Category: Excerpt

Excerpt from Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World

Posted on January 2, 2025December 18, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

January 2, 2025

This month, we’re highlighting a few of our open access books on our Open Arizona platform. These books are available to read for free!

In its earliest iteration funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, titles published in Open Arizona explored the histories and experiences of Indigenous and Latino groups in the southwestern United States, foundational areas of the Press’s long publishing history. In June 2022, thanks to a grant from the NEH, the Press was able to expand offerings in Open Arizona by adding twenty backlist titles in archaeology to the platform. These titles expand our understandings of the ancient Southwest and demonstrate the University of Arizona Press’s long-standing excellence in the field of archaeology. In Spring 2023, the Press published its first simultaneous print and open-access frontlist title.

In Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World, James Snead uses an exciting new approach—landscape archaeology—to understand ancestral Pueblo communities and the way the people consciously or unconsciously shaped the land around them. Snead provides detailed insight into ancestral Puebloan cultures and societies using an approach he calls “contextual experience,” employing deep mapping and community-scale analysis. This strategy goes far beyond the standard archaeological approaches, using historical ethnography and contemporary Puebloan perspectives to better understand how past and present Pueblo worldviews and meanings are embedded in the land. Read and excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

Flying into the Albuquerque International Airport on a clear day—which is almost any day in New Mexico—a traveler sees the landscape 25,000 feet below as a vast pattern of monumental landforms. The jet approaches from the east, paralleling the route of Interstate 40, and the southern Great Plains give way to the southernmost outcrops of the Rocky Mountains. From this height the basic facts of the land stand out literally in relief. The Pecos and Canadian Rivers sketch narrow, fertile valleys through flat, dry terrain interrupted by mesas and hills. The historic settlement of the region has clearly been influenced by topography and environment. Riverside towns such as Fort Sumner and Santa Rosa, with their associated farmland, are visible on either side of the airplane. The economic structures of modern society also stand out, from the circular imprints of irrigated fields drawing water from subsurface aquifers to the web of highways, roads, and tracks that carry people and goods around the state.

Social elements can be discerned in this tableau, too. The compact grids of small towns contrast with scattered dots that signal the occasional isolated ranch complex. Nearer Albuquerque there are neatly delineated ‘‘ranchettes,’’ a few developments with curvilinear plans, and then comes the strict geometry of the city itself. Each layout reflects a different conception of domestic space. It is also possible to see how this built landscape has changed over time. In the southern distance the course of the nineteenth-century railroad parallels the jet’s path. An occasional shrunken village along the tracks contrasts mutely with the more prosperous communities linked by the interstate highway.

This aerial panorama conveys a great deal of information about modern society in the American Southwest. Yet looking out the airplane window, I find myself searching for a different landscape, one far more interesting to me than abstract patterns of economy and ecology. Looking north to the rugged country of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, I can often pick out places of personal significance—peaks I have climbed, side roads I have driven, and especially the valley of the Rio Sapello, where my family has owned land since the 1880s.

Thinking about the Sapello Valley brings to mind the history of the property, the names and lineages of the neighbors, and many more specific recollections, such as the sweet-sharp flavor of apples from the old trees around the pond. All these experiences are bound up in the physicality of the place, and those who know it well can remember and describe it even if they have been away for decades. To me that landscape is more immediate and perhaps more important than the larger-scale historical and geographic record passing beneath the jet’s wings. As the plane descends, I crane my neck and hope that the storm clouds building over the mountains will not block the view and thwart this colloquy between memory and place.

Excerpt from On a Trail of Southwest Discovery

Posted on December 13, 2024December 16, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

December 13, 2024

This month, we’re highlighting a few of our open access books on our Open Arizona platform. These books are available to read for free!

On a Trail of Southwest Discovery, edited by Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox, examines the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition, directed by Frank Hamilton Cushing, through the diaries of two participants who fell in love on the expedition: the field secretary, Fred Hodge—who became a major figure in early twentieth-century anthropology—and the expedition artist, Margaret Magill. Divided into three parts, the book’s first two sections chronicle the field operations of the expedition, while the third part describes the anthropological career of Hodge after the end of the expedition. This book is the third installment of a multivolume work by Hinsley and Wilcox on the Hemenway Expedition. The second installment, The Lost Itinerary of Frank Hamilton Cushing, and the first, The Southwest in the American Imagination, are also available on Open Arizona.

Read an excerpt from the first chapter of On a Trail of Southwest Discovery below.

“Terrible nightmare. Were the oysters to blame? Falling over precipices and facing revolvers all night and hollowing to the top of my voice (at least so the porter tells me).” Thus twenty-two-year-old Fred Hodge recorded the night of December 5, 1886, on the train from Baltimore to Rochester. The following day he traveled on to the family homestead of Frank Hamilton Cushing near Albion, in western New York State, where he met up with Cushing and his wife, Emily Tennison Magill Cushing (1859–1920), her sister Margaret Whitehead Magill (1865–1935), and three prominent Zuni men, Palowahtiwa, Waihusiwa, and Heluta. Less than a week later the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition—named for its Boston patron, Mary Tileston Hemenway (1820–94)—departed for Arizona Territory, with Hodge employed as personal secretary to director Cushing. Hodge had no way of knowing that the next two years in Arizona and New Mexico would become his introduction to the Southwest, to archaeological fieldwork, and ultimately to a half-century career at the institutional centers of American anthropology. He would also learn the risks of life on the edge in America—and the dangers of falling over personal and professional precipices.

Frederick Webb Hodge (1864–1956) was blessed with ninety-two years of life. Born in Plymouth, England, toward the end of the American Civil War, he passed away quietly in Santa Fe, New Mexico, ten years after the end of World War II. He arrived in America with his parents, Edwin and Emily Webb Hodge, and four siblings in 1872. His father (1831–1919) worked briefly as a coachman before finding a permanent position as a watchman with the U.S. Postal Department; the family soon settled in downtown Washington. Mr. Hodge became a naturalized American citizen in 1882, thereby conferring the same on his family. Emily Hodge (1833–1924) had been trained as a seamstress and taught her first-born daughter, Emlyn, that trade as well. Of the six Hodge children, only the youngest, Charles, was born in the United States. Emlyn and her sister, Evelina, eventually established a real estate and insurance office in the capital. Edwin fils went to Yale and Johns Hopkins Medical School, later becoming an army physician and working on yellow fever with Walter Reed. Charles attended Swarthmore and became a businessman. We know nothing of son Ernest. Third-born Fred grew up as a child in the middle, surrounded by family.

When he was fourteen Hodge went to work for the summer at the offices of Henry N. Copp, a Washington lawyer who specialized in the public lands of the American West. His publications—Copp’s Land-Owner: Real Estate and Land Law and The American Settler’s Guide: A Brief Exposition of the Public Land System— served as legal guides for investors and settlers regarding the operations of the General Land Office and the Department of the Interior. With his constantly updated manuals Copp stood at the center of the vigorous, often corrupt disposition of the nation’s public lands during the swashbuckling post–Civil War decades.

