Maya Cultural Activism In Guatemala

Author : Edward F. Fischer,R. McKenna Brown
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2010-06-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780292789234

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Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala by Edward F. Fischer,R. McKenna Brown Pdf

Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala marks a new era in Guatemalan studies by offering an up-to-the-minute look at the pan-Maya movement and the future of the Maya people as they struggle to regain control over their cultural destiny. The successful emergence of what is in some senses a nationalism grounded in ethnicity and language has challenged scholars to reconsider their concepts of nationalism, community, and identity. Editors Edward F. Fischer and R. McKenna Brown have brought together essays by virtually all the leading U.S. experts on contemporary Maya communities and the top Maya scholars working in Guatemala today. Supplementing scholarly analysis of Mayan cultural activism is a position statement originating within the movement and more wide-ranging and personal reflections by anthropologists and linguists who have worked with the Maya over the years. Among the broader issues that come in for examination are the complex relations between U.S. Mayanists and the Mayan cultural movement, efforts to promote literacy in Mayan languages, the significance of woven textiles and native dress, the relations between language and national identity, and the cultural meanings that the present-day Maya have encountered in ancient Mayan texts and hieroglyphic writing.

Author : Kay B. Warren
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2021-02-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780691225302

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Indigenous Movements and Their Critics by Kay B. Warren Pdf

In this first book-length treatment of Maya intellectuals in national and community affairs in Guatemala, Kay Warren presents an ethnographic account of Pan-Maya cultural activism through the voices, writings, and actions of its participants. Challenging the belief that indigenous movements emerge as isolated, politically unified fronts, she shows that Pan-Mayanism reflects diverse local, national, and international influences. She explores the movement's attempts to interweave these varied strands into political programs to promote human and cultural rights for Guatemala's indigenous majority and also examines the movement's many domestic and foreign critics. The book focuses on the years of Guatemala's peace process (1987--1996). After the previous ten years of national war and state repression, the Maya movement reemerged into public view to press for institutional reform in the schools and courts and for the officialization of a "multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual" national culture. In particular, Warren examines a group of well-known Mayanist antiracism activists--among them, Demetrio Cojt!, Mart!n Chacach, Enrique Sam Colop, Victor Montejo, members of Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib', and grassroots intellectuals in the community of San Andr s--to show what is at stake for them personally and how they have worked to promote the revitalization of Maya language and culture. Pan-Mayanism's critics question its tactics, see it as threatening their own achievements, or even as dangerously polarizing national society. This book highlights the crucial role that Mayanist intellectuals have come to play in charting paths to multicultural democracy in Guatemala and in creating a new parallel middle class.

Author : Walter E. Little,Timothy J. Smith
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2009-05-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9780817355364

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Mayas in Postwar Guatemala by Walter E. Little,Timothy J. Smith Pdf

Like the original Harvest of Violence, published in 1988, this volume reveals how the contemporary Mayas contend with crime, political violence, internal community power struggles, and the broader impact of transnational economic and political policies in Guatemala. However, this work, informed by long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Mayan communities and commitment to conducting research in Mayan languages, places current anthropological analyses in relation to Mayan political activism and key Mayan intellectuals’ research and criticism. Illustrating specifically how Mayas in this post-war period conceive of their social and political place in Guatemala, Mayas working in factories, fields, and markets, and participating in local, community-level politics provide critiques of the government, the Maya movement, and the general state of insecurity and social and political violence that they continue to face on a daily basis. Their critical assessments and efforts to improve political, social, and economic conditions illustrate their resiliency and positive, nonviolent solutions to Guatemala’s ongoing problems that deserve serious consideration by Guatemalan and US policy makers, international non-government organizations, peace activists, and even academics studying politics, social agency, and the survival of indigenous people. CONTRIBUTORS Abigail E. Adams / José Oscar Barrera Nuñez / Peter Benson / Barbara Bocek / Jennifer L. Burrell / Robert M. Carmack / Monica DeHart / Edward F. Fischer / Liliana Goldín / Walter E. Little / Judith M. Maxwell / J. Jailey Philpot-Munson / Brenda Rosenbaum / Timothy J. Smith / David Stoll

Author : Betsy Konefal
Publisher : University of New Mexico Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : Guatemala
ISBN : 9780826348654

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For Every Indio who Falls by Betsy Konefal Pdf

By following indigenous organizing experiences at multiple levels--local, regional, national, and international--this book explores how some Mayas became involved in political activism and opposition to a repressive state.

Author : Susan Garzon,R. McKenna Brown,Julia Becker Richards
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2010-07-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780292788992

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The Life of Our Language by Susan Garzon,R. McKenna Brown,Julia Becker Richards Pdf

The native Maya peoples of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize have been remarkably successful in maintaining their cultural identity during centuries of contact with and domination by outside groups. Yet change is occurring in all Mayan communities as contact with Spanish-speaking Ladino society increases. This book explores change and continuity in one of the most vital areas of Mayan culture—language use. The authors look specifically at Kaqchikel, one of the most commonly spoken Mayan languages. Following an examination of language contact situations among indigenous groups in the Americas, the authors proceed to a historical overview of the use of Kaqchikel in the Guatemalan Highlands. They then present case studies of three highland communities in which the balance is shifting between Kaqchikel and Spanish. Wuqu' Ajpub', a native Kaqchikel speaker, gives a personal account of growing up negotiating between the two languages and the different world views they encode. The authors conclude with a look at the Mayan language revitalization movement and offer a scenario in which Kaqchikel and other Mayan languages can continue to thrive.

