The Two Milpas of Chan Kom

The Two Milpas of Chan Kom

Author: Alicia Re Cruz

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780791428290

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An ethnographic account of Chan Kom, a contemporary Maya community in Yucatan, Mexico that focuses on the social schism within the community resulting from an accelerated process of migration to Cancun, a major tourist center.


Monumental Ambivalence

Monumental Ambivalence

Author: Lisa C. Breglia

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2009-12-03

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0292783280

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From ancient Maya cities in Mexico and Central America to the Taj Mahal in India, cultural heritage sites around the world are being drawn into the wave of privatization that has already swept through such economic sectors as telecommunications, transportation, and utilities. As nation-states decide they can no longer afford to maintain cultural properties—or find it economically advantageous not to do so in the globalizing economy—private actors are stepping in to excavate, conserve, interpret, and represent archaeological and historical sites. But what are the ramifications when a multinational corporation, or even an indigenous village, owns a piece of national patrimony which holds cultural and perhaps sacred meaning for all the country's people, as well as for visitors from the rest of the world? In this ambitious book, Lisa Breglia investigates "heritage" as an arena in which a variety of private and public actors compete for the right to benefit, economically and otherwise, from controlling cultural patrimony. She presents ethnographic case studies of two archaeological sites in the Yucatán Peninsula—Chichén Itzá and Chunchucmil and their surrounding modern communities—to demonstrate how indigenous landholders, foreign archaeologists, and the Mexican state use heritage properties to position themselves as legitimate "heirs" and beneficiaries of Mexican national patrimony. Breglia's research masterfully describes the "monumental ambivalence" that results when local residents, excavation laborers, site managers, and state agencies all enact their claims to cultural patrimony. Her findings make it clear that informal and partial privatizations—which go on quietly and continually—are as real a threat to a nation's heritage as the prospect of fast-food restaurants and shopping centers in the ruins of a sacred site.


Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, Volume 6

Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, Volume 6

Author: Barbara W. Edmonson

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-06-28

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 029279178X

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In 1981, UT Press began to issue supplemental volumes to the classic sixteen-volume work, Handbook of Middle American Indians. These supplements are intended to update scholarship in various areas and to cover topics of current interest. Supplements devoted to Archaeology, Linguistics, Literatures, Ethnohistory, and Epigraphy have appeared to date. In this Ethnology supplement, anthropologists who have carried out long-term fieldwork among indigenous people review the ethnographic literature in the various regions of Middle America and discuss the theoretical and methodological orientations that have framed the work of areal scholars over the last several decades. They examine how research agendas have developed in relationship to broader interests in the field and the ways in which the anthropology of the region has responded to the sociopolitical and economic policies of Mexico and Guatemala. Most importantly, they focus on the changing conditions of life of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. This volume thus offers a comprehensive picture of both the indigenous populations and developments in the anthropology of the region over the last thirty years.


Tourism and Agriculture

Tourism and Agriculture

Author: Rebecca Maria Torres

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2011-03-07

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1136849238

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Shifting global consumption patterns, tastes and attitudes towards food, leisure, travel and place have opened new opportunities for rural producers in the form of agritourism, ecotourism, wine, food and rural tourism and specialized niche market agricultural production for tourism. Agriculture is one of the oldest and most basic parts of the global economy, while tourism is one of the newest and most rapidly spreading. In the face of current problems of climate change, rising food prices, poverty and a global financial crisis, linkages between agriculture and tourism may provide the basis for new solutions in many countries. A number of challenges, nevertheless, confront the realization of synergies between tourism and agriculture. Tourism and Agriculture examines regional specific cases at the interface between tourism and agriculture, looking at the impacts of rural restructuring, and new geographies of consumption and production. To meet the need for a more comprehensive appreciation of the relationships and interactions between the tourism and agricultural economic sectors, this book consider the factors that influence the nature of these relationships; and explore avenues for facilitating synergistic relationships between tourism and agriculture. These relationships are examined in thirteen chapters through case studies from eastern and western Europe, Japan and the United States and from the developing countries of the Pacific, the Caribbean and Ghana and Mexico. Themes of diversification, economic development, and emerging new forms of production and consumption, are integrated throughout the entire book. This essential volume, built on original research, generates new insights into the relationships between tourism and agriculture and future economic rural development. Edited by leading researchers and academics in the field, this book will be of value to students, researchers and academics interested in tourism, agriculture and rural development.


Everyday Life Matters

Everyday Life Matters

Author: Cynthia Robin

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2013-10-29

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0813048567

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While the study of ancient civilizations has often focused on holy temples and royal tombs, a substantial part of the archaeological record remains hidden in the understudied day-to-day lives of artisans, farmers, hunters, and other ordinary people of the ancient world. The various chores of a person's daily life can be quite extraordinary and, even though they may seem trivial, such activities can have a powerful effect on society as a whole. Everyday Life Matters develops general methods and theories for studying everyday life applicable in archaeology, anthropology, and a wide range of disciplines. In this groundbreaking work, Cynthia Robin examines the 2,000-year history (800 B.C.-A.D. 1200) of the ancient farming community of Chan in Belize, explaining why the average person should matter to archaeologists studying larger societal patterns. Robin argues that the impact of what is commonly perceived as habitual or quotidian can be substantial, and a study of a polity without regard to the citizenry is woefully incomplete. She also develops general methods and theories for studying everyday life applicable across a wide range of disciplines. Refocusing attention from the Maya elite and offering critical analysis of daily life interwoven with larger anthropological theories, Robin engages us to consider the larger implications of the seemingly mundane and to rethink the constitution of human societies, everyday life, and ordinary people.


