Download or read book Mayas in the Marketplace written by Walter E. Little and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2005 — Best Book Award – New England Council of Latin American Studies Selling handicrafts to tourists has brought the Maya peoples of Guatemala into the world market. Vendors from rural communities now offer their wares to more than 500,000 international tourists annually in the marketplaces of larger cities such as Antigua, Guatemala City, Panajachel, and Chichicastenango. Like businesspeople anywhere, Maya artisans analyze the desires and needs of their customers and shape their products to meet the demands of the market. But how has adapting to the global marketplace reciprocally shaped the identity and cultural practices of the Maya peoples? Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork, Walter Little presents the first ethnographic study of Maya handicraft vendors in the international marketplace. Focusing on Kaqchikel Mayas who commute to Antigua to sell their goods, he explores three significant issues: how the tourist marketplace conflates global and local distinctions. how the marketplace becomes a border zone where national and international, developed and underdeveloped, and indigenous and non-indigenous come together. how marketing to tourists changes social roles, gender relationships, and ethnic identity in the vendors' home communities. Little's wide-ranging research challenges our current understanding of tourism's negative impact on indigenous communities. He demonstrates that the Maya are maintaining a specific, community-based sense of Maya identity, even as they commodify their culture for tourist consumption in the world market.
Download or read book Mayas in the Marketplace written by Walter E. Little and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2005 — Best Book Award – New England Council of Latin American Studies Selling handicrafts to tourists has brought the Maya peoples of Guatemala into the world market. Vendors from rural communities now offer their wares to more than 500,000 international tourists annually in the marketplaces of larger cities such as Antigua, Guatemala City, Panajachel, and Chichicastenango. Like businesspeople anywhere, Maya artisans analyze the desires and needs of their customers and shape their products to meet the demands of the market. But how has adapting to the global marketplace reciprocally shaped the identity and cultural practices of the Maya peoples? Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork, Walter Little presents the first ethnographic study of Maya handicraft vendors in the international marketplace. Focusing on Kaqchikel Mayas who commute to Antigua to sell their goods, he explores three significant issues: how the tourist marketplace conflates global and local distinctions. how the marketplace becomes a border zone where national and international, developed and underdeveloped, and indigenous and non-indigenous come together. how marketing to tourists changes social roles, gender relationships, and ethnic identity in the vendors' home communities. Little's wide-ranging research challenges our current understanding of tourism's negative impact on indigenous communities. He demonstrates that the Maya are maintaining a specific, community-based sense of Maya identity, even as they commodify their culture for tourist consumption in the world market.
Download or read book The Ancient Maya Marketplace written by Eleanor M. King and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ancient Maya Marketplace, edited by Eleanor M. King, reviews the debate on prehispanic Maya markets. The volume's contributors challenge the model of a non-commercialized Maya economy and offer compelling new evidence for the existence and identification of ancient marketplaces among the Maya.
Download or read book Maya Market Women written by S. Ashley Kistler and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As cultural mediators, Chamelco's market women offer a model of contemporary Q'eqchi' identity grounded in the strength of the Maya historical legacy. Guatemala's Maya communities have faced nearly five hundred years of constant challenges to their culture, from colonial oppression to the instability of violent military dictatorships and the advent of new global technologies. In spite of this history, the people of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala, have effectively resisted significant changes to their cultural identities. Chamelco residents embrace new technologies, ideas, and resources to strengthen their indigenous identities and maintain Maya practice in the 21st century, a resilience that sets Chamelco apart from other Maya towns. Unlike the region's other indigenous women, Chamelco's Q'eqchi' market women achieve both prominence and visibility as vendors, dominating social domains from religion to local politics. These women honor their families' legacies through continuation of the inherited, high-status marketing trade. In Maya Market Women, S. Ashley Kistler describes how market women gain social standing as mediators of sometimes conflicting realities, harnessing the forces of global capitalism to revitalize Chamelco's indigenous identity. Working at the intersections of globalization, kinship, gender, and memory, Kistler presents a firsthand look at Maya markets as a domain in which the values of capitalism and indigenous communities meet.
Download or read book Engendering Mayan History written by David Carey Jr. and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting Mayan history from the perspective of Mayan women--whose voices until now have not been documented--David Carey allows these women to present their worldviews in their native language, adding a rich layer to recent Latin American historiography, and increasing our comprehension of indigenous perspectives of the past. Drawing on years of research among the Maya that specifically documents women's oral histories, Carey gives Mayan women a platform to discuss their views on education, migrant labor, work in the home, female leadership, and globalization. These oral histories present an ideal opportunity to understand indigenous women's approach to history, the apparent contradictions in gender roles in Mayan communities, and provide a distinct conceptual framework for analyzing Guatamalan, Mayan, and Latin American history.
