Suchergebnisse

"In Elusive Unity, Armstrong-Fumero examines early twentieth-century peasant politics and twenty-first-century indigenous politics in the rural Oriente region of Yucatan The rural inhabitants of this region have had some of their most important dealings with their nation's government as self-identified "peasants" and "Maya." Using ethnography, oral history, and archival research, Armstrong-Fumero shows how the same body of narrative tropes has defined the local experience of twentieth-century agrarianism and twenty-first-century multiculturalism. Through these recycled narratives, contemporary multicultural politics have also inherited some ambiguities that were built into its agrarian predecessor. Specifically, local experiences of peasant and indigenous politics are shaped by tensions between the vernacular language of identity and the intense factionalism that often defines the social organization of rural communities. This significant contribution will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and political scientists studying Latin America and the Maya"--

ABSTRACT Much recent literature on indigenous identity politics in Latin America has emphasized the emergence of new discourses on ethnic citizenship. However, the ways in which state‐sponsored efforts to validate and revitalize the Yucatec Maya language become relevant to rural Yucatecans reflect far more continuity with older local narratives about the relationship between language use and modernity. Situating contemporary engagements with multicultural language policies within a broader history of locally meaningful language practices complicates the general model of indigenous language communities that has informed many recent studies of Latin American identity politics and reframes scholarly debates that have emphasized contrasts between emergent forms of essentialism or purism and more‐traditional means of identity formation. This, in turn, suggests new routes through which multicultural and multilingual policies can be conceptualized for heterogeneous communities of indigenous language speakers.

"The Transnational Construction of Mayanness explores how people from the US contributed to the construction of the Maya as an area of academic knowledge and affected the lives of the Maya peoples subject to anthropological research from the mid-nineteenth century to the present"--

This volume looks at how different physical environments contribute to the reproduction of cultural forms even in the wake of colonization, migration, and other processes of displacement and change. This raises the question of whether cultural practices are altered by changes in physical environment or if a group's narratives and practices shape their location. Using case studies from North and South America, the contributors reveal a pattern of abandonment and reestablishment of settlements and how collective memory drives people back to culturally meaningful sites. Through the lenses of archaeology and ethnohistory and by examining the politics of cultural continuity, the authors argue that there is a complex relationship between a people's heritage and the landscape that affects the making of "place."