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Ethnohistory 49.2 (2002) 426-428



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Book Review

Interculturalidad e Identidad Indígena:
Preguntas Abiertas a la Globalización en México


Interculturalidad e Identidad Indígena: Preguntas Abiertas a la Globalización en México. Edited by Andreas Koechert and Barbara Pfeiler. Colleción Americana 4, Universit�t Bremen (Hannover, Germany: Verlag für Etnologie, 1999. 340 pp., introduction, bibliography.)

The sixteen articles in this book explore a set of related themes: the endangerment of indigenous languages and cultures and steps that could be taken to promote their preservation; the antiquity or recent emergence of ethnic consciousness among Mexican Indians; indigenous resistance to or integration into the political structures of colonial and independent Mexico; and the formulation of a critique of neoliberal globalization that would not only consider its effects upon indigenous peoples but would emerge from their perspectives upon themselves and others. The articles, more than half by German and Swiss scholars, were originally presented at sessions of the Second European Congress of Latinamericanists in Germany in 1998.

Almost half the authors write about the Yucatan Peninsula. Two authors, Barbara Pfeiler and Harald Mossbrucker, emphasize the centrality of the use of Maya language to the survival of Maya culture and identity, and they highlight the decline of that language as it is increasingly depreciated by the growing number of bilingual speakers and as the children of migrants to the peninsula's cities or tourist centers fail to learn the language [End Page 426] of their parents. Pedro Bracamonte y Sosa refutes the notion of a Pax Colonial on the Yucatan Peninsula. He finds the colonial Maya in permanent, often conflictive negotiation with colonial power, deploying when necessary a wide array of means to ensure their cultural and historical survival. In almost contrary fashion, Franco Savarino asks why Yucatan has been so tranquil, in recent times at least, when compared to the upheavals in which Mayas have been involved in Guatemala and Chiapas. The answer, he suggests, lies in the skillful fashion in which the dominant social class of Yucatan has, since the Caste War, integrated Mayas in a division of economic and political activity not nearly so onerous or marginalizing as that in other parts of Mexico and Central America.

Four authors in varying ways and depth explore the emergence of ethnic consciousness. Evidence from central Mexico (Elke Ruhnau) suggests that Nahuas had a kind of ethnic or national consciousness even before the Conquest. Other studies from central Mexico (Gunther Dietz) and the Yucatan Peninsula (Wolfgang Gabbert, Ueli Hostettler), in contrast, point to a more recent emergence of ethnic consciousness and to an only very recent ethnicization of the discourse of movements and struggles in which Indians have been involved. Both Gabbert and, in more concrete detail, Dietz highlight the importance in the second half of the twentieth century of a new indigenous "elite" whose social ascent was frustrated by economic crises in the 1980s and who found in a heightened ethnic consciousness a new role (and new jobs) in rural settings. Concerning the latter development Gabbert (Yucatan), Dietz (Michoacan), and Hostettler (Quintana Roo) interestingly highlight the role of schoolteachers and bilingual cultural promoters in the shaping of ethnically inflected struggles for meeting local needs.

With the exception of Marta Guidi's cogent, persuasive, and grim depiction of the decline of a Mixtec community in Oaxaca (one that specializes in sending people to work illegally in the United States), few of the case studies or data-based discussions in this volume really treat the subject of globalization. Rather, the polemical and programmatic contributions to the volume discuss globalization in more or less comprehensible terms. Elisabeth Steffens directly argues that there is an Indian alternative to homogenizing neoliberal globalization. Gunther Dietz appears implicitly to make a similar point when he argues that much of what has been written about the marginalization, integration, impoverishment, and political powerlessness of the Rarámuri, even what has been written by progressives trying to "help," woefully ignores the Rarámuri's own, more positive view of their circumstances and of the choices and...

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