Author: Fischer, Edward F.
Title: Cultural Logics and Global Economics : Maya Identity in Thought and Practice
Description: Austin [TX], University of Texas Press, 2001. orig.wrappers. 23x15cm, xii,287 pp. PAPERBACK.. ISBN: 0292725345. Minor rubbing. Bookplate. VG. ¶ As ideas, goods, and people move with increasing ease and speed across national boundaries and geographic distances, the economic changes and technological advances that enable this globalisation are also paradoxically contributing to the balkanisation of states, ethnic groups....this book presents an innovative synthesis of the local and global factors that have led Guatemala's indigenous Maya peoples to assert and defend their cultural identity and distinctiveness within the dominant Hispanic society. Drawing on recent theories from cognitive studies, interpretative ethnography, and political economy, Edward F. Fischer looks at individual Maya activists and local cultures, as well as changing national and international power relations, to understand how ethnic identities are constructed and expressed in the modern world.At the global level, he shows how structural shifts in international relations have opened new venues of ethnic expression for Guatemala's majority Maya population. At the local level, he examines the processes of identity construction in two Kaqchikel Maya towns, Tecpan and Patzun, and shows how divergent local norms result in different conceptions and expressions of Maya-ness, which nonetheless share certain fundamental similarities with the larger pan-Maya project. Tying these levels of analysis together, Fischer argues that open-ended Maya "cultural logics" condition the ways in which Maya individuals (national leaders and rural masses alike) creatively express their identity in a rapidly changing world".

Keywords: 0292725345 Cakchikel Ethnology, Guatemala, Mayan Indians, Maya Mayas, Social Anthropology, Central America, Sociology, Ethnography, Ethnic Identity