Narrations of Shifting Maya Identities

Three anthropological ways of narrating the historical formation of Maya identity have recently been outlined in an article by Kay Warren on intergenerational struggles of Mayan families in Guatemala. According to the anti-racism scheme, Maya identity forms as a reaction to ethnic opposition. The cultural continuity approach treats identity formation as persistence that occurs in spite of ethnic oppression. The third, ' mestizaje ' school of thought argues that assimilation has eroded indigenous identity to the extent that it only makes sense to speak of an intermediary ladino (or mestizo ) category. Warren argues that the previous antagonism between ethnographic approaches has obscured the coexistence of these narrations in families, where discontinuity and rejection of traditional Maya identities interplay with continuity and revitalisation. In this paper, I compare the narrations of shifting identities in Guatemala to local representations of socio-cultural change in Yucutan. Based upon research in Oxkutzcab, I attempt to show how the interpretations of intergenerational changes in language, dress, and occupation relate to a set of local and regional events that evade the mutually exclusive meta-narratives of change.     

Book Reviews

Inspired by the ecological model of human development and inter-subjectivist perspective of identity formation, the article addresses the complexity of professional interactions and highlights the spectrum of possible reactions of Russian-speaking teachers in Estonia to changes in the domain of language-in-education. The qualitative research demonstrates different models of the teachers’ self-views that are constructed and practiced in the interaction within significant layers identified by the ecological approach and reveals the diversity of the dilemmas teachers as professionals face in their everyday working lives.     

The Heterogeneous Isthmus: Transnationalism and Cultural Differentiation in Panama

This article addresses understandings of race and ethnicity within Latin American research by examining and arguing for an increasingly transnational interpretation of identity through an analytical engagement with the changing politics of difference in Panama. Applying historiographical and ethnographic approaches, we interrogate ethno‐racial differentiation from a transnational perspective, concluding that dominant national discourses on identity in Panama have shifted in response to transnational alliances and pressures, and that a monolithic nationalism driven by the narrative of panameñismo (a national political discourse in Panama predicated upon the concept of a monolithic and singular Panamanian culture) has given way to an ethno‐racial climate in which the politics of identity and representation are approached more pluralistically and arguably more equitably.     

Religion,ethnicity and citizenship: demands for territorial self-determination in southern Kaduna,Nigeria

This article analyses the ‘politics of scale’ of how identity is linked to territory in the quest for self-determination by actors on the Christian side of the ethno-religious conflict in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Ethnic and political relations are framed with reference to scale, such as ‘the local’ and ‘the regional’, in ways that support claims for territorial control on an ethnic and religious basis. The experience of lack of access to the state is seen to be grounded in community identities. Furthermore, the state relates to citizens through religious and neo-customary authorities as a way to localise authority. This is connected to an idea that neo-customary institutions represent ‘the local’. It is argued in this article that these institutions are just as entangled in various constructions of scale as the state.     

National unity and reconciliation in Rwanda: A flawed approach?

This article examines the Rwandan government's national unity and reconciliation policy and one of its key elements, the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC). It contends that while the NURC potentially represents an innovative model that other post-conflict societies could adapt and use, the central premise on which both the commission and the government's broader national unity and reconciliation policy are based is critically flawed. The unity that they are endeavouring to achieve, as a vehicle for reconciliation, relies upon a negation of ethnicity – a core component of the 1994 genocide – and hence does not allow for an open and honest engagement with the past. The problem is further compounded by the government's attitude towards the prosecution of crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which not only demonstrates that ethnicity remains highly significant but also underscores the incomplete and partial way in which the past is being addressed.     

The fundamental characteristics of the Kurdish nationhood project in modern Iraq

The protracted Iraqi-Kurdish conflict has plagued the country since the creation of Iraq in the 1920s. Iraqi-Kurdish relations are dominated by the clash of two contradictory nationhood projects: Kurdish and Iraqi. The Kurdish nationhood project was constructed with the perspective that the Kurds as a nation, could qualify for but is deprived of, achieving nation-state status. Based on the Kurdish project, Kurdistan and Iraq consist of two separate homelands: the Arab part of Iraq, which is part of the greater Arab homeland, and Iraqi Kurdistan which is part of the Greater Kurdistan region.     