At the end of summer 1878, Fred expected to return to school, but Copp—who was also his school principal—advised him to drop out and continue working: “I think you’ll learn just as much in my office here as you would in school. . . . All you’re going to have [in school] is word analysis, or something like that,” he told the boy. Hodge ended up staying with Copp for five formative years (1878–83). Beginning as an office clerk, he was soon gathering information from federal bureaus for Copp’s magazines, editing and proofreading materials, and seeing publications through the entire printing process. In the course of his work the teen also was getting his first close-up look at the daily intricacies of business, publishing, and government practices. But he was developing higher ambitions too. While he never entered high school or finished any formal schooling, Hodge enrolled in night classes: first at Arlington Academy, a one-man operation, then in the “science course” at Columbian University (later part of George Washington University). His main interest was topographic drafting, because he dreamed of fieldwork under John Wesley Powell with the new U.S. Geological Survey, formed in 1879. But he also made time to study the skill that would open his career: stenography.

Excerpt from “Heritage in the Body”

Posted on December 5, 2024October 8, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

December 5, 2024

Through storytelling, ethnography, and interviews, Heritage in the Body: Sensory Ecologies of Health Practice in Times of Change, by Kristina Baines, examines the links between health and heritage in times of change. Using a series of case studies, anthropologist Baines tells the intimate stories of how Indigenous Maya and Garifuna Belizeans—both in Belize and in the United States—navigate macro-level processes such as economic development, climate change, political shifts, and global health crises in the context of changes in their own lives.

Employing an embodied ecological heritage (EEH) framework, Baines explores the links between health and heritage as a fluid series of ecological practices. Health and wellness are holistically defined and approached from a phenomenological perspective. Baines focuses on how sensory experiences change the body through practice and provides insights into community-driven alternatives as a means to maintain and support happy, healthy lives. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

“CHANGE IS GONNA COME”

Accepting the inevitability of change can be seen as equal parts ambivalence and pragmatism. Whether people like it or not, change happens, and they must prepare for the inevitable and roll with the punches. People negotiate changes in subtle ways, both preempting and responding to the changing conditions of their lives. It is this perspective that guided the decision-making of many of the Maya community members I have worked with, exemplified by the quote in the opening vignette about how the road was both good and bad and the next part of the assessment from the person who said it, a former alcalde: “Well, it’s coming.” There is an element of inevitability or personal powerlessness when it comes to individual experience of large-scale changes. That said, however, Belizean communities have been unusually successful in many ways when it comes to accepting seemingly inevitable development changes: notable examples include the public burning of genetically modified corn seed to avoid its introduction into the country and the failure of international fast-food chains to open successful branches in Belize.

In the popular narrative, the effects of change on Indigenous communities can be oversimplified to evoke pictures of a cultural and physical genocide. There are certain truths to reckon with in this assessment; however, while the negative effects of climate change and global development processes on Indigenous and other marginalized groups are well-documented, so too are examples of resilience and adaptive practices among the communities impacted by these changes. It is my hope that this book will go some distance in illuminating this resilience without minimizing the real challenges these communities face, both in their histories and in their everyday lives. Change need not necessarily be embraced or feared; it simply is a part of life, with moments of increased dimensions and intensities. Perhaps this moment, the “Anthropocene,” as it has been termed in recent years, is one of these times of intensification.

EMBODIED ECOLOGICAL HERITAGE

The effect of changes on individuals, of course, is more than a series of clichés, whatever truth they may contain. As I asked people about their health, I noted that answers increasingly included how changes across multiple dimensions—spatial, temporal, ecological—had manifested in individual bodies. People had moved for work, gone to college, changed their farming practices, and stopped drinking herbal medicines—for example—and they felt the impact of these changes in their bodies. With my ongoing ethnographic work guided by the embodied ecological heritage (EEH) framework, I have sought to capture how Indigenous Belizeans have navigated these ever-present environmental and economic changes throughout their lived experience. Embodied ecological heritage kept my focus on the role of heritage, traditional ecological practices, and, more specifically, on how the individuals and communities I studied maintained healthy lives. People spoke about the maintenance and loss of “traditions” and of what it meant to be Maya or to be Garifuna in the context of changing practices. While heritage should not be conceptualized as a static concept, it brings with it a sense of continuity, in which the past informs individual and group identity, which was helpful to community members in the context of change.

I developed the EEH framework in 2011 during my first long research period, living in Santa Cruz, a small, primarily Mopan Maya village in southern Belize. The way that community members spoke about and conceptualized their health was intimately connected to how they spoke about “being Maya” or about participating in traditional ecological practices. The relationship between health and what the Maya community members defined as heritage practices existed on many levels and incorporated ideas about food, work, and education. The connections were simultaneously physical, mental, and social, with the healthy body described as that which could work and grow and prepare food in the traditional way. Their lived experience could be understood as EEH. This lens is useful describing health, particularly in communities that are not fully steeped in the legacy of Cartesian dualism. It is complementary to more politicized, critical health perspectives, which highlight structural forces and impacts on health. Embodied ecological heritage is an important intervention in this perspective in that it allows individual sensory experience to be understood in the context of both the physical and the social, which is an aspect of health understanding that receives little attention. Bodies change through everyday practices, and these changes matter for health. Embodied ecological heritage guides the understanding and explanation of these changes, illuminating the role of heritage practices in the maintenance of health.

Embodied ecological heritage brings together seemingly disparate theories about the ways in which anthropologists have historically understood bodies and bodily practice. Phenomenology seeks to capture “being in the world”—the lived and embodied experience, felt through action or practice. This perspective has been set in contrast with more cognitive theoretical orientations, which aim to capture the internal structures of the mind and how they classify external factors they encounter. In my work, and through the development of EEH, I argue that these orientations need not be in opposition. Through a focus on how sensory experiences change the body (including the brain), EEH reveals how phenomenological and cognitive perspectives can coexist. Cognitive phenomenology as a theoretical orientation shows heritage is not static, not a list of traditional plants or foods, not simply knowledge stored in the brain; rather, it is something that is carried in the body. Embodied ecological heritage is a grounded theory: people speak about their heritage in terms of practice, or what they do with their bodies, and how those practices relate to how they feel. The language of sensory experiences—the smells, tastes, sounds, and feelings of doing and being in the world—is rich with connections to tradition, to heritage identity, to health. Documenting and understanding how these connections happen and how they form a critical way of not only being well in, but also in thinking about, the world is vital.

Excerpt from Embodying Biodiversity

Posted on November 27, 2024December 4, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

November 27, 2024

Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty, by Terese Gagnon, harnesses a myriad of methodologies and research spanning multiple continents. This volume delves into the power of everyday forms of biodiversity conservation, motivated by sensory and embodied engagement with plants. Through an array of interdisciplinary contributions, the authors argue that the vast majority of biodiversity conservation worldwide is carried out not by large-scale, hierarchical initiatives but by ordinary people who cultivate sensory-motivated, place-based bonds with plants.

