Americas. Literature constitutes a key weapon in political struggles as it provides a means to render subjugated knowledge visible and to envision alternatives to modernity and coloniality. The surge in Indigenous literature and social movements is arguably one of the most significant occurrences of the twenty-first century, and yet it remains understudied. Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala bridges that gap by using the concept of Abiayala as a powerful starting point for rethinking inter-American studies through the lens of Indigenous sovereignty.

The Guatemala Reader

The Guatemala Reader PDF Author: Greg Grandin
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 689

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Book Description
DIVAn interdisciplinary anthology on the largest, most populous nation in Central America, covering Guatemalan history, culture, literature and politics and containing many primary sources not previously published in English./div

Maya Intellectual Renaissance

Maya Intellectual Renaissance PDF Author: Victor D. Montejo
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292778651
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
When Mayan leaders protested the celebration of the Quincentenary of the "discovery" of America and joined with other indigenous groups in the Americas to proclaim an alternate celebration of 500 years of resistance, they rose to national prominence in Guatemala. This was possible in part because of the cultural, political, economic, and religious revitalization that occurred in Mayan communities in the later half of the twentieth century. Another result of the revitalization was Mayan students' enrollment in graduate programs in order to reclaim the intellectual history of the brilliant Mayan past. Victor Montejo was one of those students. This is the first book to be published outside of Guatemala where a Mayan writer other than Rigoberta Menchu discusses the history and problems of the country. It collects essays Montejo has written over the past ten years that address three critical issues facing Mayan peoples today: identity, representation, and Mayan leadership. Montejo is deeply invested in furthering the discussion of the effectiveness of Mayan leadership because he believes that self-evaluation is necessary for the movement to advance. He also criticizes the racist treatment that Mayans experience, and advocates for the construction of a more pluralistic Guatemala that recognizes cultural diversity and abandons assimilation. This volume maps a new political alternative for the future of the movement that promotes inter-ethnic collaboration alongside a reverence for Mayan culture.

Tecpan Guatemala

Tecpan Guatemala PDF Author: Edward F Fischer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429976550
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This book discusses the indigenous people of Tecpan Guatemala, a predominantly Kaqchikel Maya town in the Guatemalan highlands. It seeks to build on the traditional strengths of ethnography while rejecting overly romantic and isolationist tendencies in the genre.