Download or read book The Maya Art of Speaking Writing written by Tiffany D. Creegan Miller and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the distinctions between “old” and “new” media and narratives about the deprecation of orality in favor of inscribed forms, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing draws from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in the Guatemalan highlands, Tiffany D. Creegan Miller discusses images that are sonic, pictorial, gestural, and alphabetic. She reveals various forms of creativity and agency that are woven through a rich media landscape in Indigenous Guatemala, as well as Maya diasporas in Mexico and the United States. Miller discusses how technologies of inscription and their mediations are shaped by human editors, translators, communities, and audiences, as well as by voices from the natural world. These texts push back not just on linear and compartmentalized Western notions of media but also on the idea of the singular author, creator, scholar, or artist removed from their environment. The persistence of orality and the interweaving of media forms combine to offer a challenge to audiences to participate in decolonial actions through language preservation. The Maya Art of Speaking Writing calls for centering Indigenous epistemologies by doing research in and through Indigenous languages as we engage in debates surrounding Indigenous literatures, anthropology, decoloniality, media studies, orality, and the digital humanities.
Download or read book The Ancient Maya Economy written by Janey Levy and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2016-07-16 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What drove the Maya economy? What kinds of goods did people create and trade? Readers gain insight into these questions and more as they explore ancient Maya economic systems. This book provides archaeological evidence about the goods and services that existed in the Maya civilization through primary sources. Photographs of artifacts and ruins, paired with artwork and engaging text, provide readers with a well-rounded understanding of this ancient yet advanced economy.
Download or read book Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala written by John P. Hawkins and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2021-05-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mayas, and indeed all Guatemalans, are currently experiencing the collapse of their way of life. This collapse is disrupting ideologies, symbols, life practices, and social structures that have undergirded their society for almost five hundred years, and it is causing rapid and massive religious transformation among the K’iche’ Maya living in highland western Guatemala. Many Maya are converting to Christian Pentecostal faiths in which adherents and leaders become bodily agitated during worship. Drawing on over fifty years of research and data collected by field-school students, Hawkins argues that two factors—cultural collapse and systematic social and economic exclusion—explain the recent religious transformation of Maya Guatemala and the style and emotional intensity through which that transformation is expressed. Guatemala serves as a window on religious change around the world, and Hawkins examines the rapid pentecostalization of Christianity not only within Guatemala but also throughout the global South. The “pentecostal wail,” as he describes it, is ultimately an acknowledgment of the angst and insecurity of contemporary Maya.
Download or read book Mapping Latin America written by Jordana Dym and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 57 studies of individual maps and the cultural environment that they spring from and exemplify, including one pre-Columbian map.
Download or read book Unwriting Maya Literature written by Paul M. Worley and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unwriting Maya Literature provides an important decolonial framework for reading Maya texts that builds on the work of Maya authors and intellectuals such as Q’anjob’al Gaspar Pedro González and Kaqchikel Irma Otzoy. Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios privilege the Maya category ts’íib over constructions of the literary in order to reveal how Maya peoples themselves conceive of artistic creation. This offers a decolonial departure from theoretical approaches that remain situated within alphabetic Maya linguistic and literary creation. As ts’íib refers to a broad range of artistic production from painted codices and textiles to works composed in Latin script as well as plastic arts, the authors argue that texts by contemporary Maya writers must be read as dialoguing with a multimodal Indigenous understanding of text. In other words, ts’íib is an alternative to understanding “writing” that does not stand in opposition to but rather fully encompasses alphabetic writing, placing it alongside and in dialogue with a number of other forms of recorded knowledge. This shift in focus allows for a critical reexamination of the role that weaving and bodily performance play in these literatures, as well as for a nuanced understanding of how Maya writers articulate decolonial Maya aesthetics in their works. Unwriting Maya Literature places contemporary Maya literatures within a context situated in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through ts’íib, the authors propose an alternative to traditional analysis of Maya cultural production that allows critics, students, and admirers to respectfully interact with the texts and their authors. Unwriting Maya Literature offers critical praxis for understanding Mesoamerican works that encompass non-Western ways of reading and creating texts.