Acknowledging the monumental role of everyday champions in tending biodiversity, the contributors write that this caretaking is crucial to countering ecological harm and global injustice stemming from colonial violence and racial capitalism. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

I recently had a flashback of refugia. The memory was intimate, painful, and brimming with agrobiodiversity. The vivid image was triggered when I heard an ophthalmologist say the word “scarring.” She was gazing into my eyeball, and her assistant diligently wrote down my maladies. As a participant observer, I had, five years earlier, written my own field note after hacking into the soil with a sickle: “As I chopped at the dirt, some dirt flew in my eye. And it made me think almost immediately about what was in the dirt—were there any chemicals in it that I should be worried about?”

I remained silent as this memory passed through my mind, and my silence yielded the unintended consequence of no further investigation by the ophthalmologist despite the everyday hypothesis that was now spinning in my head: Those agrichemicals did something to me. Agrichemicals do a lot of things to a lot of bodies of people who rarely complain but frequently wonder about them. Agrichemicals contaminate soils that plants nonetheless find ways to grow in. From 2015 to 2020, I conducted fieldwork in and around Chalatenango, a rural northern region of El Salvador, where agrobiodiversity is found in small subsistence farms, and where farmers narrate and remember stories of agrichemicals entering the region. My flashback of refugia is not traumatic, because it is overpowered by the intimacy of cultivating maíz capulin (capulin corn) and maíz blanco (white corn) from soil that was and will continue to be contaminated with agrichemicals. It was one fleeting reassembly of refugia, memory, and embodiment.

This chapter is concerned with epistemic entanglements amid the everyday farming practices of subsistence corn farmers who live in, emigrate from, and send parcels to and from rural El Salvador. I first provide some context regarding the transnational and affective processes implicated in this agrarian assemblage, and then describe a minor intervention that slices, pokes, and pulls at imbricated knowledges therein. Findings from this small and nongeneralizable process concern soil chemistry in relation to local farming techniques, calling attention to epistemic entanglements in the material world of subsistence farmers, as well as the methods that social scientists rely on to examine them.

Corn and a Rural Salvadoran Diaspora

In the creation narrative of the Popol Vuh, grandmother Xmucane grinds white corn and yellow corn to make the flesh of the first humans. Corn is also the plant that Xmucane’s grandchildren (Hunahpu and Xbalanque) use to provide a sign to their grandmother of their death and life before they embark on their journey to Xibalba (Tedlock 1996). While this narrative is almost never discussed among the subsistence farmers with whom I farmed corn in Chalatenango, its absence did not preclude our kneeling before every planted seed and manipulating the terrain to aid its growth in the twenty-first century.

In the second decade of this twenty-first century, the harvested corn will be brought to a Chalateca grandmother, who will compile maíz blanco seeds into a woven sack, which she will send to her migrant kin living in Colorado. She will send them by means of a courier, who will examine them for narcotics before packing them into a polypropylene-lined carboard box, which is one of multiple layers of protection for what will soon become airborne corn seeds. Eventually, the corn seeds will be stripped back down as an isolated parcel presented to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent in Houston who wants to know what this is. The corn seeds will be used to make atoll or nixtamalized tortillas in a place far away from the location in which the corn was grown. If I turn on a tape recorder and ask the parcel’s recipient questions about why she requested the seeds, she might start by making comparisons between nation-states, people, sounds, and spaces. She might also perform nostalgia for my audio recorder. If in Chalatenango I ask her father to show me how he cultivates maíz blanco, he may choose to show me only parts of the process. He might secretly set fire to the weeds, producing an ash residue on the topsoil, after I leave because he knows that gringos do not like it when campesinos use fire to farm their food. He will smother his testimony simply because I am present, watching and observing (McKinnon 2016). The farmer and I might later talk until we are lost in wonder about what is really happening in the soil beneath our feet from which the maíz blanco grows. We might again kneel down on the soil before each seed in the coming rainy season, an act that clears the weeds but nonetheless causes us to genuflect before these signs of life and death.

Excerpt from Savages and Citizens

Posted on November 25, 2024January 10, 2025 by Anissa Suazo

November 25, 2024

Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State, by Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, delves into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, showing how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.

With insights drawn from diverse global contexts and empirical research from Bolivia and Ecuador, this work advocates for the relevance of Indigenous studies within political science and argues for an ethnography of sovereignty in anthropology. Savages and Citizens makes a compelling case for the centrality of Indigenous perspectives to understand the modern state from political theory to international studies. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

The role of anthropology in exoticizing and “othering” Indigenous people has long been noted. For Franz Boas (1848–1942), widely considered to be the founder of modern U.S. cultural anthropology, anthropology was primarily concerned with Indigenous peoples of North America who had just been crushed militarily and dispossessed of their lands. His was an urgent task to collect material culture and record memory of a way of life before it was gone forever. This “salvage anthropology,” as Kahnawà:ke Mohawk anthropologist Simpson (2014) calls it, maintained a dualistic binary that kept a particular political order intact. Simpson (2018) refers to it as the grammar of Indigenous dispossession when analyzing why white people love Franz Boas. The politics of the U.S. then (as now) has little room for contemporary Indigenous peoples, and it is not without coincidence that Boasian anthropology is so much rooted in understanding an Indigenous past. The Indigenous of the past are no threat and are available to be romanticized.

British social anthropology as developed by Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) emerged in the context of a British Empire, which still sought to engage with living communities under the imperial yoke. Unsurprisingly, Malinowski functionalism looked to explain how contemporary societies continued to function explicitly not as vestiges of history. It is no coincidence that British social anthropology was concerned with the continued functioning of Indigenous peoples that it sought to absorb into an imperial state. This is not to say that both anthropologists were simply products of their time, for each was also unfashionably and explicitly antiracist as they and their students insisted on Indigenous peoples being understood in their own terms. But it would be naive to ignore the state formations in which their anthropology was produced and how it served—even when unwittingly– those state formations.

The severest critique is that anthropology was colonialism’s handmaiden (Asad 1973) and that anthropology itself produced an Indigenous subordinate alterity. However, this Indigenous alterity long predates even the earliest versions of Western anthropology. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003) sees anthropology as drawing on preexisting notions of the savage and, to be sure, developing them. For him, this “savage slot” is precisely what made the West conceivable and that, indeed, is a central thesis of this book: the existence of Indigenous peoples is precisely what makes the politically modern West imaginable, whether or not this is explicitly recognized by political actors. In turn, “anthropology belongs to a discursive field that is an inherent part of the West’s geography of imagination.”

There is a long tradition of anthropologists being concerned with the ways in which the state represents itself to its subjects (Bouchard 2011), what Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2001) call the “languages of stateness.” Anthropological studies analyze how the state is perceived through specific cultural lenses—how state practices are made manifest, performed, and given meaning (cf. Gupta and Sharma 2006, 277). The discipline is increasingly shifting its focus “toward state images and representations in research and theorizing” (Thelen, Vetters, and Benda-Beckmann 2017). Some examples of this are Fernando Coronil’s (1997), Alec Leonhardt’s (2006), and Michal Taussig’s (1997) work on the “magic” of the state; Clifford Geertz’s (1980) state as “theatre”; Begoña Aretxaga’s 2000 “ghostly” state; Akil Gupta’s (1995) “imagined” state; and Bruce Kapferer’s (1988) work on “myths” of state. These approaches are summarized by Aradhana Sharma and Akil Gupta (2006) when they write, “the anthropological project attempts to understand the conditions in which the state successfully represents itself as coherent and singular.”

