Download or read book Maya after War written by Jennifer L. Burrell and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war culminated in peace accords in 1996, but the postwar transition has been marked by continued violence, including lynchings and the rise of gangs, as well as massive wage-labor exodus to the United States. For the Mam Maya municipality of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, inhabited by a predominantly indigenous peasant population, the aftermath of war and genocide resonates with a long-standing tension between state techniques of governance and ancient community-level power structures that incorporated concepts of kinship, gender, and generation. Showing the ways in which these complex histories are interlinked with wartime and enduring family/class conflicts, Maya after War provides a nuanced account of a unique transitional postwar situation, including the complex influence of neoliberal intervention. Drawing on ethnographic field research over a twenty-year period, Jennifer L. Burrell explores the after-war period in a locale where community struggles span culture, identity, and history. Investigating a range of tensions from the local to the international, Burrell employs unique methodologies, including mapmaking, history workshops, and an informal translation of a historic ethnography, to analyze the role of conflict in animating what matters to Todosanteros in their everyday lives and how the residents negotiate power. Examining the community-based divisions alongside national postwar contexts, Maya after War considers the aura of hope that surrounded the signing of the peace accords, and the subsequent doubt and waiting that have fueled unrest, encompassing generational conflicts. This study is a rich analysis of the multifaceted forces at work in the quest for peace, in Guatemala and beyond.
Download or read book The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town written by Robert S. Carlsen and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling ethnography explores the issue of cultural continuity and change as it has unfolded in the representative Guatemala Mayan town Santiago Atitlán. Drawing on multiple sources, Robert S. Carlsen argues that local Mayan culture survived the Spanish Conquest remarkably intact and continued to play a defining role for much of the following five centuries. He also shows how the twentieth-century consolidation of the Guatemalan state steadily eroded the capacity of the local Mayas to adapt to change and ultimately caused some factions to reject—even demonize—their own history and culture. At the same time, he explains how, after a decade of military occupation known as la violencia, Santiago Atitlán stood up in unity to the Guatemalan Army in 1990 and forced it to leave town. This new edition looks at how Santiago Atitlán has fared since the expulsion of the army. Carlsen explains that, initially, there was hope that the renewed unity that had served the town so well would continue. He argues that such hopes have been undermined by multiple sources, often with bizarre outcomes. Among the factors he examines are the impact of transnational crime, particularly gangs with ties to Los Angeles; the rise of vigilantism and its relation to renewed religious factionalism; the related brutal murders of followers of the traditional Mayan religion; and the apocalyptic fervor underlying these events.
Download or read book War by Other Means written by Carlota McAllister and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-14 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1960 and 1996, Guatemala's civil war claimed 250,000 lives and displaced one million people. Since the peace accords, Guatemala has struggled to address the legacy of war, genocidal violence against the Maya, and the dismantling of alternative projects for the future. War by Other Means brings together new essays by leading scholars of Guatemala from a range of geographical backgrounds and disciplinary perspectives. Contributors consider a wide range of issues confronting present-day Guatemala: returning refugees, land reform, gang violence, neoliberal economic restructuring, indigenous and women's rights, complex race relations, the politics of memory, and the challenges of sustaining hope. From a sweeping account of Guatemalan elites' centuries-long use of violence to suppress dissent to studies of intimate experiences of complicity and contestation in richly drawn localities, War by Other Means provides a nuanced reckoning of the injustices that made genocide possible and the ongoing attempts to overcome them. Contributors. Santiago Bastos, Jennifer Burrell, Manuela Camus, Matilde González-Izás, Jorge Ramón González Ponciano, Greg Grandin, Paul Kobrak, Deborah T. Levenson, Carlota McAllister, Diane M. Nelson, Elizabeth Oglesby, Luis Solano, Irmalicia Velásquez Nimatuj, Paula Worby
Download or read book What War written by Laurie E. Levinger and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2011-08-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2004, Laurie Levinger left her home in Vermont for Guatemala, where she planned to teach English to Maya university students. But on the first day of class, Levinger became the student instead of the teacher when a young man named Fernando introduced himself by saying, "My father was killed when I was four months old. I am a survivor of the Guatemala civil war." Shocked, Levinger's first thought was, "What war?" Beginning in 1960, fighting between the Guatemalan military and guerrilla fighters raged across this Central American country. By 1980, this violence--which began with a CIA-backed coup and efforts by the United Fruit Company to protect its financial interests--turned into the massacre of Maya people in every corner of Guatemala. By the time peace accords were signed in 1996, over two hundred thousand Maya people had been murdered, "disappeared,"or forced into exile by their own government. Levinger's students had been young children when these atrocities were committed. Many lost their parents. Many had relatives who "disappeared." All had suffered the loss of their culture, their family ties, their sense of safety, their personal identities. As a clinical social worker, Levinger believes in the importance of bearing witness, of speaking the unspeakable out loud. After her initial trip, she returned to Guatemala, this time with a tape recorder and a mission: to record the testimonies of her students, to document their enduring love for their Maya culture, and to honor their unflagging search for truth. In What War? Levinger brings us stories, told in the spare and eloquent language of truth-tellers, reminding us all that the true cost of war is borne by the survivors. And so is the hope for peace.
