The book is a collection of essays that celebrate the bounty and the significance of desert places, including an extended essay by Nabhan. The celebrated author and ethnobiologist brought friends, colleagues, and advisors together from his more than four decades of study of deserts—to bring their own perspectives. Scientists, artists, desert contemplatives, poets, and writers bring the desert into view and investigate why these places compel us to walk through their sands and beneath their cacti and acacia.
Thank you, Jim Nintzel, Weekly editor, for the kind words and sharing a bit of Nabhan’s desert love.
Here’s some of the excerpt shared from Nabhan’s essay:
The horizon was dull edged and hazy from a recent sandstorm. Nevertheless, the sun beamed down on me with what seemed to be a preternatural force.
I stood there alone (I believed), silent enough to hear my own heart beating and the breeze brushing at my sleeves. I could not immediately figure out the patterns of the place—the relationships among weather, substrate, flora, fauna and human influence.
A dust devil, or chachipira, suddenly swept by me and then disappeared into thin air, leaving bushes rustling and empty beer cans rolling around in eddies.
Then my eyes began to tear up in brightness, and I wiped them clean with a sweep of my shirtsleeve. Instantly, I was looking at this world as if I had come to another planet for the very first time.
The University of Arizona Press is constantly working toward innovative, forward-thinking ways to connect our scholarship with readers worldwide. We are pleased to announce a new selection of titles in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, border studies, and Latin American studies are now available as open access (OA).
Thanks to financial support from Knowledge Unlatched, we have been able to move an additional six titles to OA format. The titles are available either via link on our website or directly through the OAPEN Foundation.
Now Available as OA:
The Border and Its Bodies The increasingly militarized U.S.-México border is an intensely physical place, affecting the bodies of all who encounter it. The essays in this volume explore how crossing becomes embodied in individuals on the most basic social unit possible: the human body. OA Link
Activist Biology Activist Biology is the story of a group of biologists at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro who joined the drive to renew the Brazilian nation, claiming as their weapon the voice of their fledgling field. It offers a portrait of science as a creative and transformative pathway. This book will intrigue anyone fascinated by environmental history and Latin American political and social life in the 1920s and 1930s. OA Link
Before Kukulkán This volume illuminates human lifeways in the northern Maya lowlands prior to the rise of Chichén Itzá. Using bioarchaeology, mortuary archaeology, and culturally sensitive mainstream archaeology, the authors create an in-depth regional understanding while also laying out broader ways of learning about the Maya past. OA Link
Big Water Big Water focuses on the uniquely overlapping character of South America’s Triple Frontier. These essays complicate the frontiers and balance the excessive weight previously given to empires, nations, and territorial expansion. Big Water’s transdisciplinary approach provides a new understanding of how space and society have developed throughout Latin America. OA Link
Challenging the Dichotomy Challenging the Dichotomy explores how dichotomies regarding heritage dominate the discussions of ethics, practices, and institutions. Contributing authors underscore the challenge to the old paradigms from multiple forces. The case studies and discourses, both ethnographic and archaeological, arise from a wide variety of regional contexts and cultures. OA Link
Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change presents examples from Paraguay, Brazil, and Colombia, examining what is necessary for smallholder agricultural cooperatives to support holistic community-based development in peasant communities. Reporting on successes and failures of these cooperative efforts, the contributors offer analyses and strategies for supporting collective grassroots interests. Illustrating how poverty and inequality affect rural people, they reveal how cooperative organizations can support grassroots development strategies while negotiating local contexts of inequality amid the broader context of international markets and global competition. OA Link
We are pleased to announce the publication of three important new essays on our open access platform, Open Arizona. The essays bring together leading contemporary scholars to add perspective to formerly out-of-print works that have been republished on the site.
A key component of the Open Arizona project, which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to make out-of-print books available as open access, is to add contemporary context to these works, some decades old. The newest essays are by Maurice Crandall, Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, and Yvette J. Saavedra. These scholars offer perspectives framed by their expertise in history, Indigenous studies, border studies, and English, as well as women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. In thoughtful, individual essays, the address the works of Henry Dobyns, Grenville Goodwin, and María Herrera-Sobek.
In this book, Goodwin presents an in-depth historical reconstruction and a detailed ethnographic account of the Western Apache culture based on firsthand observations made over a span of nearly ten years in the field.