A quite different anthropological approach moves beyond how the state is represented to people in an imagined or abstract form to look at the ways in which it is made manifest: Serena Tennekoon (1988) looks at how the state manifests through “rituals of development,” and Anya Bernstein and Elizabeth Mertz (2011) edited a special volume of PoLAR on bureaucracies (see also Ranta 2022). Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson (1999) look at the ways in which state presence is felt on borders, Townsend Middleton (2011) offers an ethnography of state surveys, and Brett Gustafson (2009a) looks at cartography. There has, however, been insufficient theorizing of stateness from Indigenous perspectives. Some anthropologists, such as Nancy Postero (2017) and Alpah Shah (2010), have looked at the rare examples of Indigenous states in Bolivia (2005–19) and Jharkhand, India, but to date there has been little work in anthropology that considers not only what the state looks like from an Indigenous perspective but how the state creates those spaces where Indigenous cultures exist, that is, where state formation produces indigeneity as a meaningful political category.

Most studies of the state draw explicitly or implicitly on a Weberian idea of a state as a bounded sovereign entity encompassing a clearly defined territory with a monopoly of violence over that territory and governed by a rational bureaucracy (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). Yet few scholars have interrogated the boundary of that (idealized) state or considered, not only what formations it produces beyond the boundary but, most importantly for our considerations, how formations beyond the notional limits of the state in themselves produce the entity we understand as being the state. This is a very different way of approaching the study of the state and departs from much of the anthropological tradition which has largely focused on representation of the state or everyday practices relating to it.

The work of James Scott (e.g., 1998, 2009, 2017) is a notable exception here, and he has shown how cultural forms and identities of people denoted as “Tribal” are themselves cultural forms of communities beyond the state, of people who explicitly reject the state and we draw heavily on his work. To express it at its simplest, our anthropological approach is not so much to see the state as a cultural form but to see how the state produces the spaces for political forms that are recognized as Indigenous. What makes them Indigenous per se is the ways in which they occupy a political space created by a particular state formation and contributed dynamically to that state formation. What we offer here is a model for understanding indigeneity not as sui generis but as cultural formations that occupy a specific political space. This avoids any kind of essentialization of Indigenous politics and sidesteps the tendency to see Indigenous cultures as historical “survivals” of a contact with Western (neo)colonization—sometimes described as living in the past, even in the “stone age”—to locate them in contemporary sovereignty-making. Indigenous peoples are neither atavistic nor static but dynamic actors in the construction of modern world politics.

Excerpt from Caracoleando Among Worlds

Posted on November 15, 2024December 4, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

November 15, 2024

Silvia Soto’s Caracoleando Among Worlds: Reconstructing Maya Worldviews in Chiapas provides an in-depth analysis of poetry, short stories, and one of the first novels written by a Maya Tsotsil writer of Chiapas alongside close readings of the EZLN’s six declarations of the Lacandon Jungle. Themes echoing ancestral connections, informing epistemologies, and sustaining cultural and spiritual practices emerge and weave the texts to each other. The work brings into the conversation literature that has been translated into English for the first time and places Maya writers of Chiapas in discussion with other Native American and Indigenous scholars.

This work shows how literature, culture, and activism intertwine, and offers a compelling narrative that transcends boundaries and fosters a deeper understanding of Maya identities and resilience. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

From the moment the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN or Zapatistas) burst into the public eye, it stated its position and vision as an organized guerrilla movement through the release of the First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle of January 1, 1994, published in its newly established paper, El Despertador Mexicano (Mexican Awakener), and made available online. The media surrounded the Zapatistas as they declared control of the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas and six other cities in the state of Chiapas (captured in the special coverage by Canal 6 de Julio), bombarding them with questions about their uprising, despite their position having already been clearly stated. In the years since this New Year’s uprising, Zapatistas have released six declarations and hundreds of communiqués stating the philosophy of the movement, giving rise to what they call the power of the word, which has allowed them agency in the narrative of their movement. As books, films, music, and art about the EZLN continue to be produced to capture their struggle, their stream of communiqués stating the position and direction of the movement grants them control of their histories.

The contemporary Maya literary movement of Chiapas unfolded alongside the EZLN’s initial steps of underground organizing, with Indigenous intellectuals at the time reframing the ways they related to state projects of Indigenismo. Enrique Pérez López (Tsotsil) (2008), former director of the Centro Estatal de Lenguas, Arte y Literatura Indígenas (State Center for Indigenous Languages, Art, and Literature, CELALI), refers to this period of time as a reawakening of Indigenous peoples of Chiapas. The strides made by this Indigenous intellectual movement coincided, too, with shifts in Mexican policy toward a neoliberal agenda; changes to Article 4 of the Mexican Constitution, recognizing the plurality of the state; and the state’s endorsement of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention 169, which recognizes Indigenous rights in addition to labor and economic rights. In the late 1970s, these Indigenous intellectuals (young men and women who had mostly formally trained as teachers) had begun organizing by engaging in a shared reflection on the current state of their communities. The focus of these intellectuals was on education, the rescue and teaching of histories, reading and writing, and song and art rooted in their Maya belief system. There was no initial systematic application of this vision; instead, they were simply a group of people coming together to reflect and dialogue on new possibilities in their own relationship to their Maya worldviews.

Thus, in the last four decades, these two movements have flourished parallel to each other, crossing paths in different stages along the way. Local languages, Maya and Spanish, are central to this process. Orality and the written word are the guiding forces in the articulation of their positions. Such action connects to the Nahuatl concept of in xochitl in cuicatl or floricanto (flower-and-song), which captures the way that poetry and poetry’s metaphors unlock the mysteries of life and dreams that are central to a Nahuatl worldview (León-Portilla 1990a, 75). The EZLN has strategically and powerfully used this approach to deliver its flowery word through the written, audio, and visual release of communiqués. This approach is captured in its fourth declaration—further developed in chapter 4—which declares that “the flower of the word will not die,” in relation to the war Zapatistas are waging in defense of the rights of Indigenous peoples of Mexico (EZLN 1996a, 1996b).

In this chapter I examine the poetry of three Maya writers. The first section of the chapter centers on four poems and the ways the poets engage with the writing process of the poetry, allowing the written word to take center stage: “Sts’ibujon: Yo escribo” (I write) by Tseltal poet Adriana del Carmen López Sántiz, from her poetry collection Jalbil k’opetik: Palabras tejidas (Woven words, 2005); “A’yej: Discurso” (Speech) by Tsotsil poet Andrés López Díaz, published in the anthology Sbel sjol yo’nton ik’: Memoria del viento (Memory of the wind, López Díaz, Díaz Ruiz, and López Díaz 2006); and both “Slikebal Kuxlejaltik: Creación” (Creation) and “Vu’un Li’oyunkutike: Soy los que Estamos Aquí” (I am the we who are here) by Tsotsil poet Enriqueta Lunez, from her poetry collection Yi’ Beltak ch’ulelaletik: Raíces del alma (Roots of the soul, 2007). The second section of the chapter engages with the oral deliverance of the poetry and the immediacy such an act carries in the production of the poetry by centering on four additional poems by the same poets and from the same publications: “Jun k’ak’al: Un día” (One day) and “Ta’lo xa: Basta” (Enough) by López Díaz, “K’unil lajel: Agonía” (Agony) by López Sántiz, and “Yavu: Lunario” (Lunary) by Lunez. The movement the work of these poets creates—and the reclamation of their role as orators and carriers of knowledge—recenters their presence in the world and sets forward new possibilities and new visions for the future. Such a position connects to the trajectories of the EZLN and its narratives of the insurgency, particularly regarding its vision of “a world where many worlds fit” (further developed in chapter 4), where the recognition of “different” is essential to the continuation of the collective.

