Description
Book SynopsisAs cultural mediators, Chamelco's market women offer a model of contemporary Q'eqchi' identity grounded in the strength of the Maya historical legacy. This book describes how market women gain social standing as mediators of sometimes conflicting realities, harnessing the forces of global capitalism to revitalize Chamelco's indigenous identity.
Trade Review"
Maya Market Women: Power and Tradition in San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala is an excellent modern ethnography of the Maya that takes globalization into account without losing any of the unique ethnographic insights of traditional case studies. Using a very descriptive writing style, S. Ashley Kistler gives an up-to-date analysis of Maya women who use modern marketing and exchange to maintain local social and cultural institutions such as religious brotherhoods, ritual co-parenthood, and folkloric performances."
--Rachel Corr, author of
Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes "This book has much to offer those interested in embodied memory, perception, and action. There are tantalizing strands for explorations of performance theory, language praxis, and spatial associations and resonances. It succeeds in its aim to elucidate the process by which Q'eqchi women entail capitalistic systems in their own projects of personhood and social institutions, and thereby maintain the cultural fabric. Indeed this ethnography displays the many meshed systems that have enabled the reemergence of Maya values onto the Guatemalan national scene."-
Western Folklore "A delightfully readable and illuminating ethnography of the Maya market women of Chamelco. . . . It offers opportunities for reflection and debate about how cultural and economic practices work in tandem."--
Journal of Anthropological Research"Kistler not only describes the daily lives of vendor women, she captures the broader contexts of their lives as they participate in local community politics, consider national-level Maya cultural movements, and confront typical non-Maya patriarchal forms of decision making and power that Mayas throughout Guatemala experience."-
American Anthropologist
