Since the Bolivian revolution in 1952, migrants have come to the city of Cochabamba, seeking opportunity and relief from rural poverty. They have settled in barrios on the city s outskirts only to find that the rights of citizens basic rights of property and security, especially protection from crime are not available to them. In this ethnography, Daniel M. Goldstein considers the significance of and similarities between two kinds of spectacles street festivals and the vigilante lynching of criminals as they are performed in the Cochabamba barrio of Villa Pagador. By examining folkloric...

Since the Bolivian revolution in 1952, migrants have come to the city of Cochabamba, seeking opportunity and relief from rural poverty. They have settled in barrios on the city s outskirts only to find that the rights of citizens basic rights of property and security, especially protection from crime are not available to them. In this ethnography, Daniel M. Goldstein considers the significance of and similarities between two kinds of spectacles street festivals and the vigilante lynching of criminals as they are performed in the Cochabamba barrio of Villa Pagador. By examining folkloric...

Mixing whether referred to as mestizaje, callaloo, hybridity, creolization, or multiculturalism is a foundational cultural trope in Caribbean and Latin American societies. Historically entwined with colonial, anticolonial, and democratic ideologies, ideas about mixing are powerful forces in the ways identities are interpreted and evaluated. As Aisha Khan shows in this ethnography, they reveal the tension that exists between identity as a source of equality and identity as an instrument through which social and cultural hierarchies are reinforced. Focusing on the Indian diaspora in the...

None of the world s lost writings have proven more perplexing than the mysterious script in which the Inka Empire kept its records. Ancient Andean peoples encoded knowledge in knotted cords of cotton or wool called khipus. In The Cord Keepers, the distinguished anthropologist Frank Salomon breaks new ground with a close ethnography of one Andean village where villagers, surprisingly, have conserved a set of these enigmatic cords to the present day. The quipocamayos, as the villagers call them, form a sacred patrimony. Keying his reading to the internal life of the ancient kin...

Mixing--whether referred to as mestizaje, callaloo, hybridity, creolization, or multiculturalism--is a foundational cultural trope in Caribbean and Latin American societies. Historically entwined with colonial, anticolonial, and democratic ideologies, ideas about mixing are powerful forces in the ways identities are interpreted and evaluated. As Aisha Khan shows in this ethnography, they reveal the tension that exists between identity as a source of equality and identity as an instrument through which social and cultural hierarchies are reinforced. Focusing on the Indian diaspora in the...

None of the world s lost writings have proven more perplexing than the mysterious script in which the Inka Empire kept its records. Ancient Andean peoples encoded knowledge in knotted cords of cotton or wool called khipus. In The Cord Keepers, the distinguished anthropologist Frank Salomon breaks new ground with a close ethnography of one Andean village where villagers, surprisingly, have conserved a set of these enigmatic cords to the present day. The quipocamayos, as the villagers call them, form a sacred patrimony. Keying his reading to the internal life of the ancient kin...

In Cartographic Mexico, Raymond B. Craib analyzes the powerful role cartographic routines such as exploration, surveying, and mapmaking played in the creation of the modern Mexican state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such routines were part of a federal obsession--or -state fixation---with determining and -fixing- geographic points, lines, and names in order to facilitate economic development and political administration. As well as analyzing the maps that resulted from such routines, Craib examines in close detail the processes that eventually generated them. Taking...

Trying to understand how civilized people could embrace fascism, Hannah Arendt searched for a precedent in modern Western history. She found it in nineteenth-century colonialism, with its mix of bureaucratic rule, racial superiority, and appeals to rationality. "Modern Inquisitions "takes Arendt s insights into the barbaric underside of Western civilization and moves them back to the sixteenth century and seventeenth, when Spanish colonialism dominated the globe. Irene Silverblatt describes how the modern world developed in tandem with Spanish imperialism and argues that key characteristics...

An ethnographic study of cultural policy in Jamaica as seen from above and below in relation to race, class, and nation.

Trying to understand how "civilized" people could embrace fascism, Hannah Arendt searched for a precedent in modern Western history. She found it in nineteenth-century colonialism, with its mix of bureaucratic rule, racial superiority, and appeals to rationality. "Modern Inquisitions "takes Arendt's insights into the barbaric underside of Western civilization and moves them back to the sixteenth century and seventeenth, when Spanish colonialism dominated the globe. Irene Silverblatt describes how the modern world developed in tandem with Spanish imperialism and argues that key characteristics...