Sugarcane and Rum

Sugarcane and Rum

Author: John Robert Gust

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2020-04-21

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0816541442

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While the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico may conjure up images of vacation getaways and cocktails by the sea, these easy stereotypes hide a story filled with sweat and toil. The story of sugarcane and rum production in the Caribbean has been told many times. But few know the bittersweet story of sugar and rum in the jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula during the nineteenth century. This is much more than a history of coveted commodities. The unique story that unfolds in John R. Gust and Jennifer P. Mathews’s new history Sugarcane and Rum is told through the lens of Maya laborers who worked under brutal conditions on small haciendas to harvest sugarcane and produce rum. Gust and Mathews weave together ethnographic interviews and historical archives with archaeological evidence to bring the daily lives of Maya workers into focus. They lived in a cycle of debt, forced to buy all of their supplies from the company store and take loans from the hacienda owners. And yet they had a certain autonomy because the owners were so dependent on their labor at harvest time. We also see how the rise of cantinas and distilled alcohol in the nineteenth century affected traditional Maya culture and that the economies of Cancún and the Mérida area are predicated on the rum-influenced local social systems of the past. Sugarcane and Rum brings this bittersweet story to the present and explains how rum continues to impact the Yucatán and the people who have lived there for millennia.


Yucatan in an Era of Globalization

Yucatan in an Era of Globalization

Author: Eric N. Baklanoff

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2008-03-18

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 081735476X

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This work describes the profound changes to Yucatán’s society and economy following the 1982 debt crisis that prostrated Mexico’s economy. The editors have assembled contributions from seasoned “Yucatecologists”—historians, geographers, cultural students, and an economist—to chart the accelerated change in Yucatán from a monocrop economy to a full beneficiary and victim of rampant globalization.


Encyclopedia of Community

Encyclopedia of Community

Author: DAVID LEVINSON

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2003-06-30

Total Pages: 2045

ISBN-13: 0761925988

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The Encyclopedia of Community is a major four volume reference work that seeks to define one of the most widely researched topics in the behavioural and social sciences. Community itself is a concept, an experience, and a central part of being human. This pioneering major reference work seeks to provide the necessary definitions of community far beyond the traditional views.


Culture, Environment and Health in the Yucatan Peninsula

Culture, Environment and Health in the Yucatan Peninsula

Author: Hugo Azcorra

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-12-11

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 3030270017

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This book adopts a human ecology approach to present an overview of the biological responses to social, political, economic, cultural and environmental changes that affected human populations in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, since the Classic Maya Period. Human bodies express social relations, and we can read these relations by analyzing biological tissues or systems, and by measuring certain phenotypical traits at the population level. Departing from this theoretical premise, the contributors to this volume analyze the interactions between ecosystems, sociocultural systems and human biology in a specific geographic region to show how changes in sociocultural and natural environment affect the health of a population over time. This edited volume brings together contributions from a range of different scientific disciplines – such as biological anthropology, bioarchaeology, human biology, nutrition, epidemiology, ecotoxicology, political economy, sociology and ecology – that analyze the interactions between culture, environment and health in different domains of human life, such as: The political ecology of food, nutrition and health Impacts of social and economic changes in children’s diet and women’s fertility Biological consequences of social vulnerability in urban areas Impacts of toxic contamination of natural resources on human health Ecological and sociocultural determinants of infectious diseases Culture, Environment and Health in the Yucatan Peninsula – A Human Ecology Perspective will be of interest to researchers from the social, health and life sciences dedicated to the study of the interactions between natural environments, human biology, health and social issues, especially in fields such as biological and sociocultural anthropology, health promotion and environmental health. It will also be a useful tool to health professionals and public agents responsible for designing and applying public health policies in contexts of social vulnerability.


Detours

Detours

Author: M. Bianet Castellanos

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0816539987

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Touring. Seeing. Knowing. Travel often evokes strong reactions and engagements. But what of the ethics and politics of this experience? Through critical, personal reflections, the essays in Detours grapple with the legacies of cultural imperialism that shape travel, research, and writing. Influenced by the works of anthropologists Ruth Behar and Renato Rosaldo, the scholars and journalists in this volume consider how first encounters—those initial, awkward attempts to learn about a culture and a people—evolved into enduring and critical engagements. Contemplating the ethics and racial politics of traveling and doing research abroad, they call attention to the power and privilege that permit researchers to enter people’s lives, ask intimate questions, and publish those disclosures. Focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean, they ask, Why this place? What keeps us coming back? And what role do we play in producing narratives of inequality, uneven development, and global spectacle? The book examines the “politics of return”—the experiences made possible by revisiting a field site over extended periods of time—of scholars and journalists who have spent decades working in and writing about Latin America and the Caribbean. Contributors aren’t telling a story of enlightenment and goodwill; they focus instead on the slippages and conundrums that marked them and raised questions of their own intentions and intellectual commitments. Speaking from the intersection of race, class, and gender, the contributors explore the hubris and nostalgia that motivate returning again and again to a particular place. Through personal stories, they examine their changing ideas of Latin America and the Caribbean and how those places have shaped the people they’ve become, as writers, as teachers, and as activists.