Download or read book The Real Business of Ancient Maya Economies written by Marilyn A. Masson and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely synthesis of the latest research and perspectives on ancient Maya economics, this volume illuminates the sophistication and intricacy of economic systems in the Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic periods. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines move beyond paradigms of elite control and centralized exchange to focus on individual agency, highlighting production and exchange that took place at all levels of society. Case studies draw on new archaeological evidence from rural households and urban marketplaces to reconstruct the trade networks for tools, ceramics, obsidian, salt, and agricultural goods throughout the empire. They also describe the ways household production integrated with community, regional, and interregional markets. Redirecting the field of ancient Maya economic studies away from simplistic characterizations of the past by fully representing the range of current views on the subject, this volume delves deeply into multiple facets of a complex, interdependent material world. Contributors: Anthony P. Andrews | Chloé Andrieu | Beatriz Balcárcel | Adolfo Iván Batún | George Bey | Ronald L. Bishop | Geoffrey E. Braswell | Marcello Canuto | Bernadette Cap | Arlen F. Chase | Diane Z. Chase | Rubén Chuc Aguilar | Maia Dedrick | Pedro Delgado Kú, | Arthur A. Demarest | Keith Eppich | Bárbara Escamilla Ojeda | Scott L. Fedick | Luis Flores Cobá | Lynda Florey Folan | William J. Folan | David A. Freidel | Tomás Gallareta Negrón | Charles Golden | Stanley P. Guenter | Joel D. Gunn | Richard D. Hansen | Timothy S. Hare | Enrique Hernández | Rachel A. Horowitz | Scott R. Hutson | Takeshi Inomata | Eleanor M. King | Marilyn A. Masson | Patricia A. McAnany | Carlos Morales-Aguilar | Carlos Peraza Lope | Dorie Reents-Budet | Prudence M. Rice | William Ringle | Fernando Robles Castellanos | Alejandra Roche Recinos| Bradley W. Russell | Andrew Scherer | Whittaker Schroder | Payson Sheets | Edgar Suyuc | Alexandre Tokovinine | Paola Torres | Daniela Triadan | Kenichiro Tsukamoto | Clive Vella | Bart Victor | Beniamino Volta | Brent K. S. Woodfill | Andrew R. Wyatt | Norman Yoffee A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase
Download or read book Faces of Resistance written by S. Ashley Kistler and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Maya have faced innumerable and constant challenges to their cultural identities in the last 500 years, from the subjugation of the contact and colonial periods, to the brutality of state-sponsored violence in Guatemala and the introduction of new global technologies. Oral tradition plays a fundamental role among the contemporary Maya as a means to record history and resist oppression. Although scholars have examined the processes of resistance and identity in different spheres, The Faces of Resistance: Maya Heroes, Power, and Identity is the first to unpack the importance of heroes as a cornerstone of Maya cultural and political resistance. This collection of essays by leading scholars explores how Maya communities draw on stories of indigenous heroes as an empowering cultural memory and a way to connect with the legacy of their extraordinary past. In particular, this volume considers how the Maya, following centuries of persecution and marginalization, use historical knowledge to generate and fortify their indigenous identities. The analysis of Maya heroes presented in this volume reveals that narratives of hero figures help the Maya to re-connect with an understanding of their history that has survived centuries of oppression and legitimize the practices, beliefs, and morality that will define their future"--
Download or read book Maya Market Women written by S. Ashley Kistler and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As cultural mediators, Chamelco's market women offer a model of contemporary Q'eqchi' identity grounded in the strength of the Maya historical legacy. Guatemala's Maya communities have faced nearly five hundred years of constant challenges to their culture, from colonial oppression to the instability of violent military dictatorships and the advent of new global technologies. In spite of this history, the people of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala, have effectively resisted significant changes to their cultural identities. Chamelco residents embrace new technologies, ideas, and resources to strengthen their indigenous identities and maintain Maya practice in the 21st century, a resilience that sets Chamelco apart from other Maya towns. Unlike the region's other indigenous women, Chamelco's Q'eqchi' market women achieve both prominence and visibility as vendors, dominating social domains from religion to local politics. These women honor their families' legacies through continuation of the inherited, high-status marketing trade. In Maya Market Women, S. Ashley Kistler describes how market women gain social standing as mediators of sometimes conflicting realities, harnessing the forces of global capitalism to revitalize Chamelco's indigenous identity. Working at the intersections of globalization, kinship, gender, and memory, Kistler presents a firsthand look at Maya markets as a domain in which the values of capitalism and indigenous communities meet.
