Description
Book SynopsisAssessing key questions such as who the foreigners and outsiders in ancient Maya societies were and how was the foreign a generative component of identity, Foreigners Among Us reassess the arrival of foreigners as part of archaeological understandings of Pre-Columbian Maya and questions not only who these foreigners might have been but who were making such designations of difference in the first place.
Drawing from identity studies, standpoint theory, and ideas on alterity, Foreigners Among Us highlights the diverse ways being foreign was constituted, imitated, and marked from quotidian practices of making corn tortillas to ceremonial acts between king and captive and their memorialization in scenes on sculpted stone monuments. Rather than treat the foreign as axiomatically determined by geographical distance or fixed at birth, the book considers the foreign as much performed as inherited. It examines practices of captivity, cuisine, body
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction, Chapter 2 Tropes of the Foreigner: From Famous Royals to Humble Migrants, Chapter 3 Captive Performances: Spectacles and the Everyday, Chapter 4 Cuisines and the Relational Making of People, Chapter 5 Pilgrimages to Foreign Places and the Acts of Becoming, Chapter 6 Looking In From Afar: Representations of Mayas, Chapter 7 Conclusion, References.