Press and ethnic polarization in post-2001 Afghanistan: the 2014 presidential election experience

This article analyses the contents of three newspapers affiliated with the Tajik-dominated Jamiat and Shura-e-Nezar factions that were deployed during the 2014 presidential election to publicize ethno-political polarization for instrumental ends. The practice of nurturing ethnic identities serves as a microcosm of the broader context in which identity politics, besides coalition-building, rent-seeking, and patrimonial interdependencies, has become a key feature of post-2001 politics. This article focuses on how these factions used these newspapers to polarize ethnic cleavages to win legitimacy for themselves and defamation for their Pashtun-dominated rival factions – Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin and the Taliban. It will be years before the ethnic mujahedeen and muhajereen and the new generation reach a mutually binding and working condition that facilitates the country's long-term stability. Reaching this condition is critical because the future of Afghanistan lies in the commitment of its people to form a united community that resolves disputes in the manner of a democratic nation.     

Contesting and negotiating religion and ethnic identity in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

Post-Soviet Central Asia has inherited a set of circumstances conducive to the revitalization of religion. The renewal of Muslim awareness and identity in Central Asia may not be surprising, but the growth of Christianity is, especially in its Protestant form within indigenous Muslim communities. This article, based on qualitative field research, reviews one example of this development: the process of conversion to Protestant Christianity among Muslim Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan. A prominent aspect of this social movement has been the ways in which Kyrgyz Christians have entered into a dynamic process of engaging with issues of identity and what it means to be Kyrgyz – a process that has sought to locate their new Christian religious identity within, rather than on the margins of, familial and ethnic identity, and one that challenges the normative understanding of Kyrgyz identity: that to be Kyrgyz is to be Muslim. While providing the context for Kyrgyz conversion, this discussion primarily focuses on the way Kyrgyz Christians utilize a number of different discursive strategies to contest normative Kyrgyz identity constructs and to legitimize a Kyrgyz Christian identity.     

ISSUES OF RACE,ETHNICITY, SOCIO-ECONOMIC POSITION AND SPATIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA: HOW SPATIAL ACCESS AND EXPRESSION STILL PERPETUATE NOTIONS OF DIFFERENCE,SEPARATION AND UNCERTAINTY AMONGST THE SOUTH AFRICAN COLOURED1 POPULATION

ABSTRACT

While the Native Land Act [Act 27 of 1913] and the Native Trust and Land Act [Act 18 of 1936] dispossessed black South Africans of their land physically, the insidious Group Areas Act [Act 41 of 1950] and the Population Registration Act [Act 30 of 1950] reified perceptions of race and ethnicity in the context of phenotype, culture, language and even religion. Although these Acts were repealed the legacy remains part of the South African psyche still. Such perceptions are evident in the Coloured communities where the Population Registration Act classified and defined the group as a singular unit while the Group Areas Act segregated and confined them, and restricted their association within the group almost exclusively. This meant that education, access to information, socialising, and religious assembly and to a limited extent employment were restricted mostly to these designated segregated areas. Limited interaction between various legislated groups, even within the Coloured group itself reinforced the socio-economic racial hierarchy and the prejudices linked to economics. The combination of these Acts created an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ hostility further (re)enforcing notions of separateness and difference. The article seeks to examine social and racial interpretation (based on income and spatial realities) of the Coloured population in the Eastern Cape and how the group perceives its primary identity and allegiance in terms of ethnicity or national identity as salient in the current socio-political environment. The objectives are first to assert that legislated segregation created rigid jingoist structures of ethnic and racial identities that will take longer to dismantle than the Acts of separation had and secondly that national identity can be salient amongst a minority group irrespective of socio-economic position. The conclusion highlights that the social and identity Acts, spatial acts, regarded once as a legislated absolute, reduced the Coloured communities specifically, to regard themselves as different yet the same, inferior and superior, marginalised yet included, but that this is not incompatible with nation building.     

Regionalism,personalism, ethnicity,and violence: parties and voter preference in the 2010 parliamentary election in Kyrgyzstan

On the basis of interviews, census data, and precinct-level electoral results from the October 2010 parliamentary election in Kyrgyzstan, this paper examines the influences on the party vote in Kyrgyzstan. Instead of traditional socioeconomic variables, this study finds that regionalism (North vs. South), ethnicity, personalism, and violence offered the most compelling explanations of party preference in Central Asia's most competitive election. The paper also examines the contextual factors that constructed and filtered voter demand, from Kyrgyzstan's political and economic conjuncture in 2010 to its unusual party system and electoral rules.     

