Download or read book The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico written by Lisa Sousa and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an ambitious and wide-ranging social and cultural history of gender relations among indigenous peoples of New Spain, from the Spanish conquest through the first half of the eighteenth century. In this expansive account, Lisa Sousa focuses on four native groups in highland Mexico—the Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mixe—and traces cross-cultural similarities and differences in the roles and status attributed to women in prehispanic and colonial Mesoamerica. Sousa intricately renders the full complexity of women's life experiences in the household and community, from the significance of their names, age, and social standing, to their identities, ethnicities, family, dress, work, roles, sexuality, acts of resistance, and relationships with men and other women. Drawing on a rich collection of archival, textual, and pictorial sources, she traces the shifts in women's economic, political, and social standing to evaluate the influence of Spanish ideologies on native attitudes and practices around sex and gender in the first several generations after contact. Though catastrophic depopulation, economic pressures, and the imposition of Christianity slowly eroded indigenous women's status following the Spanish conquest, Sousa argues that gender relations nevertheless remained more complementary than patriarchal, with women maintaining a unique position across the first two centuries of colonial rule.
Download or read book Sacred Energies of the Sun and Moon written by Erika Buenaflor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical guide to ancient Mesoamerican solar and lunar rites for healing and transformation • Details shamanic rituals and practices for each period of the day, including dawn, sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight, to best harness the energies of the sun, night sun, and moon for specific purposes, such as divination, journeying with animal spirit guides, or spiritual wisdom • Incorporates shamanic breathwork, dreamwork, mantra chanting, mudras, dancing and movement, toning, chakra work, crystals, herbs, and limpias (shamanic cleanses) • Explores how nighttime energies are affected by the phases of the moon, offering specific practices for each phase Ancient Mesoamerican shamans and modern practitioners of curanderismo--a Latin American shamanic healing practice--divide each day and night into distinct periods based on the sacred rhythms of the sun and moon, with each time offering opportunities to connect with specific celestial energies for healing and transformation. In this hands-on guide to working with the sacred energies of the sun, night sun, and moon, curandera Erika Buenaflor details the rites, rituals, and deities for each part of the day and night and explores the sacred tools and techniques used by ancient Mesoamerican shamans for harnessing solar and lunar energies. She explains how the sun is the source of soul energy that heals, animates, strengthens, and revitalizes us on many levels, while night energies are transformative and conducive for connecting with nonordinary realms. She explores rituals for dawn, sunrise, and midmorning to harness the energies of creation and new beginnings; for noon and afternoon to promote peak strength and spiritual wisdom; for sunset and dusk to bring about transformation, perform divination, and journey with animal spirit guides; and for midnight and predawn to facilitate shamanic dreamwork, connect with the ancestors, make offerings, and regenerate at the deepest levels. She also explores how nighttime energies are affected by the phases of the moon and offers specific practices for each phase. By intentionally tuning our activities to the rhythms of the sun and moon, we can invite in their sacred energies of abundance and healing for more healthy, creative, mindful, and happy lives.
Download or read book Asociaci n de Literaturas Ind genas Latinoamericana written by Mary H. Preuss and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book As Long as the Sun Walks written by Judith McAllister and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2005-12-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clay Whistle held to sanity by strength of will. She had three days only to live in this Middleworld, to taste the sweetness of chocolate, to hear the music of the morning bird, to smell the heady perfume of flowers, touch the female fertility of earth-three days to find meaning in life. She thought often of Zactun Na, The City Of The White Stone House, of her friend, Half Coat. She thought of her sister, Thirteen Moon, and there was comfort in the knowledge that the blood of their lineage would be passed on through her child. But most often, Clay Whistle thought of the island. In her mind she fled the enclosing walls of her stone chambers at Tikal to soar free on the wings of a Red-tailed Hawk. With her heart she rose high above mist that clung like white gauze to the verdant green hills of the highlands, then wheeled to ride a swift carpet of warm wind over white beaches and across the blue-green tidal inlet that led home. She lived in two worlds, now-in the present, clinging to the vibrant texture of life. And in the past, in that time when as a child she ran barefoot toward the promise of tomorrow and touched, so easily, the elusive tail-feathers of happiness-in that time and place in the sacred round of days when she had known Red Canoe.
Download or read book The Achievement of Ted Hughes written by Keith Sagar and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Origin of Table Manners written by Claude Lévi-Strauss and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1990-11-08 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Origin of Table Manners is the third volume of a tetralogy devoted to American Indian mythology. Unlike the first two volumes (The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes), which are devoted to South American myths, the present one establishes relations with North America, which is the subject of the fourth (The Naked Man). . . . In the course of the analysis, the myths link up with ideas of more general interest. Thus, we find discussions of numeration, of morals, and of the origin of the novel. . . . The Origin of Table Manners is thus of special interest to students of American Indian mythology, although it contains ideas of interest to other fields and even to the general reader."—Daniel C. Raffalovich, American Anthropologist "An immense anthropological erudition is here wielded by one of the world's finest minds, and the myths themselves have never been taken more seriously. . . . [Lévi-Strauss] raises issues and then resolves them with the suspenseful cunning of a mystery novelist."—John Updike, New Yorker
Download or read book The Major Gods of Ancient Yucatan written by Karl A. Taube and published by Dumbarton Oaks. This book was released on 1992 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Year s Best Science Fiction written by Gardner Dozois and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1986-04 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science fiction at its very best, this award-winning anthology features worksby the top sci fi writers of the year.
