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Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca
2003 ― Julian Steward Award – Anthropology & Environment Section, American Anthropological Association
2002 ― A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book How Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science. Zapotec farmers in the northern sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, are highly successful in providing their families with abundant, nutritious food in an ecologically sustainable fashion, although the premises that guide their agricultural practices would be considered erroneous by the standards of most agronomists and botanists in the United States and Europe. In this book, Roberto González convincingly argues that in fact Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science, which has had a reciprocally beneficial relationship with European and United States farming and food systems since the sixteenth century. González bases his analysis upon direct participant observation in the farms and fields of a Zapotec village. By using the ethnographic fieldwork approach, he is able to describe and analyze the rich meanings that campesino families attach to their crops, lands, and animals. González also reviews the history of maize, sugarcane, and coffee cultivation in the Zapotec region to show how campesino farmers have intelligently and scientifically adapted their farming practices to local conditions over the course of centuries. By setting his ethnographic study of the Talea de Castro community within a historical world systems perspective, he also skillfully weighs the local impact of national and global currents ranging from Spanish colonialism to the 1910 Mexican Revolution to NAFTA. At the same time, he shows how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the sustainable practices of "traditional" subsistence agriculture are beginning to replace the failed, unsustainable techniques of modern industrial farming in some parts of the United States and Europe.
2002 ― A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book How Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science. Zapotec farmers in the northern sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, are highly successful in providing their families with abundant, nutritious food in an ecologically sustainable fashion, although the premises that guide their agricultural practices would be considered erroneous by the standards of most agronomists and botanists in the United States and Europe. In this book, Roberto González convincingly argues that in fact Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science, which has had a reciprocally beneficial relationship with European and United States farming and food systems since the sixteenth century. González bases his analysis upon direct participant observation in the farms and fields of a Zapotec village. By using the ethnographic fieldwork approach, he is able to describe and analyze the rich meanings that campesino families attach to their crops, lands, and animals. González also reviews the history of maize, sugarcane, and coffee cultivation in the Zapotec region to show how campesino farmers have intelligently and scientifically adapted their farming practices to local conditions over the course of centuries. By setting his ethnographic study of the Talea de Castro community within a historical world systems perspective, he also skillfully weighs the local impact of national and global currents ranging from Spanish colonialism to the 1910 Mexican Revolution to NAFTA. At the same time, he shows how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the sustainable practices of "traditional" subsistence agriculture are beginning to replace the failed, unsustainable techniques of modern industrial farming in some parts of the United States and Europe.
360 pages, Paperback
First published August 15, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 23, 2008
This is an excellent ethnography of food and agriculture in central Mexico. It's highly readable, as ethnographies go, and very interesting. I read it as a sort of companion to The Omnivore's Dilemma, because Gonzalez talks about how to the Zapotec, maize has a soul, which is a huge contrast to corn as a commodity in the US. This was for an independent study on sustainable agriculture systems, and the book immediately became a valuable segment of my study.
October 14, 2007
One of those rare successful transformation of a doctoral thesis into a trade book. Might be the first good book written on this very important subject.
April 27, 2024
Ethnographic report from working as a fieldhand in rural Oaxaca for subsistence food and small scale cash crops, and perspective on the community relationships that non-industrial production methods create that help contextualize and contradict a western agricultural critique of efficiency and productivity.
August 16, 2021
Never thought I’d read someone’s PhD thesis on anthropological agriculture but holy shit this book was such an interesting deep dive into the agricultural and social practices of Talean farmers. It gives real insight into how they function, how their system is more egalitarian and democratic then ours claims we are, and how their practices are ecologically sound and worth considering implementing into our bloated and destructive industrial farming system. Also provides a great insight into the failing of our scientific system to consider local scientific traditions and how the arbitrary boundaries hurts all of us. Great book
May 21, 2020
This study is a wealth of practical technology useful to any society from very custom fitted tool & methods to 50 species of plants in small household gardens; peer reviewed, sociology.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews