Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica

Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica PDF Author: Paloma Martinez-Cruz
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816538506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Paloma Martinez-Cruz argues that the medicine traditions of Mesoamerican women constitute a hemispheric intellectual lineage that continues to thrive despite the legacy of colonization. Martinez-Cruz asserts that indigenous and mestiza women healers are custodians of a knowledge base that remains virtually uncharted. The few works looking at the knowledge of women in Mesoamerica generally examine only the written—even academic—world, accessible only to the most elite segments of (customarily male) society. These works have consistently excluded the essential repertoire and performed knowledge of women who think and work in ways other than the textual. And while two of the book’s chapters critique contemporary novels, Martinez-Cruz also calls for the exploration of non-textual knowledge transmission. In this regard, the book's goals and methods are close to those of performance scholarship and anthropology, and these methods reveal Mesoamerican women to be public intellectuals. In Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica, fieldwork and ethnography combine to reveal women healers as models of agency. Her multidisciplinary approach allows Martinez-Cruz to disrupt Euro-based intellectual hegemony and to make a case for the epistemic authority of Native women. Written from a Chicana perspective, this study is learned, personal, and engaging for anyone who is interested in the wisdom that prevailing analytical cultures have deemed “unintelligible.” As it turns out, those who are unacquainted with the sometimes surprising extent and depth of wisdom of indigenous women healers simply haven’t been looking in the right places—outside the texts from which they have been consistently excluded.

Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica

Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica PDF Author: Paloma Martinez-Cruz
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816538506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book

Book Description
Paloma Martinez-Cruz argues that the medicine traditions of Mesoamerican women constitute a hemispheric intellectual lineage that continues to thrive despite the legacy of colonization. Martinez-Cruz asserts that indigenous and mestiza women healers are custodians of a knowledge base that remains virtually uncharted. The few works looking at the knowledge of women in Mesoamerica generally examine only the written—even academic—world, accessible only to the most elite segments of (customarily male) society. These works have consistently excluded the essential repertoire and performed knowledge of women who think and work in ways other than the textual. And while two of the book’s chapters critique contemporary novels, Martinez-Cruz also calls for the exploration of non-textual knowledge transmission. In this regard, the book's goals and methods are close to those of performance scholarship and anthropology, and these methods reveal Mesoamerican women to be public intellectuals. In Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica, fieldwork and ethnography combine to reveal women healers as models of agency. Her multidisciplinary approach allows Martinez-Cruz to disrupt Euro-based intellectual hegemony and to make a case for the epistemic authority of Native women. Written from a Chicana perspective, this study is learned, personal, and engaging for anyone who is interested in the wisdom that prevailing analytical cultures have deemed “unintelligible.” As it turns out, those who are unacquainted with the sometimes surprising extent and depth of wisdom of indigenous women healers simply haven’t been looking in the right places—outside the texts from which they have been consistently excluded.

Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica

Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica PDF Author: Rosemary A. Joyce
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292740654
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Gender was a fluid potential, not a fixed category, before the Spaniards came to Mesoamerica. Childhood training and ritual shaped, but did not set, adult gender, which could encompass third genders and alternative sexualities as well as "male" and "female." At the height of the Classic period, Maya rulers presented themselves as embodying the entire range of gender possibilities, from male through female, by wearing blended costumes and playing male and female roles in state ceremonies. This landmark book offers the first comprehensive description and analysis of gender and power relations in prehispanic Mesoamerica from the Formative Period Olmec world (ca. 1500-500 BC) through the Postclassic Maya and Aztec societies of the sixteenth century AD. Using approaches from contemporary gender theory, Rosemary Joyce explores how Mesoamericans created human images to represent idealized notions of what it meant to be male and female and to depict proper gender roles. She then juxtaposes these images with archaeological evidence from burials, house sites, and body ornaments, which reveals that real gender roles were more fluid and variable than the stereotyped images suggest.

Ancient Maya Women

Ancient Maya Women PDF Author: Traci Ardren
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759100107
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
The flood of archaeological work in Maya lands has revolutionized our understanding of gender in ancient Maya society. The dozen contributors to this volume use a wide range of methodological strategies--archaeology, bioarchaeology, iconography, ethnohistory, epigraphy, ethnography--to tease out the details of the lives, actions, and identities of women of Mesoamerica. The chapters, most based upon recent fieldwork in Central America, examine the role of women in Maya society, their place in the political hierarchy and lineage structures, the gendered division of labor, and the discrepancy between idealized Mayan womanhood and the daily reality, among other topics. In each case, the complexities and nuances of gender relations is highlighted and the limitations of our knowledge acknowledged. These pieces represent an important advance in the understanding of Maya socioeconomic, political, and cultural life--and the archaeology of gender--and will be of great interest to scholars and students.

