The Grimace of Macho Ratón

The Grimace of Macho Ratón
Author: Les W. Field
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN:

An ethnographic account of indigenous artisans in Nicaragua and the complex ways they have understood and constructed their own identity from the period of the Sandanistas to the present.

Myths of Modernity

Myths of Modernity
Author: Elizabeth Dore
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2006-01-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 082238762X

In Myths of Modernity, Elizabeth Dore rethinks Nicaragua’s transition to capitalism. Arguing against the idea that the country’s capitalist transformation was ushered in by the coffee boom that extended from 1870 to 1930, she maintains that coffee growing gave rise to systems of landowning and labor exploitation that impeded rather than promoted capitalist development. Dore places gender at the forefront of her analysis, which demonstrates that patriarchy was the organizing principle of the coffee economy’s debt-peonage system until the 1950s. She examines the gendered dynamics of daily life in Diriomo, a township in Nicaragua’s Granada region, tracing the history of the town’s Indian community from its inception in the colonial era to its demise in the early twentieth century. Dore seamlessly combines archival research, oral history, and an innovative theoretical approach that unites political economy with social history. She recovers the bygone voices of peons, planters, and local officials within documents such as labor contracts, court records, and official correspondence. She juxtaposes these historical perspectives with those of contemporary peasants, landowners, activists, and politicians who share memories passed down to the present. The reconceptualization of the coffee economy that Dore elaborates has far-reaching implications. The Sandinistas mistakenly believed, she contends, that Nicaraguan capitalism was mature and ripe for socialist revolution, and after their victory in 1979 that belief led them to alienate many peasants by ignoring their demands for land. Thus, the Sandinistas’ myths of modernity contributed to their downfall.

Measuring Identity

Measuring Identity
Author: Rawi Abdelal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2009-04-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0521518180

Abdelal, Herrera, Johnston, and McDermott have brought together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider the conceptual and methodological challenges associated with treating identity as a variable, offer a synthetic theoretical framework, and demonstrate the possibilities offered by various methods of measurement.

Intimate Migrations

Intimate Migrations
Author: Deborah A. Boehm
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2013-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 147988555X

In her research with transnational Mexicans, Deborah A. Boehm has often asked individuals: if there were no barriers to your movement between Mexico and the United States, where would you choose to live? Almost always, they desire the freedom to "come and go." Yet the barriers preventing such movement are many. Because of rigid U.S. immigration policies, Mexican immigrants often find themselves living long distances from family members and unable to easily cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Transnational Mexicans experience what Boehm calls "intimate migrations," flows that both shape and are structured by gendered and familial actions and interactions, but are always defined by the presence of the U.S. state. By showing how intimate relations direct migration, and by looking at kin and gender relationships through the lens of "illegality," Boehm sheds new light on the study of gender and kinship, as well as understandings of the state and transnational migration.

Border Crossings

Border Crossings
Author: Kathleen Sue Fine-Dare
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2009-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0803222742

For anthropologists and social scientists working in North and South America, the past few decades have brought considerable change as issues such as repatriation, cultural jurisdiction, and revitalization movements have swept across the hemisphere. Today scholars are rethinking both how and why they study culture as they gain a new appreciation for the impact they have on the people they study. Key to this reassessment of the social sciences is a rethinking of the concept of borders: not only between cultures and nations but between disciplines such as archaeology and cultural anthropology, between past and present, and between anthropologists and indigenous peoples. "Border Crossings" is a collection of fourteen essays about the evolving focus and perspective of anthropologists and the anthropology of North and South America over the past two decades. For a growing number of researchers, the realities of working in the Americas have changed the distinctions between being a "Latin," "North," or "Native" Americanist as these researchers turn their interests and expertise simultaneously homeward and out across the globe.

A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians

A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians
Author: Thomas Biolsi
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1405156120

This Companion is comprised of 27 original contributions by leading scholars in the field and summarizes the state of anthropological knowledge of Indian peoples, as well as the history that got us to this point. Surveys the full range of American Indian anthropology: from ecological and political-economic questions to topics concerning religion, language, and expressive culture Each chapter provides definitive coverage of its topic, as well as situating ethnographic and ethnohistorical data into larger frameworks Explores anthropology’s contribution to knowledge, its historic and ongoing complicities with colonialism, and its political and ethical obligations toward the people 'studied'

Crafting Gender

Crafting Gender
Author: Eli Bartra
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2003-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780822331704

DIVAnalyzes Latin American and Caribbean folk art from a feminist perspective, considering the issue of gender in the production and circulation of popular art produced by women./div

Challenging the Dichotomy

Challenging the Dichotomy
Author: Les Field
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-12-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816534659

Challenging the Dichotomy explores how dichotomies regarding heritage dominate the discourse of ethics, practices, and institutions. Examining issues of cultural heritage law, policy, and implementation, editors Les Field, Cristóbal Gnecco, and Joe Watkins guide the focus to important discussions of the binary oppositions of the licit and the illicit, the scientific and the unscientific, incorporating case studies that challenge those apparent contradictions. Utilizing both ethnographic and archaeological examples, contributors ask big questions vital to anyone working in cultural heritage. What are the issues surrounding private versus museum collections? What is considered looting? Is archaeology still a form of colonialization? The contributors discuss this vis-à-vis a global variety of contexts and cultures from the United States, South Africa, Argentina, New Zealand, Honduras, Colombia, Palestine, Greece, Canada, and from the Nasa, Choctaw, and Maori nations. Challenging the Dichotomy underscores how dichotomies—such as licit/illicit, state/nonstate, public/private, scientific/nonscientific—have been constructed and how they are now being challenged by multiple forces. Throughout the eleven chapters, contributors provide examples of hegemonic relationships of power between nations and institutions. Scholars also reflect on exchanges between Western and non-Western epistemologies and ontologies. The book’s contributions are significant, timely, and inclusive. Challenging the Dichotomy examines the scale and scope of “illicit” forms of excavation, as well as the demands from minority and indigenous subaltern peoples to decolonize anthropological and archaeological research.

Economies and the Transformation of Landscape

Economies and the Transformation of Landscape
Author: Lisa Cliggett
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780759111172

Economies and the Transformation of Landscape explores both the general and specific ways in which local economic ventures around the world, such as mining, ranching, and farming, affect the environment.

Theatres of Rebellion in Nicaragua

Theatres of Rebellion in Nicaragua
Author: Alberto Guevara
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2022-03-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1527578801

This book examines the critical connection between revolts and revolutions to larger notions of social and cultural performances in Nicaraguan social, cultural and political life. To understand social relations in Nicaragua today, it is crucial to look at those highly theatricalized and rhetorical performances of power and resistance that have spanned specific national spaces for centuries. The book looks, therefore, at the history of Nicaragua from the colonial period to the Sandinista Revolution to frame contingent and temporal social and cultural processes that have become heightened and revealing of the social relations in revolution. The contemporary staging of the ancient El Gueguense play, for instance, illustrates a social space that reveals contemporary issues of oppression and power. Tapping into the spirit of self-consciousness, reflexivity, and narrational disruptions, the book uses the conventions of theatre such as audience and actor relations to make available to readers the theatrical intimacy of interlocutors and researcher.