Indigeneity in the Air: The Case of Chinchero Airport in Cusco,Peru

This article problematises ‘indigeneity’ by looking at the various disruptions, conflicts and fractures that the recent sale of the land for the construction of the new Cusco international airport in Chinchero, Peru, has triggered locally. In addition to examining the erosion of the peasant community model that emerged from the 1969 agrarian reform, it explores the formation of new social groupings in a context of tourism and neoliberal development. The discussion highlights the role of tourism-related, large-scale infrastructure in the production of new identity politics that challenges fixed and preconceived ideas about ‘the indigenous’ in the Andes.     

Race and ethnicity: Voters’ party preference in South African elections

Abstract

Genuine, periodic, free and fair elections are one of the key defining features of a vibrant multi-party democracy. They provide a public mechanism for regular peaceful institutional competition for power and the opportunity for people to change, review or legitimise government through their freely expressed will. This article interrogates the behaviour of South African voters using a qualitative analysis of available studies covering the national and provincial elections held in 1994, 1999, 2004 and 2009, and the municipal election of 2011. One of the notable trends is that while the number of registered voters keeps increasing, voter turnout is on the decrease. There are other salient observable tends but they are not the focus of the article. For the purposes of the article the first conclusion is that among the various competing variables influencing voters’ choice of a particular political party in South African public elections, the race issue, however weak some might suggest it is, still looms large and is a dominant factor despite denials by some researchers. Second, in contrast to what obtains in many other African countries, ethnic identity happily has only a marginal influence on South African voters. This second conclusion should however not be regarded as cast in stone, given the ever-changing dynamic nature of people's identity and behaviour as well as the election campaign strategies of participating political parties and the role of the media. Given that there is a complex interrelatedness of ethnic and racial identity and interests, the electorate might well be more sophisticated than many realise.     

Reviews

Books reviewed:
Salomon and Schwartz, (eds.) The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. Volume III. South America
Lovell, A Beauty That Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala
Beardsell, Europe and Latin America: returning the gaze
Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab: Hispanic Texts
Rowe, Poets of Contemporary Latin America: History and the Inner Life
Crisp, Democratic Institutional Design: the Powers and Incentives of Venezuelan Politicians and Interest Groups
Naro, A Slave's Place, a Master's World: Fashioning Dependency in Rural Brazil
Campbell, Mexican Memoir: A Personal Account of Anthropology and Radical Politics in Oaxaca
Javier, Poor People's Politics. Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita. Duke
Petras, The Left Strikes Back: Class Conflict in the Age of Neoliberalism
Molyneux, Women's Movements in International Perspective: Latin America and Beyond     

Reviews

Books reviewed:
Hassig Time, History and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico
Baskes Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821
Caldeira City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo
Caulfield In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century Brazil
Earle Rumours of Wars: Civil Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Clarke Class, Ethnicity, and Community in Southern Mexico: Oaxaca's Peasantries
Jones and Munck, (eds) Cultural Politics in Latin America
CEDLA FRONTERAS: Towards A Borderless Latin America
Tulchin and Garland Social Development in Latin America. The Politics of Reform
Paley Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile
Crabtree and Whitehead (eds) Towards Democratic Viability: The Bolivian Experience
Bailey and Godson (eds) Organized Crime and Democratic Governability: Mexico and the U.S.–Mexican Borderlands
Adams Dollar Diplomacy: United States Economic Assistance to Latin America
Smith (ed.) Democracy and International Relations: Critical Theories/Problematic Practices
Angell, Lowden Thorpe Decentralizing Development: The Political Economy of Institutional Change in Colombia and Chile
Itzigsohn Developing Poverty: The State, Labor Market Deregulation, and the Informal Economy in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic
Nencel Ethnography and Prostitution in Peru
Potter Deeper than Debt: Economic globalisation and the poor     