Women in Prehistory

Women in Prehistory PDF Author: Cheryl Claassen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812216028
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
During the 1960s, scholars constructed a model of cultural evolution in which men cooperated in the hunting of big game while women gathered plant food, "immobilized" by pregnancy and childcare. The essays in Women in Prehistory challenge this model as they reconsider women's social and economic roles.

The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico

The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico PDF Author: Lisa Sousa
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503601110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
This book is an ambitious and wide-ranging social and cultural history of gender relations among indigenous peoples of New Spain, from the Spanish conquest through the first half of the eighteenth century. In this expansive account, Lisa Sousa focuses on four native groups in highland Mexico—the Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mixe—and traces cross-cultural similarities and differences in the roles and status attributed to women in prehispanic and colonial Mesoamerica. Sousa intricately renders the full complexity of women's life experiences in the household and community, from the significance of their names, age, and social standing, to their identities, ethnicities, family, dress, work, roles, sexuality, acts of resistance, and relationships with men and other women. Drawing on a rich collection of archival, textual, and pictorial sources, she traces the shifts in women's economic, political, and social standing to evaluate the influence of Spanish ideologies on native attitudes and practices around sex and gender in the first several generations after contact. Though catastrophic depopulation, economic pressures, and the imposition of Christianity slowly eroded indigenous women's status following the Spanish conquest, Sousa argues that gender relations nevertheless remained more complementary than patriarchal, with women maintaining a unique position across the first two centuries of colonial rule.

Gale Researcher Guide for: La Malinche and the Voice of Mesoamerican Women

Gale Researcher Guide for: La Malinche and the Voice of Mesoamerican Women PDF Author: Kristina Downs
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
ISBN: 1535848162
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 8

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Book Description
Gale Researcher Guide for: La Malinche and the Voice of Mesoamerican Women is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes

Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes PDF Author: Margot Blum Schevill
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292787618
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
In this volume, anthropologists, art historians, fiber artists, and technologists come together to explore the meanings, uses, and fabrication of textiles in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia from Precolumbian times to the present. Originally published in 1991 by Garland Publishing, the book grew out of a 1987 symposium held in conjunction with the exhibit "Costume as Communication: Ethnographic Costumes and Textiles from Middle America and the Central Andes of South America" at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.

Painted Books and Indigenous Knowledge in Mesoamerica

Painted Books and Indigenous Knowledge in Mesoamerica PDF Author: Mary Elizabeth Smith
Publisher: Tulane University, Middle American Research Institute
ISBN:
Category : Indians of Mexico
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
The volume, an homage to Mary Elizabeth Smith, contains twenty-five essays that focus on the art and intellectual culture of ancient Mesoamerica as that culture is revealed primarily in painted books or "codices" of the native tradition. The authors explore aspects of indigenous knowledge, such as religion and ritual, calendrical systems, rulership, and spatial and historical reckoning. Cultures treated include the Toltecs, as well as the Aztecs, Miktecs, Zapotecs, and Maya in the precolumbian and colonial periods.

Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas

Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas PDF Author: Susy J. Zepeda
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053532
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Acts of remembering offer a path to decolonization for Indigenous peoples forcibly dislocated from their culture, knowledge, and land. Susy J. Zepeda highlights the often overlooked yet intertwined legacies of Chicana feminisms and queer decolonial theory through the work of select queer Indígena cultural producers and thinkers. By tracing the ancestries and silences of gender-nonconforming people of color, she addresses colonial forms of epistemic violence and methods of transformation, in particular spirit research. Zepeda also uses archival materials, raised ceremonial altars, and analysis of decolonial artwork in conjunction with oral histories to explore the matriarchal roots of Chicana/x and Latina/x feminisms. As she shows, these feminisms are forms of knowledge that people can remember through Indigenous-centered visual narratives, cultural wisdom, and spirit practices. A fascinating exploration of hidden Indígena histories and silences, Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas blends scholarship with spirit practices to reimagine the root work, dis/connection to land, and the political decolonization of Xicana/x peoples.

Letras Y Limpias

Letras Y Limpias PDF Author: Amanda V. Ellis
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816542686
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Letras y Limpias is the first book to explore the literary significance of the curandera. It offers critical new insights about how traditional medicine and folk healing underwrite Mexican American literature. Amanda Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by Mexican American authors such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire'ne lara silva, and more.