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Mexican Rural Development and the Plumed Serpent
This is the first ethnography to be written about a Campeche Maya community. It examines the surviving Maya traditional technologies and sacred cosmologies and discusses the potential for combining these with modern knowledge and technologies to form an efficient new system that will not only provide for ecologically responsible development but will also make possible the cultural survival of this threatened indigenous population.
240 pages, Paperback
First published March 30, 1998
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April 16, 2010
I more or less liked this book. It was definitely a bit dry at times, especially when the author went into huge amounts of detail unnecessarily on the exact methods of conducting a rain ceremony, or planting corn. But the themes were spot on. The beginning two chapters and the end were by far the best.
Betty Faust is an anthropologist who conducted field work in Pich, a Maya village in Eastern Mexico. She is looking into their transformation from a traditional Maya village with swidden agriculture, a "commons" land, drought-resistant water systems, and community faith and love in each other, into a modern town. The Mexican government is pushing them to modernize with traditional agriculture methods which were developed in the US and are not suited to the desert-like environment of Pich, so therefore these methods were depleting the soil of all nutrients, causing lower crop yields, and also due to increased deforestation there were regional shifts in weather patterns leading to less rain each year.
This was a great way to learn about traditional Maya life and link this into a global context of development, globalization, and modernization. This is NOT always a good thing, and in many cases it is a very bad thing in the long-term for the local cultures involved. It was definitely an interesting read, and it made me think about how the US a century ago was in a similar situation, and we have chosen modernization of our agricultural system with what I would argue are disastrous environmental consequences.
Betty Faust is an anthropologist who conducted field work in Pich, a Maya village in Eastern Mexico. She is looking into their transformation from a traditional Maya village with swidden agriculture, a "commons" land, drought-resistant water systems, and community faith and love in each other, into a modern town. The Mexican government is pushing them to modernize with traditional agriculture methods which were developed in the US and are not suited to the desert-like environment of Pich, so therefore these methods were depleting the soil of all nutrients, causing lower crop yields, and also due to increased deforestation there were regional shifts in weather patterns leading to less rain each year.
This was a great way to learn about traditional Maya life and link this into a global context of development, globalization, and modernization. This is NOT always a good thing, and in many cases it is a very bad thing in the long-term for the local cultures involved. It was definitely an interesting read, and it made me think about how the US a century ago was in a similar situation, and we have chosen modernization of our agricultural system with what I would argue are disastrous environmental consequences.
Displaying 1 of 1 review