Download or read book Unsafe Motherhood written by Nicole S. Berry and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally.
Download or read book 3 000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands written by Geoffrey E. Braswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-30 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 3,000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands presents the cutting-edge research of 25 authors in the fields of archaeology, biological anthropology, art history, ethnohistory, and epigraphy. Together, they explore issues central to ancient Maya identity, political history, and warfare. The Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Belize, and southeast Mexico have witnessed human occupation for at least 11,000 years, and settled life reliant on agriculture began some 3,100 years ago. From the earliest times, Maya communities expressed their shifting identities through pottery, architecture, stone tools, and other items of material culture. Although it is tempting to think of the Maya as a single unified culture, they were anything but homogeneous, and differences in identity could be expressed through violence. 3,000 Years of War and Peace in the Maya Lowlands explores the formation of identity, its relationship to politics, and its manifestation in warfare from the earliest pottery-making villages through the late colonial period by studying the material remains and written texts of the Maya. This volume is an invaluable reference for students and scholars of the ancient Maya, including archaeologists, art historians, and anthropologists.
Download or read book Maya written by Maya Torngren and published by . This book was released on 2007-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the life story of a German girl growing up in Germany during Hitler's regime. She spent the night of her fifteenth birthday huddled in the basement with her family as her home town of Augsburg suffered its largest air raid of the war, during the coldest night of that year. Life was very interesting for the teenager after the war ended and the American troops entered the city, bringing with them the Big Band Sound. Five years after the war, she met and married an American soldier. Moving to America was just the beginning of many different experiences that awaited her. When the couple had four children, aged thirteen, twelve, nine, and six, they left the U.S. to embark on an eleven-month, once-in-a-lifetime trip to Africa, the Canary Islands, and Europe. Four years after their return to the U.S., they moved to California, where they remain to this day. Sadly, a few years later, tragedy struck the family. The book ends 60 years later on Maya's 75th birthday.
Download or read book Central America in the New Millennium written by Jennifer L. Burrell and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most non-Central Americans think of the narrow neck between Mexico and Colombia in terms of dramatic past revolutions and lauded peace agreements, or sensational problems of gang violence and natural disasters. In this volume, the contributors examine regional circumstances within frames of democratization and neoliberalism, as they shape lived experiences of transition. The authors--anthropologists and social scientists from the United States, Europe, and Central America--argue that the process of regions and nations "disappearing" (being erased from geopolitical notice) is integral to upholding a new, post-Cold War world order--and that a new framework for examining political processes must be accessible, socially collaborative, and in dialogue with the lived processes of suffering and struggle engaged by people in Central America and the world in the name of democracy.
Download or read book Mayas in Postwar Guatemala written by Walter E. Little and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2009-05-17 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like the original Harvest of Violence, published in 1988, this volume reveals how the contemporary Mayas contend with crime, political violence, internal community power struggles, and the broader impact of transnational economic and political policies in Guatemala. However, this work, informed by long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Mayan communities and commitment to conducting research in Mayan languages, places current anthropological analyses in relation to Mayan political activism and key Mayan intellectuals’ research and criticism. Illustrating specifically how Mayas in this post-war period conceive of their social and political place in Guatemala, Mayas working in factories, fields, and markets, and participating in local, community-level politics provide critiques of the government, the Maya movement, and the general state of insecurity and social and political violence that they continue to face on a daily basis. Their critical assessments and efforts to improve political, social, and economic conditions illustrate their resiliency and positive, nonviolent solutions to Guatemala’s ongoing problems that deserve serious consideration by Guatemalan and US policy makers, international non-government organizations, peace activists, and even academics studying politics, social agency, and the survival of indigenous people. CONTRIBUTORS Abigail E. Adams / José Oscar Barrera Nuñez / Peter Benson / Barbara Bocek / Jennifer L. Burrell / Robert M. Carmack / Monica DeHart / Edward F. Fischer / Liliana Goldín / Walter E. Little / Judith M. Maxwell / J. Jailey Philpot-Munson / Brenda Rosenbaum / Timothy J. Smith / David Stoll
Download or read book Invading Guatemala written by Matthew Restall and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The invasions of Guatemala -- Pedro de Alvarado's letters to Hernando Cortes, 1524 -- Other Spanish accounts -- Nahua accounts -- Maya accounts
Download or read book Popular a Memoir written by Maya Van Wagenen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents a high school student's year-long attempt to change her social status from that of a misfit to a member of the "in" crowd by following advice in a 1950s popularity guide, an experiment that triggered embarrassment, humor and unexpected surprises.
