Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians. Volume Six: Ethnology (review)

Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians. Volume Six: Ethnology. Edited by John D. Monaghan, with the assistance of Barbara W. Edmonson. Victoria R. Bricker, general editor. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. viii + 340 pp., preface, maps, charts, tables, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth.)

The Handbook of Middle American Indians, comprising sixteen volumes published between 1964 and 1976 under the direction of Robert Wauchope, certainly ranks among the great modernist achievements of anthropology: an encyclopedic review of what was known at the time about Mesoamerican cultures past and present. But much has changed since the first Handbook volumes were published, both in terms of real world circumstances and anthropological approaches to representation. Nowhere is this more evident than in cultural anthropology, a field that over the last twenty years has been wracked by intense epistemological angst. Compared to the contributions in the original Handbook, ethnographers today are apt to view culture (when they dare to use that term) as more diffuse, more laden with power relations, and as much a product of anthropological constructions as objective documentation. In this light, John Monaghan observes that the original Handbook "exudes a confidence and sense of purpose that is often lacking today" (3). To the credit of its editors and contributors, the current volume manages to engage recent disparate developments in the field while also subtly reifying the enduring importance of ethnographic documentation.

The volume is divided into two parts that are preceded by a brief preface and an introduction. The first section presents topical syntheses of Mesoamerican social organization, religion, and politics; the second section covers anthropological trends in seven ethnogeographic regions. The three chapters of part 1 do a fine job of mapping the terrain of recent studies and complicating the neat categorizations of the original Handbook. Eileen Mulhare shows how dramatically local social organization has changed since the 1960s: "classic" institutions such as the cargo system occupy a much reduced role in many native communities; the boundaries of communities themselves have become increasingly blurred in this age of transnationalization; and ethnicity has come to replace community as the dominant trope in cultural anthropology. Mulhare convincingly relates these changes in practice and perspective to increasingly global flows of people, products, and ideas.

John Monaghan's chapter on religion reflects an understanding of Mesoamerican spirituality that is more complex than the rigid schemes of a previous generation allowed. In focusing on idiosyncrasies, theological links between diversity and unity, the complex articulation of surface images and underlying meaning, and creative performance (as opposed to canonical recitation), Monaghan rejects broad categorical generalizations. At the same time, he does find salient themes that appear in slightly different configurations throughout the region, including (at the more "traditional" end of the spectrum) notions of a reciprocal covenant between humans and cosmic forces and (at the more postmodern extreme) a fluidity of contemporary religious identity as seen in Protestant conversions.

Perhaps the most dramatic changes in indigenous Mesoamerica over the last thirty years involve forms of political activism, a topic covered in the chapter by Howard Campbell. Campbell begins by examining the ethnic complexity of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and the role of its enigmatic and charismatic leader, Subcomandante Marcos. He then turns to the dramatic rise of pan-Maya cultural activism in Guatemala following that country's civil war, highlighting latent contradictions between national ideology and local practice. Finally, Campbell presents a summary of his own work with Zapotec peoples of Oaxaca, a fascinating case of shifting alliances between students, workers, and ethnic nationalists. Campbell explicitly rejects the notion that "revolution, nationalism, and electoral politics" are opposed, seeing them rather "as a gamut of overlapping possibilities available to Mesoamerican Indians" (61). While he has a much different end in mind, Campbell concludes by echoing the progressive optimism of the original Handbook: "there is much hope for a better life for Mesoamerican peoples in the future...