Author : Edward F. Fischer
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2010-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780292781993

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Cultural Logics and Global Economies by Edward F. Fischer Pdf

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 2002 As ideas, goods, and people move with increasing ease and speed across national boundaries and geographic distances, the economic changes and technological advances that enable this globalization are also paradoxically contributing to the balkanization of states, ethnic groups, and special interest movements. Exploring how this process is playing out in Guatemala, this book presents an innovative synthesis of the local and global factors that have led Guatemala's indigenous Maya peoples to assert and defend their cultural identity and distinctiveness within the dominant Hispanic society. Drawing on recent theories from cognitive studies, interpretive ethnography, and political economy, Edward F. Fischer looks at individual Maya activists and local cultures, as well as changing national and international power relations, to understand how ethnic identities are constructed and expressed in the modern world. At the global level, he shows how structural shifts in international relations have opened new venues of ethnic expression for Guatemala's majority Maya population. At the local level, he examines the processes of identity construction in two Kaqchikel Maya towns, Tecpán and Patzún, and shows how divergent local norms result in different conceptions and expressions of Maya-ness, which nonetheless share certain fundamental similarities with the larger pan-Maya project. Tying these levels of analysis together, Fischer argues that open-ended Maya "cultural logics" condition the ways in which Maya individuals (national leaders and rural masses alike) creatively express their identity in a rapidly changing world.

Author : Brigittine M. French
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
Page : 186 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2010-04-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780816501137

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Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity by Brigittine M. French Pdf

In this valuable book, ethnographer and anthropologist Brigittine French mobilizes new critical-theoretical perspectives in linguistic anthropology, applying them to the politically charged context of contemporary Guatemala. Beginning with an examination of the “nationalist project” that has been ongoing since the end of the colonial period, French interrogates the “Guatemalan/indigenous binary.” In Guatemala, “Ladino” refers to the Spanish-speaking minority of the population, who are of mixed European, usually Spanish, and indigenous ancestry; “Indian” is understood to mean the majority of Guatemala’s population, who speak one of the twenty-one languages in the Maya linguistic groups of the country, although levels of bilingualism are very high among most Maya communities. As French shows, the Guatemalan state has actively promoted a racialized, essentialized notion of “Indians” as an undifferentiated, inherently inferior group that has stood stubbornly in the way of national progress, unity, and development—which are, implicitly, the goals of “true Guatemalans” (that is, Ladinos). French shows, with useful examples, how constructions of language and collective identity are in fact strategies undertaken to serve the goals of institutions (including the government, the military, the educational system, and the church) and social actors (including linguists, scholars, and activists). But by incorporating in-depth fieldwork with groups that speak Kaqchikel and K’iche’ along with analyses of Spanish-language discourses, Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity also shows how some individuals in urban, bilingual Indian communities have disrupted the essentializing projects of multiculturalism. And by focusing on ideologies of language, the author is able to explicitly link linguistic forms and functions with larger issues of consciousness, gender politics, social positions, and the forging of hegemonic power relations.

Author : Joyce N. Bennett
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2022-02-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780817321161

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Good Maya Women by Joyce N. Bennett Pdf

"Analyzes the forced migration of Maya women from the highlands of Guatemala and their turn toward language and indigenous clothing revitalization upon their return home"--

Author : John Mamoru Watanabe,Edward F. Fischer
Publisher : School for Advanced Research Press
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : IND:30000101559890

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Pluralizing Ethnography by John Mamoru Watanabe,Edward F. Fischer Pdf

This volume brings together eight Maya specialists and a prominent anthropological theorist as discussant to assess the contrasting historical circumstances and emerging cultural futures of Maya in Mexico and Guatemala. Rather than presume a romanticized, timeless Maya culture-or the globalized predicaments of transnationalized Maya imaginings-this seminar took its cue from contemporary Maya cultural activists who derive their enduring sense of Mayan-ness from a historical consciousness of five hundred years of cultural resilience. The contributors evaluate the history of Maya peoples and Maya anthropology by examining language, religion, political attitudes and activism, ethnographic traditions, and the relationship between economic change, migration, and cultural identity. In comparing Maya peoples across Mexico and Guatemala, the contributors' emphasis on culture recovers intermediate linkages between the personal and the political, the local and the global. Their work enables a controlled cross-cultural comparison across national boundaries and histories that in turn illuminates the articulation between locally constructed meanings and global transformations.