Download or read book Tails of Wonder and Imagination written by Ellen Datlow and published by Start Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2010-02-01 with total page 903 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From legendary editor Ellen Datlow, Tails of Wonder collects the best of the last thirty years of science fiction and fantasy stories about cats.
Download or read book Ancient Maya Women written by Traci Ardren and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2002 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The flood of archaeological work in Maya lands has revolutionized our understanding of gender in ancient Maya society. The dozen contributors to this volume use a wide range of methodological strategies--archaeology, bioarchaeology, iconography, ethnohistory, epigraphy, ethnography--to tease out the details of the lives, actions, and identities of women of Mesoamerica. The chapters, most based upon recent fieldwork in Central America, examine the role of women in Maya society, their place in the political hierarchy and lineage structures, the gendered division of labor, and the discrepancy between idealized Mayan womanhood and the daily reality, among other topics. In each case, the complexities and nuances of gender relations is highlighted and the limitations of our knowledge acknowledged. These pieces represent an important advance in the understanding of Maya socioeconomic, political, and cultural life--and the archaeology of gender--and will be of great interest to scholars and students.
Download or read book The Fire of the Jaguar written by Terence Turner and published by Hau. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not since Clifford Geertz's "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" has the publication of an anthropological analysis been as eagerly awaited as this book, Terence S. Turner's The Fire of the Jaguar. His reanalysis of the famous myth from the Kayapo people of Brazil was anticipated as an exemplar of a new, dynamic, materialist, action-oriented structuralism, one very different from the kind made famous by Claude L vi-Strauss. But the study never fully materialized. Now, with this volume, it has arrived, bringing with it powerful new insights that challenge the way we think about structuralism, its legacy, and the reasons we have moved away from it. In these chapters, Turner carries out one of the richest and most sustained analysis of a single myth ever conducted. Turner places the "Fire of the Jaguar" myth in the full context of Kayapo society and culture and shows how it became both an origin tale and model for the work of socialization, which is the primary form of productive labor in Kayapo society. A posthumous tribute to Turner's theoretical erudition, ethnographic rigor, and respect for Amazonian indigenous lifeworlds, this book brings this fascinating Kayapo myth alive for new generations of anthropologists. Accompanied with some of Turner's related pieces on Kayapo cosmology, this book is at once a richly literary work and an illuminating meditation on the process of creativity itself.
Download or read book The Title of Totonicap n written by Allen J. Christenson and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is the first English translation of the complete text of the Title of Totonicapán, one of the most important documents composed by the K’iche’ Maya in the highlands of Guatemala, second only to the Popol Vuh. The original document was completed in 1554, only a few decades after the Spanish Conquest of the K’iche’ people in 1524. This volume contains a wholly new translation from the original K’iche’ Maya text, based on the oldest known manuscript copy, rediscovered by Robert Carmack in 1973. The Title of Totonicapán is a land title written by surviving members of the K’iche’ Maya nobility, a branch of the Maya that dominated the highlands of western Guatemala prior to the Spanish invasion in 1524, and it was duly signed by the ruling lords of all three major K’iche’ lineages—the Kaweqib’, the Nijayib’, and the Ajaw K’iche’s. Titles of this kind were relatively common for Maya communities in the Guatemalan highlands in the first century after the Spanish Conquest as a means of asserting land rights and privileges for its leaders. Like the Popol Vuh, the Title of Totonicapán is written in the elevated court language of the early Colonial period and eloquently describes the mythic origins and history of the K’iche’ people. For the most part, the Title of Totonicapán agrees with the Popol Vuh’s version of K’iche’ history and cosmology, providing a complementary account that attests traditions that must have been widely known and understood. But in many instances the Totonicapán document is richer in detail and departs from the Popol Vuh’s more cursory description of history, genealogy, and political organization. In other instances, it contradicts assertions made by the authors of the Popol Vuh, perhaps a reflection of internal dissent and jealousy between rival lineages within the K’iche’ hierarchy. It also contains significant passages of cosmology and history that do not appear in any other highland Maya text. This volume makes a comprehensive and updated edition of the Title of Totonicapán accessible to scholars and students in history, anthropology, archaeology, and religious studies in Latin America, as well as those interested in Indigenous literature and Native American/Indigenous studies more broadly. It is also a stand-alone work of Indigenous literature that provides additional K’iche’ perspectives, enhancing the reading of other colonial Maya sources.
Download or read book Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate written by Elizabeth Hill Boone and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-05-17 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode. In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.
Download or read book The Hidden Maya written by Martin Brennan and published by Inner Traditions / Bear & Co. This book was released on 1998 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explains how Plains Indians used handsigns as symbols for communication, and that the graphic signs derived from hand gestures played an important role in the development of writing. The author deciphers Maya inscriptions to reveal their hidden messages.
Download or read book Sweat of the Sun Tears of the Moon written by Peter T. Furst and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Handbook of South American Indians The circum Caribbean tribes written by Julian Haynes Steward and published by . This book was released on 1946 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Lost City written by Robert C. Novarro and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep within the rainforests heart, deep within its unknown part lies a Mayan city lost in the centuries of time. In its golden age, Nakanjo was ruled by a mighty warrior king named Jaguar Claw, who extended the citys domination over other Mayan cities. Later, a Spanish conquistador, Cesar de Leon, hears the fable of the riches of Nakanjo and is determined to make its wealth his own. Finally, Esmie Cummings, an archeologist, follows in her husbands footsteps to at last uncover the city, but as Esmie delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, she does not realize that she is endangering her own life.
