Books about Lacandon from Amazon.com

In Watching Lacandon Maya Lives, the author follows three generations of one Lacandon Maya family. Readers track the subjects' lives as they shift through events such as marriage, parenthood, and religious conversion, all set against a backdrop of increased tourism, road construction, and the murders of two people in the community. This book encompasses both ethnography and a critique of ethnographic writing. At one level, the book is about social, agricultural, technological, and religious changes that have occurred in a Lacandon Maya community in Mexico. At a second level, the book is a critique of those who invented a Utopian picture of a "traditional" Lacandon past that never really existed. For cultural anthropologists, or anyone interested in learning more about this Mayan culture.

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Price: $32.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Flowing across the limestone plateaus and tropical forests of Mexico and Guatemala, the Usamacinta River was the cradle of ancient Mayan civilization, heavily traveled and lined with palaces and huge cities. In the aftermath of the European conquest, the rugged Usamacinta country became a remote afterthought, a place where few travelers dared to venture.

Christopher Shaw, an American writer and canoeist, makes a journey down the Maya's "watery path," reporting his sightings from this broad stream of "pale jade shot with turquoise and slightly clouded with silt." Sacred Monkey River (whose title translates the Maya name for the great watercourse) is a spiritually charged quest into once-sacred geography--but a land profaned in recent years by warfare and ethnic division. Traveling by kayak, a craft he explains to locals as a canoe of the winik, or native people, of the far north, Shaw takes us through forbidding territory, delivering glimpses of rainforest country that is in imminent danger of being felled by the region's expanding timber concerns and dammed by governments intent on harnessing hydroelectric--and political--power. Ironically, his snapshots of the unspoiled Usamacinta may turn out to be documents of a disappeared world--unless, he observes, international environmental agencies find ways to join with the Maya to preserve their forest world. --Gregory McNamee.
Price: $49.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Before massive deforestation began in the 1960s, the Lacandón jungle, which lies on the border of Mexico and Guatemala, was part of the largest tropical rain forest north of the Amazon. The destruction of the Lacandón occurred with little attention from the international press—until January 1, 1994, when a group of armed Maya rebels led by a charismatic spokesperson who called himself Subcomandante Marcos emerged from jungle communities and briefly occupied several towns in the Mexican state of Chiapas. These rebels, known as the Zapatista National Liberation Army, became front-page news around the globe, and they used their notoriety to issue rhetorically powerful communiqués that denounced political corruption, the Mexican government’s treatment of indigenous peoples, and the negative impact of globalization. As Brian Gollnick reveals, the Zapatista communiqués had deeper roots in the Mayan rain forest than Westerners realized—and he points out that the very idea of the jungle is also deeply rooted, though in different ways, in the Western imagination. Gollnick draws on theoretical innovations offered by subaltern studies to discover “oral traces” left by indigenous inhabitants in dominant cultural productions. He explores both how the jungle region and its inhabitants have been represented in literary writings from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present and how the indigenous people have represented themselves in such works, including post-colonial and anti-colonial narratives, poetry, video, and photography. His goal is to show how popular and elite cultures have interacted in creating depictions of life in the rain forest and to offer new critical vocabularies for analyzing forms of cross-cultural expression..
Price: $49.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]