I frame my analysis of the poetry in direct dialogue with the work of U.S. Native scholars of the last five decades, such as N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo). This analysis highlights the relationship between the role of language, the written and oral word, the interweaving of their stories to reveal their worldviews, and the reclamation of their place in history. These relations are always rooted to place (land) and time and are in continuous dialogue with one another. My analysis also brings into conversation the work of Indigenous and Indigenous studies scholars, such as Gloria E. Chacón’s (2018) concept of kab’awil or the double gaze, which addresses Indigenous writers’ search within their worldviews to reaffirm their presence as Indigenous peoples;
Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios’s (2019) concept of ts’íib, which decenters the Latin alphabet by placing other methods of recording knowledges alongside it; Elicura Chihuailaf Nahuelpan’s (Mapuche from Chile) (2009) concept of oralitor (oraliture), which underscores the ways textual narratives are informed by millennia-old oral traditions; and Miguel Rocha Vivas’s (2021) concept of “oralitegraphy,” which, in line with the work of Chacón and Chihuailaf, stresses the usage of multimedia in Indigenous scholarship, and the ways that textual, oral, and visual narratives are in constant dialogue in Indigenous knowledge production. The work of these poets also brings out the concept of caracoleando, which speaks of the movement the poetry creates, the production of new ways of being that are drawn from the old ways and in a constant process of change. Through my readings of the poetry, I ask the following questions: What are the central themes articulated by the EZLN and Maya writers of Chiapas? How do orality and writing, as well as the specific languages used, produce these central themes? As these poets move through the practices of orality and writing, I suggest that the central theme the poems address is this notion of presence, revealing new visions of Maya worlds that are not just about claiming a Maya identity but also about claiming a space to perform this Maya identity.

Silvia Soto is an assistant professor in Chicano and Latino Studies at Sonoma State University (SSU). She earned her doctoral degree from the University of California, Davis, in Native American Studies. Her research focuses on the contemporary Maya literary movement of Chiapas, Mexico, more specifically on concepts of identity formation, gender relations, and Maya cosmovisions. Soto has been the recipient of the postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in American Indian Studies.

Excerpt from Cold War Anthropologist

Posted on November 13, 2024December 4, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

November 13, 2024

Cold War Anthropologist: Isabel Kelly and Rural Development in Mexico, by Stephanie Baker Opperman, delves into distinct facets of Kelly’s international journey, with a particular emphasis on her involvement in cooperative programs aimed at fostering diplomatic relations with Mexico. Through this narrative framework, readers are immersed in a compelling exploration of Dr. Isabel T. Kelly’s (1906-1983) enduring impact on both the field of anthropology and the realm of international diplomacy.

This book is indispensable for historians, anthropologists, and individuals intrigued by the nuanced complexities of Cold War politics, presenting pioneering research at the intersection of history and anthropology. Opperman skillfully brings to light the previously untold narratives of Isabel Kelly, unveiling her influence on mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

In March 1952, Dr. Isabel Kelly attended the tenth annual meeting of the United States–Mexico Border Public Health Association (USMBPHA) in the northern Mexican state of Monterrey. The Pan American Sanitary Bureau (PASB) helped to establish the association “in order to foster understanding of public health needs and through mutual assistance to promote public and personal health along the United States– Mexico border.” The wartime alliance, however, did not easily transfer into postwar solidarity among health officials in the region. The meeting’s attendees included PASB director Fred Soper and secretary general Miguel Bustamante; USMBPHA president Wilton L. Halverson and secretary J. C. Ellington; U.S. health officers from the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas; Mexican health officers from the states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Sonora, and Tamaulipas; and “federal representatives of the health services of Mexico and of the United States.” Kelly served as a U.S. delegate to the meeting on behalf of the Smithsonian’s Institute of Social Anthropology (ISA). Beginning in 1943, the ISA established a series of cooperative agreements with the Mexican government to expand social science research in the country.

In summarizing her experience to her supervisors in Washington, D.C., Kelly acknowledged an air of tension that permeated the meetings. She commented, “It was clearly evident that the rapport between the representatives of the two nations was neither very close nor very warm.” Rather than working together to resolve common health problems along the border, she identified a “direct competition” between representatives as each side prioritized their own initiatives while giving less consideration to that of their counterparts. Many of the U.S. delegates could not understand Spanish and therefore, according to Kelly, felt “no obligation to sit through a paper in a foreign tongue.” They also expressed frustration that the Mexican representatives did not adhere to presentation time limits set by the organizing committee. Mexican delegates, in turn, voiced their exasperation with the association for designing the event without seeking their input on topics, formatting, or other cultural considerations. Kelly concluded that “far from fostering cordial relations between the two countries, it seems to have fostered a feeling of rivalry and to have intensified the local national inferiority complex. Under the circumstances, the meeting probably did more harm than good.”

Kelly’s report points to larger tensions within mid-twentieth-century relations between the two countries. After World War II, U.S. foreign policymakers attempted to exert “hegemonic influence through expertise.” State officials offered to educate their international counterparts in public health, industrial development, and modernization practices through development projects that aligned with U.S. culture. Arturo Escobar argues, “Development fostered a way of conceiving of social life as a technical problem.” Consequently, U.S. officials approached foreign relations from a position of authority, believing their technical knowledge to be superior to non-U.S. intellectuals. Rather than establishing reciprocal relationships with foreign diplomats, U.S. officials followed a top-down model of engagement. In contrast, Mexican officials hoped to shift postwar diplomatic dialogues away from U.S. exceptionalism toward a more inclusive approach that valued the technical knowledge and contributions of Mexicans and, more broadly, Latin Americans. As Kelly’s notes exemplify, the contradictions between these two styles of diplomacy resulted in heightened animosity between the representatives and consequently limited opportunities for collaboration.

Whereas other scholars focus on Kelly’s career as an archaeologist or briefly note her role on a particular anthropological project, the depth and breadth of her international work remains largely untouched. Yet her extensive experiences in Mexico in the decades immediately following World War II, as well as brief assignments in Bolivia and Pakistan, offer a distinct perspective on the changing nature of the relationship between anthropologists and technical cooperation programs during the Cold War. They highlight Kelly’s intentional efforts to combat professional gender bias and to amplify women’s voices in community studies. And they demonstrate the significant role that anthropology played in politicizing modernization programs aimed at assimilation. Although anthropologists working in rural areas spoke directly with community members to learn more about their health and economic needs, the data they collected confirmed for politicians a general call for state intervention. Consequently, decisions regarding project programming, funding, and desired outcomes were based almost entirely on the agendas of state, national, and international leaders rather than on the expressed needs of the local citizens.

Isabel Kelly’s international work grew out of her well-established career as an anthropologist and archaeologist in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. She was born in Santa Cruz, California, in 1906 and raised in a nurturing household that encouraged independence and intellectual thought. Both she and her younger sister, Evelyn, attended the University of California, Berkeley. Isabel graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1926 and remained at the school to pursue graduate study. She worked with some of the biggest names in the field, including Alfred L. Kroeber, Robert H. Lowie, Edward W. Gifford, and Carl O. Sauer, while researching her master’s thesis on northwestern California Indian art. After spending a summer conducting fieldwork with archaeologist Alfred V. Kidder in New Mexico’s Pecos Pueblo, she completed her own doctoral research on the Northern Paiute and Coast Miwok Indigenous cultures of Northern California. She earned her PhD in anthropology with a dissertation on the “Fundamentals of Great Basin Culture” in 1932. After graduation, she received funding from the National Research Council to conduct research among the Southern Paiute as a counterpart to her work on the Northern Paiute. While in the field, however, she received word that Kroeber and Sauer nominated her to lead an archaeological project in Sinaloa, Mexico. She moved to Mexico in 1935 to oversee the initial excavation of Sinaloa’s Culiacán and Chametla sites. After returning to the United States to lead Gila Pueblo’s excavations of the Hodges site, a Hohokam village in Tucson, Arizona, she again found her way to Mexico to continue working on excavations in Sinaloa, Jalisco, Colima, and Nayarit. She also expanded her reputation among intellectual circles in this period by publishing several research papers in academic journals and edited volumes.

This impressive list of accomplishments, particularly by a woman in what was still a male-dominated field, emphasizes Kelly’s determination to continuously learn and lead in anthropological and archaeological circles. Her strong nature, however, was not universally enjoyed. Marian E. Cummings, a photographer hired by Kroeber to accompany Kelly on an assignment in Jalisco, left the project early due to Kelly’s “constant complaining and bad disposition.” Kroeber, responding to Cummings’s resignation, wrote, “I am sure you will agree with me when I say that these unreasonable tensions in Isabel are the counterpart of the dynamic energy which causes her to be so grand and successful a scientist. Add the fact that she is over thirty, unmarried, and has never had a permanent job, and I think the psychology is understandable.” This quote is indicative of the prejudice against single, independent professional women during this period. Kelly regularly faced opposition to her strong will and staunch work ethic, even among her female collaborators. Regardless of how she came across to her colleagues, Kelly loved her work and became increasingly attracted to Mexico as a place to combine her passion for archaeological exploration and ethnographic fieldwork. She moved to the country permanently in 1939.

Nancy J. Parezo argues that contrary to the common belief that anthropology has historically been more open to women scholars than other fields, the influence of gender on power relations ensured that women have not always been treated as equals to their male counterparts. While many women “were determined that they be judged on the basis of their talents and merit alone,” they could not ignore the gender dynamics that kept them subservient to male leaders in the field. For her part, Kelly routinely pushed back against this norm, using correspondence, social occasions, and official reports to challenge her treatment as a female professional. She vocalized her dissatisfaction with often being mistaken for a diplomatic wife rather than a professional and advocated for more opportunities to work in the field as well as the classroom. She also encouraged young Mexican women to pursue degrees in anthropology and often hired her best female students to serve as her research assistants. All of these examples point to an intentional effort at capacity building for women who traditionally stayed home to provide domestic care for their families.

Kelly’s gendered experiences are also evident in her personal life. She maintained a close relationship with Bertha Harris, a U.S. librarian and cultural liaison who moved to Mexico City in 1941. Together, the two women worked, traveled, and shared a home that they co-designed on the outskirts of Mexico City. They were invited to events as a couple and hosted several parties of their own. These public expressions of their connectedness undoubtedly influenced how their U.S. and Mexican colleagues treated them, and after Bertha’s unexpected death in 1949, Kelly increasingly withdrew from public functions and social engagements. Instead, she focused all of her attention on work. Her research interests gradually shifted to follow the trajectory of women’s lives, from midwifery, curanderas, and maternal and child health to household dynamics, motherhood, and educational opportunities for working mothers. She recognized that she and her female students gained access to more domestic spaces than their male counterparts and utilized this advantage to learn more about the experiences, needs, and contributions of women in both domestic and community settings. She leveraged her position to document and record ideas related to morality, tradition, progress, and modernity as seen through the eyes of rural families. And her research clarified many discrepancies between official programming and individual interests as she found ways to bring women’s voices to the forefront of social welfare programs.

Excerpt from Kids in Cages

Posted on November 7, 2024January 10, 2025 by maryreynolds

November 7, 2024

Kids in Cages: Surviving and Resisting Child Migrant Detention, edited by Emily Ruehs-Navarro, Lina Caswell Muñoz, and Sarah Diaz, reveals the experience of child migrants in detention by the U.S. government. The authors in this volume approach the topic of child migrant detention from a range of perspectives. Some authors, particularly those who provide a legal perspective, chronicle the harms of detention, arguing that despite governmental assurances of child protection, detention is fundamentally a state-sanctioned form of violence. The social scientists in the volume have worked closely with detained youth themselves; in these chapters, authors highlight the ways in which youth survive detention, often through everyday acts of resistance and through the formation of temporary relationships. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction written by Ruehs-Navarro and Caswell Muñoz below.

In the early summer of 2019, installations began popping up across New York City. In front of the American Museum of Natural History, at a Williamsburg subway stop, and near the Google building in Manhattan, small chain-linked cages appeared overnight. Inside of them, mannequins laid supine and in fetal positions, covered by foil blankets, with tennis shoes sticking out of the bottoms. Passersby could hear the wails of children coming from the cages, real audio that had been secretly taken in a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facility. On top of the installations was a hashtag reading #NoKidsinCages (Bekiempis 2019).

These installations, promptly removed by city police, were part of an activist campaign, mobilized to decry a range of anti-immigrant policies put in place by the Donald Trump administration, not least of these the practice of holding migrant children in detention facilities and the zero-tolerance immigration enforcement policy, which separated migrant children from their parents. These activists were part of a diverse coalition that had been mobilized from across the country. In fact, in the previous summer, more than seven hundred demonstrations took place across the United States on June 30, 2018, with slogans such as “#EndFamilyDetention” and “Jails Are Not for Children.” From Huntsville, Alabama, to Chicago to Los Angeles, thousands of people took to the streets, admonishing the administration that “Families Belong Together” and decrying the fact that “ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] Cages Children.” It was a life-affirming demonstration, organizer Marj Halperin told a reporter with the Chicago Tribune: “Lives are truly at stake in this case . . . and the outpouring of people today around the country affirms that this nation supports immigrants” (Mahr, Briscoe, and Olumhense 2018).