Download or read book Yucat n s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War written by Terry Rugeley and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Social history that challenges earlier views of the Caste War. Examines the development of the social, political, and economic structure of the Yucatâan during the first half of the 19th century and profiles four towns involved in the Caste War. Emphasizes the eroding status of Maya elites as a key to the revolt"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
Download or read book Militarizing Men written by Maya Eichler and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-26 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A state's ability to maintain mandatory conscription and wage war rests on the idea that a "real man" is one who has served in the military. Yet masculinity has no inherent ties to militarism. The link between men and the military, argues Maya Eichler, must be produced and reproduced in order to fill the ranks, engage in combat, and mobilize the population behind war. In the context of Russia's post-communist transition and the Chechen wars, men's militarization has been challenged and reinforced. Eichler uncovers the challenges by exploring widespread draft evasion and desertion, anti-draft and anti-war activism led by soldiers' mothers, and the general lack of popular support for the Chechen wars. However, the book also identifies channels through which militarized gender identities have been reproduced. Eichler's empirical and theoretical study of masculinities in international relations applies for the first time the concept of "militarized masculinity," developed by feminist IR scholars, to the case of Russia.
Download or read book Golem written by Maya Barzilai and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: The Golem condition -- 1. The face of destruction: Paul Wegener's World War I Golem films -- 2. The Golem cult of 1921 New York: between redemption and expulsion -- 3. Our enemies, ourselves: Israel's monsters of 1948 -- 4. Supergolem: revenge after the Holocaust -- 5. Pacifist computers and Jewish cyborgs: fighting for the future
Download or read book The Caste War of Yucat n written by Nelson A. Reed and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the classic account of one of the most dramatic episodes in Mexican history--the revolt of the Maya Indians of Yucatán against their white and mestizo oppressors that began in 1847. Within a year, the Maya rebels had almost succeeded in driving their oppressors from the peninsula; by 1855, when the major battles ended, the war had killed or put to flight almost half of the population of Yucatán. A new religion built around a Speaking Cross supported their independence for over fifty years, and that religion survived the eventual Maya defeat and continues today. This revised edition is based on further research in the archives and in the field, and draws on the research by a new generation of scholars who have labored since the book's original publication 36 years ago. One of the most significant results of this research is that it has put a human face on much that had heretofore been treated as semi-mythical. Reviews of the First Edition "Reed has not only written a fine account of the caste war, he has also given us the first penetrating analysis of the social and economic systems of Yucatán in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." --American Historical Review "In this beautifully written history of a little-known struggle between several contending forces in Yucatán, Reed has added an important dimension to anthropological studies in this area." --American Anthropologist "Not only is this exciting history (as compelling and dramatic as the best of historical fiction) but it covers events unaccountably neglected by historians. . . . This is a brilliant contribution to history. . . . Don't miss this book." --Los Angeles Times "One of the most remarkable books about Latin America to appear in years." --Hispanic American Report
Download or read book Voices from Exile written by Victor Montejo and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elilal, exile, is the condition of thousands of Mayas who have fled their homelands in Guatemala to escape repression and even death at the hands of their government. In this book, Victor Montejo, who is both a Maya expatriate and an anthropologist, gives voice to those who until now have struggled in silence--but who nevertheless have found ways to reaffirm and celebrate their Mayaness. Voices from Exile is the authentic story of one group of Mayas from the Kuchumatan highlands who fled into Mexico and sought refuge there. Montejo's combination of autobiography, history, political analysis, and testimonial narrative offers a profound exploration of state terror and its inescapable human cost.
Download or read book The Democracy Development Machine written by Nicholas Copeland and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicholas Copeland sheds new light on rural politics in Guatemala and across neoliberal and post-conflict settings in The Democracy Development Machine. This historical ethnography examines how governmentalized spaces of democracy and development fell short, enabling and disfiguring an ethnic Mayan resurgence. In a passionate and politically engaged book, Copeland argues that the transition to democracy in Guatemalan Mayan communities has led to a troubling paradox. He finds that while liberal democracy is celebrated in most of the world as the ideal, it can subvert political desires and channel them into illiberal spaces. As a result, Copeland explores alternative ways of imagining liberal democracy and economic and social amelioration in a traumatized and highly unequal society as it strives to transition from war and authoritarian rule to open elections and free-market democracy.The Democracy Development Machine follows Guatemala's transition, reflects on Mayan involvement in politics during and after the conflict, and provides novel ways to link democratic development with economic and political development. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.