As a free trade zone and Latin America's most popular destination, Cancun, Mexico, is more than just a tourist town. It is not only actively involved in the production of transnational capital but also forms an integral part of the state's modernization plan for rural, indigenous communities. Indeed, Maya migrants make up over a third of the city's population. A Return to Servitude is an ethnography of Maya migration within Mexico that analyzes the foundational role indigenous peoples play in the development of the modern nation-state. Focusing on tourism in the Yucatan Peninsula,...
As a free trade zone and Latin America's most popular destination, Cancun, Mexico, is more than just a tourist town. It is not only actively involved ...
As a free trade zone and Latin America's most popular destination, Cancun, Mexico, is more than just a tourist town. It is not only actively involved in the production of transnational capital but also forms an integral part of the state's modernization plan for rural, indigenous communities. Indeed, Maya migrants make up over a third of the city's population. A Return to Servitude is an ethnography of Maya migration within Mexico that analyzes the foundational role indigenous peoples play in the development of the modern nation-state. Focusing on tourism in the Yucatan Peninsula,...
As a free trade zone and Latin America's most popular destination, Cancun, Mexico, is more than just a tourist town. It is not only actively involved ...
That these treasures are available to us as writing is a miracle. . . . The writings here, while altogether modern in one sense, are based upon a literature, albeit oral, that has existed for thousands of years. They are the reflections of people who have lived long on the earth, on their own terms, in harmony with the powers of nature. They are invaluable to us who have so much to learn from them. These stories, poems, songs give us a way, a sacred way, into a world that we ought to know for its own sake. It is our own world, after all. --N. Scott Momaday, from the Foreword The first...
That these treasures are available to us as writing is a miracle. . . . The writings here, while altogether modern in one sense, are based upon a lite...
While King Carlos I of Spain struggled to suppress the Protestant Reformation in the Old World, the Spanish turned to New Spain to promote the Catholic cause, unimpeded by the presence of the false Old World religions. To this end, Osowski writes, the Spanish saw indigenous people as necessary protagonists in the anticipated triumph of the faith. As the conversion of the indigenous people of Mexico proceeded in earnest, Catholic ritual became the medium through which indigenous leaders and Spaniards negotiated colonial hegemony. Indigenous Miracles is about how the Nahua elite of...
While King Carlos I of Spain struggled to suppress the Protestant Reformation in the Old World, the Spanish turned to New Spain to promote the Catholi...
Using the intriguing stories and words of a Quechua-speaking woman named Luisa Cadena from the Pastaza Province of Ecuador, Janis B. Nuckolls reveals a complex language system in which ideophony, dialogue, and perspective are all at the core of cultural and grammatical communications among Amazonian Quechua speakers. This book is a fascinating look at ideophones--words that communicate succinctly through imitative sound qualities. They are at the core of Quechua speakers' discourse--both linguistic and cultural--because they allow agency and reaction to substances and entities as well as...
Using the intriguing stories and words of a Quechua-speaking woman named Luisa Cadena from the Pastaza Province of Ecuador, Janis B. Nuckolls reveals ...
In Ghana, adinkra and kente textiles derive their significance from their association with both Asante and Ghanaian cultural nationalism. Adinkra, made by stenciling patterns with black dye, and kente, a type of strip weaving, each convey, through color, style, and adornment, the bearer's identity, social status, and even emotional state. Yet both textiles have been widely mass-produced outside Ghana, particularly in East Asia, without any compensation to the originators of the designs. In The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here, Boatema Boateng focuses on the appropriation and...
In Ghana, adinkra and kente textiles derive their significance from their association with both Asante and Ghanaian cultural nationalism. Adinkra, mad...
For many communities around the world, the revitalization or at least the preservation of an indigenous language is a pressing concern. Understanding the issue involves far more than compiling simple usage statistics or documenting the grammar of a tongue--it requires examining the social practices and philosophies that affect indigenous language survival. In presenting the case of Kaska, an endangered language in an Athabascan community in the Yukon, Barbra Meek asserts that language revitalization requires more than just linguistic rehabilitation; it demands a social transformation. The...
For many communities around the world, the revitalization or at least the preservation of an indigenous language is a pressing concern. Understanding ...
Patrisia Gonzales addresses "Red Medicine" as a system of healing that includes birthing practices, dreaming, and purification rites to re-establish personal and social equilibrium. The book explores Indigenous medicine across North America, with a special emphasis on how Indigenous knowledge has endured and persisted among peoples with a legacy to Mexico. Gonzales combines her lived experience in Red Medicine as an herbalist and traditional birth attendant with in-depth research into oral traditions, storytelling, and the meanings of symbols to uncover how Indigenous knowledge...
Patrisia Gonzales addresses "Red Medicine" as a system of healing that includes birthing practices, dreaming, and purification rites to re-establis...
In the Dene worldview, relationships form the foundation of a distinct way of knowing. For the Tlicho Dene, indigenous peoples of Canada's Northwest Territories, as stories from the past unfold as experiences in the present, so unfolds a philosophy for the future. Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire vividly shows how through stories and relationships with all beings Tlicho knowledge is produced and rooted in the land.
Tlicho-speaking people are part of the more widespread Athapaskan-speaking community, which spans the western sub-arctic and includes pockets in British Columbia,...
In the Dene worldview, relationships form the foundation of a distinct way of knowing. For the Tlicho Dene, indigenous peoples of Canada's Northwes...
"Eating is not only a political act, it is also a cultural act that reaffirms one's identity and worldview," Enrique Salmon writes in Eating the Landscape. Traversing a range of cultures, including the Tohono O'odham of the Sonoran Desert and the Raramuri of the Sierra Tarahumara, the book is an illuminating journey through the southwest United States and northern Mexico. Salmon weaves his historical and cultural knowledge as a renowned indigenous ethnobotanist with stories American Indian farmers have shared with him to illustrate how traditional indigenous foodways--from the...
"Eating is not only a political act, it is also a cultural act that reaffirms one's identity and worldview," Enrique Salmon writes in Eating th...