It was certainly true that the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies prompted a groundswell of support for immigrants, and it was an inspiring reminder that many Americans cared passionately about the government’s treatment of immigrants and the welfare of children. But it was also a deeply ahistorical moment of protest, focused almost entirely on Trump and his administration, with little understanding of the history of child migration,the use of detention as a form of deterrence, and the culpability of various administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, in the inhumane treatment of immigrants. It is telling, in fact, that national backlash against Trump policies has all but disappeared during the Joe Biden administration, although the plight of immigrant children in the United States has not improved in meaningful ways. Indeed, from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, the administrations of the past four decades have implemented and cemented a convoluted and utterly dehumanizing system of child migrant detention that has swept up hundreds of thousands of young migrants. And, as is explored in chapter 1 of this volume, it was centuries of dehumanizing and racist policies and ideologies, which “othered” Black, Brown, and Native children, that laid the groundwork for this modern system.

Despite the fact that the public outcry in recent years has decreased significantly, it would be disingenuous to suggest that no one cares about child migrant detention today. In fact, throughout the construction and maintenance of the modern system of detention, there has been a steady push of activists, attorneys, and practitioners who have witnessed the harms done to migrant children and have worked to heal the traumas of detention and push back against the practice altogether. From attorneys who work to close detention centers, to psychologists who attempt to provide mental health care to young people who are detained, to religious leaders who rally their communities to create hospitality homes as alternatives to detention, there is a passionate cohort of people who care and actively engage in finding solutions. However, these individuals do not always agree on a way forward: On the one hand, some argue that the system of detention is so entrenched in larger national policies that, seeing no change in the immediate future, the best way forward is through harm reduction. That is, the goal of these advocates is to make detention child-friendly and trauma-informed. On the other hand, many activists and scholars argue that detention is so fundamentally destructive that there is no way forward in harm reduction. That is, the goal must be to pursue abolition from the system entirely.

It would be easy to engage this conversation on a theoretical level, but the reality is that there are young people today experiencing the humiliations, indignities, and violences of detention. As discussed throughout this volume, it is clear that detention does tremendous harm to these children, and they will bear the scars of their experiences throughout their lives. However, young migrants also find ways to survive. They build relationships with one another, even forging chosen families. They resist indignities, finding spaces and moments in which they might exert power against an overwhelming system. And they find compassion in those around them, surviving off the kindness of strangers. A conversation about the way forward would not be complete without the active centering of their stories and their voices.

In this volume, we present the voices, ideas, and experiences of young migrants and those who have fought with them and for them. Collectively, we agree that the system of child migrant detention is an unjust and dehumanizing institution and we believe in working toward a future in which migrant children are treated with dignity, humanity, and compassion.

Excerpt from “Plants for Desperate Times”

Posted on October 31, 2024October 8, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

October 31, 2024

Plants for Desperate Times: The Diversity of Life-Saving Famine Foods, by Paul E. Minnis and Robert L. Freedman, is an introduction to the diversity of plant foods that have saved millions of lives during lethal food shortages. While not a field guide, it addresses questions about what famine foods are and why they are important. The work highlights one hundred plants. Each entry includes the common and scientific names, botanical family, distribution, use as a famine food and other uses, and nutritional information. The species come from across the botanical kingdom, demonstrating the diversity of life-saving plants and the human ingenuity of making what might seem to be inedible plants edible. Unexpectedly, important famine foods include alternative uses of important crops as well as native plants.

Beyond a study of famine foods, the authors share why keeping an inventory of plant foods of last resort is so important. They help to build an understanding of little-known and underappreciated foods that may have a greater role in provisioning humanity in the future. As much as we may hope that severe food scarcity will never occur again, history suggests otherwise, and Plants for Desperate Times provides invaluable documentation of these vital foods. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

Severe food shortages have been one of the ever-present Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. We know of no part of the world where lethal food shortages have been absent. And famines have been all too frequent: thousands have been noted in historical records. Now, consider yourself and your ancestors. Had only one of your many direct lineal ancestors going back multiple generations not survived a severe food shortage before reproducing, you would not exist. Fortunately, one of the many ways to survive starvation has been the consumption of famine foods, many of which are plants. In short, nearly all of us likely owe our very existence to these unappreciated plants.

The value of famine foods extends far beyond our individual existence. The sum total of deaths due to severe food shortages throughout history surely is in the hundreds of millions. One study estimated that seventy-five million died during famines in the twentieth century alone. Millions can perish in a single episode due to mass starvation and associated diseases. The most famous famine, the An Gorta Mór or Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, led to around one million deaths as well as massive emigration. Parts of the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s witnessed horrendous starvation and suffering. It has been estimated that the Ukrainian famine (Holodomor) resulted in more than four million deaths, while the toll of starvation deaths in the North Caucuses and Upper Volga regions was two to three million, and Kazakhstan suffered 1.5 to 2.3 million deaths all at about the same time. The Chinese famine during the Great Leap Forward in the mid-twentieth century resulted in fifteen to thirty-three million or more deaths, probably the most lethal famine on record.

The effects of severe food shortages are far more than immediate starvation and death. There are often long-term, multigenerational health effects from starvation. Famines have psychological, social, demographic, and even genetic consequences. Irish society was altered for decades after the potato famine because of the scale of death and emigration. The Kazakh famine contributed to the permanent destruction of the traditional Kazakh herding economy and led to ethnic Kazakhs being a minority in their country until the 1990s.

What Are Famine Foods?

The common image of a famine food is of a little-used and perhaps even despised native plant eaten only during the most desperate times. There is in fact no universal definition of a famine food. In general, there are two views of what famine foods are. The most common term is restricted to those foods not normally eaten but are eaten only during food shortages. An alternative and broader definition is they are foods eaten during food shortages. The latter, broader category can include foods normally eaten but that are consumed in novel ways or in unusual quantities during shortages. Eating cultivated grains or fruits before maturity or increasing the consumption of wild plants that would normally be minor components of the diet are examples of this more expansive view of famine foods, the definition we will use here. For example, in a study in southern Ethiopia, the authors found that of the many wild food plants consumed during shortages, three-fourths were eaten in both times of normal rations and during food shortages, and only a quarter of the species were eaten only during times of food stress. Therefore, focusing simply on plants consumed only during shortages restricts our understanding of how people use plants to feed themselves when food stores are low or absent.

Likewise, the foods discussed here are not restricted to those consumed during famines, the most acute food shortages. There is a range of food shortages. At one end of a continuum of food shortage severity are annual hunger seasons. A hunger season is often anticipated as a time in the normal yearly cycle when food stocks are low. This is common when stored foods are depleted and before harvest, or at the end of a dry season before vegetation grows with the monsoons. At the other end of the continuum are actual famines. In between are a range of food shortages of varying severity but not as catastrophic as famines. Whatever the severity of the food shortage, humans have employed their ingenuity to cope with such events. Among the many strategies used is the consumption of foods not normally eaten or eaten in novel ways. Knowledge of famine foods is a part of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), quite often gained through centuries if not millennia of intimate and intense interaction with the environment. This information has value for helping during modern food shortages.

Why Are Famine Foods Important?