Download or read book Maya Salt Works written by Heather McKillop and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Maya Salt Works, Heather McKillop details her archaeological team’s groundbreaking discovery of a unique and massive salt production complex submerged in a lagoon in southern Belize. Exploring the organization of production and trade at the Paynes Creek Salt Works, McKillop offers a fascinating new look at the role of salt in the ancient Maya economy. McKillop maps over 4,000 wooden posts and wedges, the first known wooden structures preserved underwater from the Classic period, describing new methods of underwater archaeology developed specifically for this shallow maritime setting. She explains the technology of salt production, examining fragments of briquetage—the pots that boiled brine over fires in the kitchens—and provides evidence that salt workers relied on specific types of wood for building construction. McKillop theorizes that different households operated salt kitchens and distributed their goods via canoe to sell at inland marketplaces for use as dietary salt, a flavor enhancer, and preservative. Complex distribution networks reveal expertise in water transportation and knowledge of the sea by Maya mariners, skills that allowed them to control the transport of commodities like salt. By evaluating the scale, concentration, intensity, and context of the Paynes Creek Salt Works, McKillop provides a model for interpreting existing salt works sites as well as future discoveries along the Yucatán Peninsula. A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase
Download or read book Ancient Maya Politics written by Simon Martin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Classic Maya have long presented scholars with vexing problems. One of the longest running and most contested of these, and the source of deeply polarized interpretations, has been their political organization. Using recently deciphered inscriptions and fresh archaeological finds, Simon Martin argues that this particular debate can be laid to rest. He offers a comprehensive re-analysis of the issue in an effort to answer a simple question: how did a multitude of small kingdoms survive for some six hundred years without being subsumed within larger states or empires? Using previously unexploited comparative and theoretical approaches, Martin suggests mechanisms that maintained a 'dynamic equilibrium' within a system best understood not as an array of individual polities but an interactive whole. With its rebirth as text-backed historical archaeology, Maya studies has entered a new phase, one capable of building a political anthropology as robust as any other we have for the ancient world.
Download or read book The Maya World written by Scott R. Hutson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-17 with total page 983 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Maya World brings together over 60 authors, representing the fields of archaeology, art history, epigraphy, geography, and ethnography, who explore cutting-edge research on every major facet of the ancient Maya and all sub-regions within the Maya world. The Maya world, which covers Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador, contains over a hundred ancient sites that are open to tourism, eight of which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and many thousands more that have been dug or await investigation. In addition to captivating the lay public, the ancient Maya have attracted scores of major interdisciplinary research expeditions and hundreds of smaller projects going back to the 19th century, making them one of the best-known ancient cultures. The Maya World explores their renowned writing system, towering stone pyramids, exquisitely painted murals, and elaborate funerary tombs as well as their creative agricultural strategies, complex social, economic, and political relationships, widespread interactions with other societies, and remarkable cultural resilience in the face of historical ruptures. This is an invaluable reference volume for scholars of the ancient Maya, including archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists.
Download or read book Construction of Maya Space written by Thomas H. Guderjan and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Construction of Maya Spaces sheds new light on how Maya society may have shaped—and been shaped by—the constructed environment. Moving beyond the towering pyramids and temples often associated with Maya spaces, this volume focuses on how those in power used features such as walls, roads, rails, and symbolic boundaries to control those without power, and how the powerless pushed back. Through fifteen engaging chapters, contributors examine the construction of spatial features by ancient, historic, and contemporary Maya elite and nonelite peoples to understand how they used spaces differently. Through cutting-edge methodologies and case studies, chapters consider how and why Maya people connected and divided the spaces they used daily in their homes, in their public centers, in their sacred places such as caves, and across their regions to inform us about the mental constructs they used to create their lives and cultures of the past. Contributors Elias Alcocer Puerto Alejandra Alonso Olvera Traci Ardren Jaime J. Awe Alejandra Badillo Sánchez Nicolas C. Barth Grace Lloyd Bascopé Adolpho Iván Batún-Alpuche Elizabeth Beckner M. Kathryn Brown Bernadette Cap Miguel Covarrubias Reyna Juan Fernandez Diaz Alberto G. Flores Colin Thomas H. Guderjan C. Colleen Hanratty Héctor Hernández Álvarez Scott R. Hutson Joshua J. Kwoka Whitney Lytle Aline Magnoni Jennifer P. Mathews Stephanie J. Miller Shawn G. Morton Holley Moyes Shannon Plank Dominique Rissolo Patrick Rohrer Carmen Rojas Sandoval Justine M. Shaw J. Gregory Smith Travis W. Stanton Karl A. Taube Daniel Vallejo-Cáliz
