The Maya Of Guatemala
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Author | : Ronald Wright |
Publisher | : Grove Press |
Total Pages | : 468 |
Release | : 2000 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 9780802137289 |
The Maya created one of the world's most brilliant civilizations, famous for its art, astronomy, and deep fascination with the mystery of time. Despite collapse in the ninth century, Spanish invasion in the sixteenth, and civil war in the twentieth, eight million people in Guatemala, Belize, and southern Mexico speak Mayan languages and maintain their resilient culture to this day. Traveling through Central America's jungles and mountains, Ronald Wright explores the ancient roots of the Maya, their recent troubles, and prospects for survival. Embracing history, anthropology, politics, and literature, Time Among the Maya is a riveting journey through past magnificence and the study of an enduring civilization with much to teach the present. "Wright's unpretentious narrative blends anthropology, archaeology, history, and politics with his own entertaining excursions and encounters." -- The New Yorker; "Time Among the Maya shows Wright to be far more than a mere storyteller or descriptive writer. He is an historical philosopher with a profound understanding of other cultures." -- Jan Morris, The Independent (London).
Author | : Edward F Fischer |
Publisher | : Routledge |
Total Pages | : 198 |
Release | : 2018-04-27 |
Genre | : Political Science |
ISBN | : 0429976550 |
This book discusses the indigenous people of Tecpan Guatemala, a predominantly Kaqchikel Maya town in the Guatemalan highlands. It seeks to build on the traditional strengths of ethnography while rejecting overly romantic and isolationist tendencies in the genre.
Author | : Brent E. Metz |
Publisher | : UNM Press |
Total Pages | : 356 |
Release | : 2006-05-01 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 082633881X |
Scholars and Guatemalans have characterized eastern Guatemala as "Ladino" or non-Indian. The Ch'orti' do not exhibit the obvious indigenous markers found among the Mayas of western Guatemala, Chiapas, and the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Few still speak Ch'orti', most no longer wear distinctive dress, and most community organizations have long been abandoned. During the colonial period, the Ch'orti' region was adjacent to relatively vibrant economic regions of Central America that included major trade routes, mines, and dye plantations. In the twentieth century Ch'orti's directly experienced U.S.-backed dictatorships, a 36-year civil war from start to finish, and Christian evangelization campaigns, all while their population has increased exponentially. These have had tremendous impacts on Ch'orti' identities and cultures. From 1991 to 1993, Brent Metz lived in three Ch'orti' Maya-speaking communities, learning the language, conducting household surveys, and interviewing informants. He found Ch'orti's to be ashamed of their indigeneity, and he was fortunate to be present and involved when many Ch'orti's joined the Maya Movement. He has continued to expand his ethnographic research of the Ch'orti' annually ever since and has witnessed how Ch'orti's are reformulating their history and identity.
Author | : Phillip Wearne |
Publisher | : Minority Rights Group |
Total Pages | : 52 |
Release | : 1994-09-01 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 1897693559 |
MAYA: A PEOPLE IN RESISTANCE ‘As I go around the world, people seem surprised that we indigenous people of Central America still exist’, noted the Maya Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchú in 1992. More than 500 years after the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, the Maya, descendants of one of the greatest pre-Columbian civilizations, not only exist but are thriving. The survival of 21 different Maya speaking peoples in Guatemala is a living testimony to their powers of resistance. In recent years, the brutal conquest of their cities and mountain lands by Spanish conquistadores in the early sixteenth century, has been replayed in all its horrors. In the 1980s alone, the Guatemalan army is conservatively estimated to have murdered 20,000 Maya. Whole villages were wiped out, as at least 120,000 fled into Mexico and 500,000 became internal refugees. The MAYA OF GUATEMALA studies the Maya world in depth: the history, culture, beliefs and responses to the nonindigenous world. The author, Phillip Wearne, a journalist with long experience in Central America, looks at the Maya cultural resurgence of recent years – the product of both fearsome oppression and international geo-political changes of the 1980s. This is a story of indomitable will, a plea for solidarity and international support for a people who want to reclaim their identity as one of the ‘first peoples’ of the world. It is also a story of resistance and resurgence on behalf of the Maya who in the words of one internal refugee ‘want to come out of the mud, the cold, the shadows and into the sunshine’. Please note that the terminology in the fields of minority rights and indigenous peoples’ rights has changed over time. MRG strives to reflect these changes as well as respect the right to self-identification on the part of minorities and indigenous peoples. At the same time, after over 50 years’ work, we know that our archive is of considerable interest to activists and researchers. Therefore, we make available as much of our back catalogue as possible, while being aware that the language used may not reflect current thinking on these issues.
