The 1994 Zapatista uprising of Chiapas' Maya peoples against the Mexican government shattered the state myth that indigenous groups have been successfully assimilated into the nation. In this wide-ranging study of identity formation in Chiapas, Aida Hernandez delves into the experience of a Maya group, the Mam, to analyze how Chiapas' indigenous peoples have in fact rejected, accepted, or negotiated the official discourse on "being Mexican" and participating in the construction of a Mexican national identity.

Hernandez traces the complex relations between the Mam and the national...

Anthropologists, historians, and sociologists will find here a striking challenge to accepted explanations of the northward movement of migrants from Mexico into the United States. Alvarez investigates the life histories of pioneer migrants and their offspring, finding a human dimension to migration which centers on the family. Spanish, American, and English exploits paved the way for exchange between Baja and Alta California. Alvarez shows how cultural stability actually increased as migrants settled in new locations, bringing their common values and memories with them.

Nation-building and the construction of citizenship, so often conducted--or coerced--from the center, are all too commonly studied from the center as well. This book moves the view of cultural citizenship to the periphery--specifically to the perspective of hinterland groups in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sarawak, East Malaysia--to show that notions of nationhood and citizenship are not given, but created in dialogue between the state and local communities.
Written by an emergent generation of anthropologists, these essays address the question of how the identities of peoples whose...

Culture and Truth is a call for a new approach to thinking and writing about culture. Exposing the inadequacies of old conceptions of static, monolithic culture, and of detached, "objective" observers, the book argues instead for social science to acknowledge and celebrate diversity, narrative, emotion, and the unavoidability of subjectivity. In this edition, a new introduction gives powerful reasons for protecting diversity within and outside the academy.

A Companion to Latina/o Studies is a collection of 40 original essays written by leading scholars in the field, dedicated to exploring the question of what 'Latino/a' is.

• Brings together in one volume a diverse range of original essays by established and emerging scholars in the field of Latina/o Studies
  
• Offers a timely reference to the issues, topics, and approaches to the study of US Latinos - now the largest minority population in the United States
  
• Explores the depth of creative scholarship in this field, including...

Updated with a fresh introduction and brand new selections, the second edition of The Anthropology of Globalization collects some of the decade's finest work on globalization, focusing on the increasing interconnectedness of people around the world, and the culturally specific ways in which these connections are mediated.

• Provides a rich introduction to the subject
  
• Grounds the study of globalization ethnographically by locating global processes in everyday practice
  
• Addresses the global flow of capital, people, commodities,...

This study, a history of the kind of people who are supposed to have one, challenges the fashionable view that so-called primitives live in a timeless present. The conventional wisdom, that such societies are static, is shown by the author to be an artifact of anthropological method. By piecing together extended oral histories and written history records, the author found that headhunting among the Ilongots of Northern Luzon, Philippines, was not an unchanging ancient custom, but a cultural practice that has shifted dramatically over the course of the past century. Headhunting stopped,...

Burkert, Girard, and Smith hold important and contradictory theories about the nature and origin of ritual sacrifice, and the role violence plays in religion and culture. These papers and conversations derive from a conference that pursued the possibility and utility of a general theory of religion and culture, especially one based on violence. The special value of this volume is the conversations as such-the real record of working scholars engaged with one another's theories, as they make and meet challenges, and move and maneuver. Girard and Burkert present different versions of the same...

A Companion to Latina/o Studies is a collection of 40 original essays written by leading scholars in the field, dedicated to exploring the question of what 'Latino/a' is.

• Brings together in one volume a diverse range of original essays by established and emerging scholars in the field of Latina/o Studies
  
• Offers a timely reference to the issues, topics, and approaches to the study of US Latinos - now the largest minority population in the United States
  
• Explores the depth of creative scholarship in this field, including...

This deeply moving collection of poetry by Renato Rosaldo focuses on the shock of his wife Michelle (Shelly) Rosaldo's sudden death on October 11, 1981. Just the day before, Shelly and her family had arrived in the northern Philippine village of Mungayang, where she and her husband Renato, both accomplished anthropologists, planned to conduct fieldwork. On October 11, Shelly died after losing her footing and falling some sixty feet from a cliff into a swollen river. Renato Rosaldo explored the relationship between bereavement and rage in his canonical essay, "Grief and a Headhunter's Rage,"...