Regrettably, the study of famine foods has been an infinitesimally small niche of food scholarship. Literally thousands of books view food in other ways. Most often, it seems, we read about food as a sensory pleasure, as a focal point of social interaction, as a key component of cultural identity, and as a means to consume an optimal diet. These are all important ways of viewing food. By contrast, it is surprising how little academic and practical attention has been given to famine foods in light of how important these plants have been to humanity’s very existence.

This is unfortunate because the study of famine foods is not simply an obscure academic topic. Because we cannot predict the future with precision, we should prepare for contingencies. It should be obvious that knowledge of famine foods could help ameliorate the effects of food shortages in the future. Famine foods may not be the best tasting, the most nutritious, the most efficient to collect, or the easiest to prepare, but they can help keep people alive, the minimal and essential value of food.

There is a long history of organizations and individuals working to maintain the genetic diversity of poorly known or even nearly extinct crops and crop varieties. The Svalbard Seed Vault (“Doomsday Seed Bank”) in far northern Norway is only the most recent and well-publicized of the many genetic repositories around the world, including dozens in the United States. The concern about preserving the genome of crops has not extended to famine foods. There are famine foods, some of which are highlighted in this volume, that have the potential for greater use because of their favorable nutritional profile. Plants used as famine foods, almost by definition, are some of the most resilient food resources because they have to be available when other foods aren’t. Food resilience is a powerful characteristic when faced with an uncertain and dynamic future.

Excerpt from “Landscapes of Movement and Predation”

Posted on October 22, 2024October 23, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

October 22, 2024

Landscapes of Movement and Predation: Perspectives from Archaeology, History, and Anthropology edited by Brenda J. Bowser and Catherine M. Cameron, is a global study of times and places where people were subject to brutality, displacement, and loss of life, liberty, livelihood, and possessions. Extensive landscapes of predation emerged in the colonial era when Europeans expanded across much of the world, appropriating land and demanding labor from Indigenous people, resulting in the enslavement of millions of Africans and Indigenous Americans.

Landscapes of predation also developed in precolonial times in places where people were subjected to repeated ruthless attacks and dislocation. With contributions from archaeologists and a historian, the book provides a startling new perspective on an aspect of the past that is often overlooked: the role of violence in shaping where, how, and with whom people lived. Using ethnohistoric, ethnographic, historic, and archaeological data, the authors explore the actions of both predators and their targets and uncover the myriad responses people took to protect themselves. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

“Landscape” is a familiar term for archaeologists. Over the past few decades, the concept of a landscape of the past has grown beyond the idea of human adaptation to a natural environment to include the understanding that humans actively shape their physical, natural, and social environments (Whittlesey 2009). Postmodern approaches to landscape that became common in the 1990s ushered in an increased concern with meaning. Archaeologists following the phenomenological approach used their own senses to assign meaning to landscapes (Tilley 1994; Van Dyke 2007). Increasingly, especially in North America, archaeologists today work closely with Indigenous people to understand landscapes in their terms. Writing about the American Southwest, Severin Fowles (2010) notes that the passage of a law in 1990 concerning the return of Indigenous human remains (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) forced archaeologists to engage with and learn from the descendants of the Indigenous people they study (see also Lekson 1996, 891). Consulting Indigenous descendants about the spaces their ancestors inhabited and the meanings they gave to natural and cultural features is now common for archaeologists (Bernstein and Ortman 2020; Duwe and Preucel 2019; in this volume see Kater et al.; Marshall and Biginagwa; Seyler and Leventhal; and Silva). Furthermore, Indigenous scholars themselves explore the history and archaeology of their own people (for example, Kuwanwisiwma and Ferguson 2009, Schneider 2021).

People in the past lived in spaces that were, to them, rich in symbolism and full of memories of ancestors and their activities. But we suggest that there are few places in the inhabited world that were not occasionally touched by violence (Keeley 1996, 3–24; Kim and Kissel 2018, 1–2; LeBlanc and Register 2003, 1–22). Our characterization of landscapes of predation is based on the scale of the violence: they are places in which violence became enduring and intense and forced widespread changes to the lives of the people who inhabited them. As noted above, we adopt, for example, Stahl’s (2008) depiction of Africa during the slave trade and Bowser’s (2008) representation of Amazonia during colonialism and call such places “landscapes of predation.”

As a group, the authors in this volume considered how to define landscapes of predation. A working definition frames the chapters that follow:

A landscape of predation is a geographic space primarily marked or characterized by predatory practices and their consequences. Instability and mobility are inherent. Experiences of predation may be inscribed in memory and may be integral to a sense of place and shared identity.

The geographic space in this definition is situational and not conventionally bounded. It is the space within which predation occurs, not necessarily an established territory or physically or environmentally bounded region. A landscape of predation, as considered here, also includes the consequences of predation, both for the predator and their target. Mobility as the result of predatory behavior is apparent in all of the cases considered in this book and is a fundamental aspect of a predatory landscape. Such mobility may seem chaotic and tumultuous as targeted people flee their predators, but a closer look can reveal strategies for resisting predation; in other words, intentional mobility to avoid or engage with predators (see the Resistance and Other Responses to Predation section below). Of course, predators also move in order to encounter their targets or to pursue actions of benefit to themselves.

“Landscape of predation” is a term that we fear might be misappropriated and used in a multitude of inappropriate situations from Roman wars of conquest to places of contemporary urban poverty. Therefore, we want to be clear about the sorts of times and places we include in the term and those we do not. Landscapes of predation are places of violence, but they are not a battlefield, nor even a theater of war. They are not just places where people live with oppression, however bad the oppression may be. They are places where people’s lives are profoundly disrupted, and the disruption extends to virtually every aspect of their lives. Predatory practices involve a wide range of activities that can be physically or structurally violent, can upend cultural traditions, including religious practices, can displace people from their homeland, sever their connection to their social identity, and can intentionally seek to annihilate an entire social group.

Predatory practices created landscapes of movement. Movement was common, almost universal in the small-scale societies that are the focus of this volume. People move for subsistence purposes, to trade with other groups, to attend social events, or to monitor the boundaries of their territory (Anthony 1990, 1997; Cabana and Clark 2011; Daniels 2022; van Dommelen 2014). Predation, however, results in distinctive types of movement, some of which are the direct result of predation and others that are the consequence of the targets of predation moving to protect themselves.

At the very most personal level, captive-taking, a form of movement that characterized many, if not most, landscapes of predation, took people from their homes, erased their social identity, and forced them into a new, generally subordinate identity. For those captives that became slaves, loss of social personhood was complete or nearly so (Cameron 2008, 2016; Santos-Granero 2009; Snyder 2018). At a broader level, predators can dispossess people of their land or exploit or destroy the resources people relied on to survive. Predators might impose ruinous tribute or taxes, leaving their targets facing starvation. They might use a variety of methods to terrorize their targets, including desecration of sacred sites or co-option of religious belief. Physical abuse and injury might be a regular outcome of an encounter with a member of the predator group and murder, persecution, and even genocide might be common in landscapes of predation. Such violence in landscapes of predation is chronic, although it may be episodic and there may be periods of calm. Even during periods of calm, violence is latent in landscapes of predation, never far from the minds of either predators or their targets.

The University of Arizona Press