Author | : Brigittine M. French |
Publisher | : University of Arizona Press |
Total Pages | : 186 |
Release | : 2010-04-15 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 0816527679 |
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 Ònationalist projectÓ that has been ongoing since the end of the colonial period, French interrogates the ÒGuatemalan/indigenous binary.Ó In Guatemala, ÒLadinoÓ refers to the Spanish-speaking minority of the population, who are of mixed European, usually Spanish, and indigenous ancestry; ÒIndianÓ is understood to mean the majority of GuatemalaÕs 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 ÒIndiansÓ as an undifferentiated, inherently inferior group that has stood stubbornly in the way of national progress, unity, and developmentÑwhich are, implicitly, the goals of Òtrue GuatemalansÓ (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 KÕicheÕ 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 | : John Palmer Hawkins |
Publisher | : University of Oklahoma Press |
Total Pages | : 292 |
Release | : 2007 |
Genre | : Medical |
ISBN | : 9780806138596 |
This book examines medical systems and institutions in three K'iche' Maya communities to reveal the conflicts between indigenous medical care and the Guatemalan biomedical system. It shows the necessity of cultural understanding if poor people are to have access to medicine that combines the best of both local tradition and international biomedicine.
Author | : Margot Blum Schevill |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 320 |
Release | : 1993-12 |
Genre | : Antiques & Collectibles |
ISBN | : |
Informative and beautifully illustrated.... It is both a detailed anthropological study, which delves into aspects of Mayan culture and examines historical and sociological forces brought to bear on Mayan communities of Guatemala, and a catalog of the stunning collections, containing descriptions of techniques, dying processes, and textile production. -- Booklist
Author | : Richard Wilson |
Publisher | : University of Oklahoma Press |
Total Pages | : 396 |
Release | : 1999-09-01 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 9780806131955 |
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 | : Matthew Restall |
Publisher | : Penn State Press |
Total Pages | : 154 |
Release | : 2007 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 0271027584 |
The invasions of Guatemala -- Pedro de Alvarado's letters to Hernando Cortes, 1524 -- Other Spanish accounts -- Nahua accounts -- Maya accounts
Author | : John P. Hawkins |
Publisher | : University of Oklahoma Press |
Total Pages | : 320 |
Release | : 2013-03-21 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 0806188936 |
The possibility of violence beneath a thin veneer of civil society is a fact of daily life for twenty-first-century Guatemalans, from field laborers to the president of the country. Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala explores the causes and consequences of governmental failure by focusing on life in two K’iche’ Maya communities in the country’s western highlands. The contributors to this volume, who lived among the villagers for some time, include both undergraduate students and distinguished scholars. They describe the ways Mayas struggle to survive and make sense of their lives, both within their communities and in relation to the politico-economic institutions of the nation and the world. Since Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war ended in 1996, the state has been dysfunctional, the country’s economy precarious, and physical safety uncertain. The intrusion of Mexican cartels led the U.S. State Department to declare Guatemala “the epicenter of the drug threat” in Central America. Rapid cultural change, weak state governance, organized crime, pervasive corruption, and ethnic exclusion provide the backdrop for the studies in this volume. Seven nuanced ethnographies collected here reveal the complexities of indigenous life and describe physical and cultural conflicts within and between villages, between insiders and outsiders, and between local and federal governments. Many of these essays point to a tragic irony:the communities seem largely forgotten by the government until the state seeks to capture their resources—timber, minerals, votes. Other chapters portray villages responding to criminal activity through lynch mobs and by labeling nonconformist youth as gang members. In focusing on the internal dynamics of poor, marginal communities in Guatemala, this book explores the realities of life for indigenous people on all continents who are faced with the social changes brought about by war and globalization.