IMS Studies on Culture and Society Series
The following publications are in print and distributed through the University Press of Colorado
Volume 9
Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds: Religion and Modernity in a Transnational K'iche' Community
By C. James MacKenzie
Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds examines tension and conflict over ethnic and religious identity in the K’iche’ Maya community of San Andrés Xecul in the Guatemalan Highlands and considers how religious and ethnic attachments are sustained and transformed through the transnational experiences of locals who have migrated to the United States. Author C. James MacKenzie explores the relationship among four coexisting religious communities within Highland Maya villages in contemporary Guatemala—costumbre, traditionalist religion with a shamanic substrate; “Enthusiastic Christianity,” versions of Charismaticism and Pentecostalism; an “inculturated” and Mayanized version of Catholicism; and a purified and antisyncretic Maya Spirituality—with attention to the modern and nonmodern worldviews that sustain them. He introduces a sophisticated set of theories to interpret both traditional religion and its relationship to other contemporary religious options, analyzing the relation among these various worldviews in terms of the indigenization of modernity and the various ways modernity can be apprehended as an intellectual project or an embodied experience. Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds investigates the way an increasingly plural religious landscape intersects with ethnic and other identities. It will be of interest to Mesoamerican and Mayan ethnographers, as well as students and scholars of cultural anthropology, indigenous cultures, globalization, and religion.
Hardcover ISBN: 9781607323938. $110.00. Paperback ISBN: 9781607325567. $34.95.
Ebook ISBN: 9781607323945. $27.95. Please order
this book directly through the University Press of Colorado.
Volume 8
Beware the Great Horned Serpent! : Chiapas
under the Threat of Napoleon
By Robert M. Laughlin
"Dr. Robert M. Laughlin, one of the world's greatest students
of native language and culture, has produced a "historical anthropology"
that is both captivating and illuminating. Like a mystery novel, the reader
is led from the accidental discovery of a Tzotzil-Maya nineteenth-century text,
found in the very building where Laughlin works (the Smithsonian Institution),
through the bizarre and dramatic history of events surrounding the 1812 Cortes
in Spain and an obscure proclamation sent to the officials of the American colonies.
Through Laughlin's detailed accounts of these historical events that took place
in Spain, New Spain, Peru, Guatemala, and Chiapa, the reader learns the meaning
of the proclamation for the Creoles and Indians to whom it was addressed. In
the best tradition of the "microhistorian," the proclamation and its
Tzotzil text are historically and culturally contextualized rather than explained.
As Laughlin himself states in his introduction: "The pages that follow
present a theater of the absurd, a fabulous history with myriads of details
as if set in the Milky Way. The reader will not be comforted with an historical
'argument.'" The prose is wonderful, the characters alive, and the plot
intriguing. And along the way, the reader is treated to an inside perspective
on the vicissitudes and small triumphs of colonial Indians in one small corner
of the Mesoamerican world." - Robert M. Carmack, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University at Albany.
ISBN 0-942041-19-4. $31.95. Please order
this book directly through the University of Colorado.
Volume 7
Identities on the Move: Transnational Processes
in North America and the Caribbean Basin
Edited by Liliana R. Goldin
This valuable collection assembles essays by leading experts in transnationalism, highlighting emerging trends in this newly developed field. The contributions focus on the construction of transnational identities and how these identities form and change in the context of processes of migration and displacement. The book addresses the ways in which nations and states frame identity formation through labels, politics of exception, and racialization through an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological perspective, which permits the student of transnational processes to access diverse constructs through multiple angles. The volume includes concrete ethnographic examples of identities in the making, documentation of the effects of exile and displacement, reflexive accounts by writers who have direct experience with transnationalism, and incisive theoretical arguments that highlight the ways in which race, citizenship, nation-states, and neo-colonialism create images and actions of individuals and communities. The examples include discussions about Latinos in the United States, individuals and communities along the borders, indigenous peoples in migration, and identity construction in international workplaces.
Contributors include: Edna Acosta-Belén, Allan F. Burns, Jorge Durand,
Duncan Earle, Juan Flores, Liliana R. Goldin, Michael Kearney, Douglas S. Massey,
Victor D. Montejo, Suzanne Oboler, Carlos E. Santiago, Azara L. Santiago-Rivera,
Nina Glick Schiller, and Ilan Stavas.
ISBN: 0-942041-18-6. $26.95. Please order
this book directly through the University Press of Colorado.