Author : Phillip Wearne
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 56 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : Ethnology
ISBN : UVA:X006035553

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The Maya of Guatemala by Phillip Wearne Pdf

Author : Pedro Pitarch,Shannon Speed,Xochitl Leyva-Solano
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 390 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2008-12-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822389057

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Human Rights in the Maya Region by Pedro Pitarch,Shannon Speed,Xochitl Leyva-Solano Pdf

In recent years Latin American indigenous groups have regularly deployed the discourse of human rights to legitimate their positions and pursue their goals. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the Maya region of Chiapas and Guatemala, where in the last two decades indigenous social movements have been engaged in ongoing negotiations with the state, and the presence of multinational actors has brought human rights to increased prominence. In this volume, scholars and activists examine the role of human rights in the ways that states relate to their populations, analyze conceptualizations and appropriations of human rights by Mayans in specific localities, and explore the relationship between the individualist and “universal” tenets of Western-derived concepts of human rights and various Mayan cultural understandings and political subjectivities. The collection includes a reflection on the effects of truth-finding and documenting particular human rights abuses, a look at how Catholic social teaching validates the human rights claims advanced by indigenous members of a diocese in Chiapas, and several analyses of the limitations of human rights frameworks. A Mayan intellectual seeks to bring Mayan culture into dialogue with western feminist notions of women’s rights, while another contributor critiques the translation of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights into Tzeltal, an indigenous language in Chiapas. Taken together, the essays reveal a broad array of rights-related practices and interpretations among the Mayan population, demonstrating that global-local-state interactions are complex and diverse even within a geographically limited area. So too are the goals of indigenous groups, which vary from social reconstruction and healing following years of violence to the creation of an indigenous autonomy that challenges the tenets of neoliberalism. Contributors: Robert M. Carmack, Stener Ekern, Christine Kovic, Xochitl Leyva Solano, Julián López García, Irma Otzoy, Pedro Pitarch, Álvaro Reyes, Victoria Sanford, Rachel Sieder, Shannon Speed, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, David Stoll, Richard Ashby Wilson

Author : Diane M. Nelson
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 450 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 1999-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520212855

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A Finger in the Wound by Diane M. Nelson Pdf

"Nelson brings the insights of postmodern theory to a highly charged situation and offers compelling interpretations of the state's intense ambivalence toward Mayan culture and Mayans. The writing is lively and accessible, the issues current, and the theoretical contributions very important in this study of the heterogeneity and flux of urban national culture."—Kay B. Warren, author of Indigenous Movements and Their Critics

Author : Patricia A. McAnany
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2016-09-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781442241282

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Maya Cultural Heritage by Patricia A. McAnany Pdf

Situated at the intersection of cultural heritage and local community, this book enlarges our understanding of the Indigenous peoples of southern México and northern Central America who became detached from “the ancient Maya” through colonialism, government actions, and early twentieth-century anthropological and archaeological research. Through grass-roots heritage programs, local communities are reconnecting with a much valorized but distant past. Maya Cultural Heritage explores how community programs conceived and implemented in a collaborative style are changing the relationship among, archaeological practice, the objects of archaeological study, and contemporary ethnolinguistic Mayan communities. Rather than simply describing Maya sites, McAnany concentrates on the dialogue nurtured by these participatory heritage programs, the new “heritage-scapes” they foster, and how the diverse Maya communities of today relate to those of the past.

Author : Richard Wilson
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 396 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1999-09-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0806131950

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Maya Resurgence in Guatemala by Richard Wilson Pdf

Across Guatemala, Mayan peoples are struggling to recover from decades of cataclysmic upheaval--religious conversions, civil war, displacement, military repression. Richard Wilson carried out long-term research with Q’eqchi’-speaking Mayas in the province of Alta Verapaz to ascertain how these events affected social organization and identity. He finds that their rituals of fertility and healing--abandoned in the 1970s during Catholic and Protestant evangelizations--have been reinvented by an ethnic revivalist movement led by Catholic lay activists, who seek to renovate the earth cult in order to create a new pan-Q’eqchi’ ethnic identity.

Author : Jean Molesky-Poz
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2009-06-23
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780292778627

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Contemporary Maya Spirituality by Jean Molesky-Poz Pdf

An authoritative study of the indigenous religion still practiced in Guatemala based on extensive original research and participant observation. Jean Molesky-Poz draws on in-depth dialogues with Maya Ajq’ijab’ (keepers of the ritual calendar), her own participant observation, and inter-disciplinary resources to offer a comprehensive, innovative, and well-grounded understanding of contemporary Maya spirituality and its theological underpinnings. She reveals significant continuities between contemporary and ancient Maya worldviews and spiritual practices. Molesky-Poz opens with a discussion of how the public emergence of Maya spirituality is situated within the religious political history of the Guatemalan highlands, particularly the pan-Maya movement. She investigates Maya cosmovision and its foundational principles, as expressed by Ajq’ijab’. At the heart of this work, Ajq’ijab’ interpret their obligation, lives, and spiritual work. Molesky-Poz then explores aspects of Maya spirituality, including sacred geography, sacred time, and ritual practice. She confirms contemporary Maya spirituality as a faith tradition with elaborate historical roots that has significance for individual, collective, and historical lives, reaffirming its own public space and legal right to be practiced.