Ethno- and Historical Geographic Studies in Latin America: Essays Honoring William V. Davidson (review)

The essays in this lovingly edited festschrift honor Louisiana State geographer William Davidson. Davidson's still very active academic life has had a variety of profound, direct and indirect impacts on our discipline. The essays in this volume cover themes related to his life's work in Central America and beyond, and also demonstrate the "state of the art" of what can fairly be called the Berkeley–Baton Rouge school of Latin Americanist cultural and historical geography.

The introduction (by Davidson's first and last doctoral students, Peter Herlihy, and Craig Revels, and his Baton Rouge colleague Kent Mathewson) provides an overview of Davidson's influences, from his childhood in small town Arkansas, to his education at what is now Rhodes College, his first trip through Latin America in the summer of 1963, and his graduate education at Memphis State and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. In Wisconsin, he took advantage of course work with a cadre of Latin Americanists both in both Madison and in Milwaukee to formulate a field research project in the Bay Islands of Honduras; this project resulted in a book and in a research agenda which was to make Davidson the discipline's foremost expert on that country. During his long tenure (1975-2002) as a faculty member at LSU Davidson supervised 36 graduate students, led many field trips, and had an important impact on the discipline, particularly in the subfield of ethnogeography. The introductory essay is a must read for everyone interested in the intellectual history (and sociology of knowledge) of Latin Americanist geography.

Half of the chapters focus directly on processes of ethnicity and identity. Joby Bass argues for the importance of environmental factors in serving as markers for ethnic identity, using the Garífuna of Belize as a case example. Laura Hobson Herlihy explores the subtleties of the deployment of socioracial claims to ethnic identity in the Honduran Mosquitia. Mark Bonta examines the "spatial identity" of the Olancho region of eastern Honduras. Craig Revels documents the persistence of the cultural legacy of English-speaking Mahogany cutters who inscribed place names on the cultural landscape of northern Honduras, while Kent Mathewson explores the characteristics of a tri-racial hybrid ethnic group, the Montubios of Ecuador. These essays highlight the variety and contingency of ethnic processes and will be of special interest to anyone undertaking projects in ethnogeography or participatory mapping.

Two chapters demonstrate the importance of dooryard gardens as providing a linkage between identity and place. Herlihy and Frederick Wiseman deploy archival and field research to argue the significance of Maya dooryard orchard-gardens as providing spatial anchors, a factor that created a challenge for Spanish colonial resettlement policy. Derek Smith argues for the contemporary salience of dooryard gardens as conditioning the efforts of Mayangna populations in Nicaragua to reclaim their homelands. More work on the role of gardens in developing individual and group linkages to place and territory is clearly called for.

As against these studies of local and regional identity, Miles Richardson examines religious icons - "dark Christs and brown Virgins" and argues that, rather than reflecting the persistence of indigenous culture, or being simply the artifacts of smoky church interiors, they rather are the product of more universal, existential concerns. He bases his argument in part on their geographical distribution far beyond any specific ethnic or racial group. Of course, an item of material culture may both reflect universal concerns as well as be deployed as part of a claim of ethnic identity.

Settlement patterns provide another theme for three of the chapters. Ben Till- man examines the variations of plaza landscapes of Honduran towns, and shows that many vary from a standardized grid-pattern model. Taylor Mack shows how the abandonment of the colonial...