Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
[O]ne can learn a great deal from it....[I]t is a valuable book indeed.South Eastern Latin Americanist
Review
Most important is the insight [Faust] provides into the actual context of environmental management in the tropics--how indigenous people maintained a complex system over time, and why deforestation and decline have recently occurred. By combining the approaches of the interpretative humanist and the biological scientist, she brings a new and illuminating approach to notoriously difficult questions.E. N. Anderson Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside
Review
Faust has provided an engaging ethnographic account on the Yucatec Maya....Her analysis correlates the social life of the Maya, their landscape, and ritual. Details on technological change and exploitation of water resources among the Maya provide a context for consideration of rural development and reflection on the potential for conservation of the natural world. The study is a personal narrative of engagement in the Maya culture by an anthropologist who is committed to advocacy.Ellen R. Kintz, Ph.D. Chair, Department of Anthropology, SUNY Geneseo
Review
The remarkable strength of Faust's study is based upon her enviable control of Mayan archaeological prehistory and contemporary ethnography as well her penetrating knowledge of the geology, climate, and agricultural patterns of the Yucatec Maya. Her exciting account and analysis of the patterns of water management, technologically and ritually, for sustainable agriculture in this Maya community are a must for scholars and laymen alike who wish to understand these technical and ceremonial processes.Evon Z. Vogt Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus Harvard University
Synopsis
This ethnography examines the struggles of the Maya community of Pich, Campeche, and the relationship between technology and the Maya cosmology.
About the Author
BETTY BERNICE FAUST is a Researcher and the Academic Coordinator of Human Ecology at the Centro de Investigacion y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politecnico Nacional in Merida, Mexico.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: The Plumed Serpent and Rural Development
Fieldwork: Navigating Friendships in the Dark
Maya Cultural Heritage
Past Transformations of Maya Technology
Working for Water from the Earth and the Sky
Growing the Sacred Bread
The Plumed Serpent, Rural Development, and the Future of the Biosphere
References
Index