Description
McGee (anthropology, Southwest Texas State U.) analyzes the material and economic changes that have occurred in the Lacandon Maya community of Nahß over the last 20 years, and the different adaptations that families within one large extended kin group have made to the changing world around them. Includes a few b&w photographs taken by the author, who spent extensive time among the families studied. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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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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