Reviews

Books reviewed:
Sampson Vera Tudela, Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Sprituality in Mexico
Archer, Wars of Independence in Spanish America
Bergad, Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720–1888
McFarlane and Posado-Carbó, Independence and Revolution in Spanish America: Perspectives and Problems
Earle, Spain and the Independence of Colombia, 1800–1825
Zimmermann, Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Nugent, Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual, and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes
Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico: Michoacán from the Late Colony ti the Revolution
Benjamin, La Revolució: Mexico's Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History
Spenser, The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s
Buve and Weisebron, Procesos de Integración en América Latina: Perspectivas y Experiencias Latinoamericanas y Europeas
Edelman, Peasants Against Globalisation: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica
Pelupessy and Ruben, Agrarian Policies in Central America
Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy
Hite, When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left
Aguirre and Buffington, Reconstructing Criminality in Latin America
Craske, Women and Politics in Latin America
Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory
Breiner, An Introduction to West Indian Poetry
Goslinga, Caribbean Literature: A Bibliography
San Román, Onetti and Others: Comparative Essays on a Major Figure in Latin American Literature     

Reviews

In recent years, urban community studies in China have been taking a closer look at neighbourhood space. Many researchers have examined neighbourhood using a state-society approach. This article argues that the fragmented state structure and the diversified society have led to calls for a different view of state and society. Based on the empirical studies in Shanghai, this article attempts to uncover the limitations of the state-society paradigm in exploring the transformation of urban grassroots, and suggests understanding the increasingly fragmented grassroots from examining different actors who are embedded in a specific neighbourhood space and vary in their interests and goals.     

Reviews

The expansion of the global economy and the governance deficit it has generated raise questions about the possibilities for regulating the practices of participants in global production networks. This paper focuses on the regulation of industrial relations in Cambodia's textile and garment industry – a unique ensemble of state, trade union, private sector and international institutions that is promoted as a “fair model of globalisation.” We track the trajectory of Cambodia's industrialisation and insertion into the global economy over three interrelated phases: first, the beginnings of export-orientated garment production in the mid- to late 1990s; secondly, the promotion of Cambodia as an “ethical producer” from 1999; and, thirdly, privileging “competitiveness” in global production networks over labour compliance for its advantage. In doing so we centre our analysis on the complex intertwining of global production, the genesis of the unique ensemble of actors in Cambodia and the anomaly of Cambodia's labour movement.     

Reviews

Adopting a comparative historical approach informed by Marxist theory of imperialism, this study demonstrates the tendencies toward conflict between past and present rising and declining imperial powers. In the present context the study compares and contrasts two types of imperialism: a highly militarised US empire based on wars and territorial occupations and a market-driven Chinese empire driven by an alliance of state, foreign and national capital. Both imperial systems are influenced by “overseas” diasporas. In the case of the USA, an internal Zionist power configuration loyal to Israel subordinates Washington's Middle East policies to the economically prejudicial interests of a militarist state (Israel), while in the case of China the overseas diaspora facilitates and promotes investments and trade enhancing China's dynamic economic expansion. The emerging contradictions between and within the two conflicting styles of empire building, point to the need for a social transformation, enhancing the power and position of labour against the Zionised state and speculative economy in the USA and the new plutocrats in China.     

Reviews

Books reviewed:
Burns Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru
Socolow The Women of Colonial Latin America
Dunkerley Americana. The Americas in the World, around 1850 (or 'Seeing the Elephant' as the Theme for an Imaginary Western)
Wasserman Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico. Men, Women and War
Alonso Between Revolution and the Ballot Box. The Origins of the Argentine Radical Party
Peard Race, Place, and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine
Iverleigh The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival
Dore and Molyneaux Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America
Ehlers Silent Looms: Women and Production in a Guatemalan Town
Townsend, Zapata, Rowlands, Alberti and Mercado, eds Women and Power: Fighting Patriarchies and Poverty
Higgins and Coen Streets, Bedrooms and Patios: The Ordinariness of Diversity of Urban Oaxaca
Vila Crossing Borders – Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the US–Mexico Frontier
Rochín and Valdés Voices of a New Chicano/o History
Flores From Bomba to Hip-hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity
Early and Peters The Xilixana Yanomami of the Amazon: History, Social Structure, and Population Dynamics
Díaz-Briquets and Pérez-López Conquering Nature: The Environmental Legacy of Socialism in Cuba
Hall Amazonia At The Crossroads: the Challenge of Sustainable Development
Clifton The Politics of Telecommunications in Mexico: Privatization and State-Labour Relations, 1982–1995     

Evangelical Protestantism and Indigenous Populations1

Abstract – The response of the Indian population to Protestant proselytism is neither passive nor impotent, and far from playing a destructive or reactionary role, Protestantism provides an unsuspected combination of identity markers and modernity, thus occupying a space left open by Catholicism.