Volume 6
Economies and Politics in the Aztec Realm
Edited by Mary G. Hodge and Michael E. Smith
"The Seventeen papers in this collection deal with various
aspects of the relationship between economics and the political units which
constituted the Aztec state and its main competitor the Tarascan empire...Until
recently Aztec studies were dominated by two rather narrow foci...a preoccupation
with the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan coupled with neglect of other cities
and the rural countryside, and an over-emphasis on the best-known Native and
Spanish chronicles which ignored the vast corpus of lesser known but equally
important documentary sources...Fortunately a few archaeologists and ethnohistorians,
including the contributors to this volume, insisted on expanding the geographical
and conceptual parameters of Aztec studies., They also began to employ recent
innovative approaches in archaeology, locational geography, economics, political
theory, and history in their quest to understand what really happened in central
Mexico during the Postclassic period. The result has been some very exciting
new perspectives on this fascinating topic." -Richard A. Diehl; Professor of Anthropology; University of Alabama.
ISBN: 0-942041-15-1. $32.95. Please order
this book directly through the University Press of Colorado.
Volume 5
With Our Heads Bowed: The Dynamics of Gender
in a Maya Community
By Brenda Rosenbaum
"Brenda Rosenbaum has succeeded in capturing the daily routines
of San Juan Chamula men and women in such a way as to reveal the gender subordination
implicit in the fabric of this society. Since few of the monographs on this
much studied area have addressed the issue of gender relations, this volume
is a welcome and valuable addition to the field. Few ethnographers have explored
the ambiguous link between ideology and social role performance in as great
a depth as Brenda Rosenbaum. With her long commitment to fieldwork in San Juan
Chamula she is able to demonstrate how women have been able to overreach a constraining
model of behavior defined by men." - June Nash; Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; City University of New
York.
ISBN: 0-942041-14-3. $19.95. Please order
this book directly through the University Press of Colorado.
Volume 4
Casi Nada: A Study of Agrarian Reform in the
Homeland of Cardenismo
By John Gledhill
"Casi Nada is the result of many months that the author shared
the lives of the ejidatarios of Guaracha, Michoacan and of his patient reconstruction
of the collective memory concerning a half centry of violence and hope. Without
a doubt, it will become obligatory reading for those interested in the themes
of agrarian reform, peasant reproduction and political control at the local
level. The book will also serve to remind us that, if it is true that Mexican
peasants never have supported populist inefficiencies, neither will they become
enthusiastic supporters of a neoliberal agenda which condemns them to disappear."
- Guillermo de la Peña; Director, CIESAS-Occidente; Guadalajara, Mexico.
ISBN: 0-942641-13-5. $32.95. Please order
this book directly through the University Press of Colorado.
Volume 3
Ethnographic Encounters in Southern Mesoamerica: Essays in Honor of Evon Zartman Vogt, Jr.
Edited by Victoria R. Bricker and Gary H. Gossen
This volume celebrates the long and productive career of Evon Z. Vogt, through whom the Chiapas highlands of southern Mexico have become a landmark reference point in the world ethnographic record. Comparable in significant ways to Franz Boas and his Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Evon Z. Vogt and his Harvard Chiapas Project students and collaborators have, over thirty years, produced and published an ethnographic and linguistic corpus that has made the Tzotzil-speaking area of Chiapas on of the most thoroughly and professionally documented regions of the Americas.
ISBN: 0-942041-12-7. $18.00. Please order
this book directly through the University Press of Colorado.
Volume 2
The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico
Edited by J. Jorge Klor de Alva, H. B. Nicholson, and Eloise Quiñones Keber
1990 marked the 400th anniversary of the death of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, the famous Franciscan missionary whose pioneering ethnographies of the Aztecs and their Nahuatl-speaking neighbors have earned him the title of "father of modern anthropology". Thus it is fitting that the Institute for Mesoamerican Studies publish this landmark collection of studies by well-known scholars on the work of Sahagún and his native collaborators. The articles span from a review of Sahaguntine studies and the role played by Sahagún and his ethnographic project in the history of anthropology, to a series of novel inquiries into his encyclopedia of Aztec (Nahua) culture and its significance for art history and linguistics.
ISBN: 0-942041-11-9. $18.00. Please order
this book directly through the University Press of Colorado.
Volume 1
Symbol and Meaning Behind the Closed Community: Essays in Mesoamerican
Ideas
Edited by Gary H. Gossen
This innovative volume seeks to identify patterns in Mesoamerican
symbolic representation that have persistence and coherence across the boundaries
of time, space, culture, and language. The collection also includes consideration
of recent and powerful arrivals on the Mesoamerican stage, notably, European
political, economic, and religious systems.
ISBN: 0-942041-10-0. $19.95. Please order
this book directly through the University Press of Colorado