This project includes a new essay by Maurice Crandall, a citizen of the Yavapai-Apache Nation of Camp Verde, Arizona. He is a historian of the Indigenous peoples of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and is currently assistant professor of Native American studies at Dartmouth College. Crandall’s essay, “Reflections on The Social Organization of the Western Apache and Grenville Goodwin Among the Western Apache: Letters from the Field” addresses the complexity of a white ethnographer’s relationship to and with the community where he worked.
Early literary works written in Spanish in what is today the American Southwest have been largely excluded from the corpus of American literature, yet these documents are the literary antecedents of contemporary Chicano and Chicana writing. This collection of essays establishes the importance of this literary heritage through a critical examination of key texts produced in the Southwest from 1542 to 1848.
This book offers a fascinating account of the ethnic development of early Tucson. Using a variety of methods and sources, Dobyns reveals how Spaniards, mestizos from New Spain, and Native people from many tribes laid the ethnic foundations for the modern city.
This project also includes a new essay by Yvette J. Saavedra, an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon, titled “Spanish Colonial Tucson: Shifting the Paradigms of Borderlands History.” Saavedra writes, “When we review the significance of Dobyns’s work forty-three years after its publication, it becomes clear that his study marked an important shift in the field of borderlands history by further complicating our understanding of how communities develop within the processes of conquest and colonization.”
In this new essay, Vélez-Ibáñez reflects on the origins of The Chicanos: As We See Ourselves, edited by Arnulfo D. Trejo and published by the University of Arizona Press in 1979. Vélez-Ibáñez reflects on contributing to the work, nearly forty years ago, and how his thinking and scholarship has changed since that time.
When The Chicanos was first published Trejo wrote, “We have come a long way, from the time when the Mexicano silently accepted the stereotype drawn of him by the outsider. Our purpose is not to talk to ourselves, but to open a dialogue among all concerned people.”
In the new essay, Vélez-Ibáñez continues the dialogue, inviting us all to consider a transborder cultural citizenship that is hemispheric, inclusive, and beyond borderlines.
Vélez-Ibáñez is Regents’ Professor in the School of Transborder Studies and School of Human Evolution and Social Change, the Motorola Presidential Professor of Neighborhood Revitalization, and founding director emeritus of the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University.
Eight new open access titles are now available in Open Arizona, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Selected by an advisory board of scholars and community members, the new additions include Henry Dobyn’s Spanish Colonial Tucson, Edward H. Spicer’s Pascua,and Arnulfo D. Trejo’s The Chicanos.
Kathryn Conrad, director of the UA Press and lead of the Open Arizona project, says, “We know that these titles were very influential to their fields when they were first published and have continued to be sources of critical and dynamic conversation. We hope that as open access works they continue to contribute to scholarly discourses. We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for providing the funding to allow us to make them available again in this new format.”
Open Arizona also includes new original essays by leading scholars, offering contemporary reflections on these once out-of-print works.
In the essay Otero writes, “Ethnic communities surrounding major urban areas across the United States are currently struggling to retain their cultural identity as the forces aligned with gentrification undermine their existence… The inclusion of Mexican Americans in a Dallas Barrio an important addition to the Open Arizona project. It is not only timely but critical.”
The University of Arizona Press is constantly working toward innovative, forward-thinking ways to connect our scholarship with readers worldwide. We are pleased to announce a new selection of titles in the fields of anthropology and archaeology are now available as open access (OA). The University of Arizona Press has been a leading publisher in those fields since it was founded by future-thinking members of the University of Arizona’s anthropology department 60 years ago.
Thanks to financial support from Knowledge Unlatched, we have been able to move six titles to OA format. The titles are available either via link on our website or directly through the OAPEN Foundation.
Now Available as OA:
Nature™ Inc. Edited by Bram Büscher, Wolfram Dressler, and Robert Fletcher With global wildlife populations and biodiversity riches in peril, it is obvious that innovative methods of addressing our planet’s environmental problems are needed. But is “the market” the answer? Nature™ Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how “neoliberal conservation” is reshaping human–nature relations. OA Link
Foods of Association Nina L. Etkin This fascinating book examines the biology and culture of foods and beverages that are consumed in communal settings, with special attention to their health implications. Nina Etkin covers a wealth of topics, exploring human evolutionary history, the Slow Food movement, ritual and ceremonial foods, caffeinated beverages, spices, the street foods of Hawaii and northern Nigeria, and even bottled water. Her work is framed by a biocultural perspective that considers both the physiological implications of consumption and the cultural construction and circulation of foods. OA Link
Reimagining Marginalized Foods Edited by Elizabeth Finnis This volume brings together ethnographically based anthropological analyses of shifting meanings and representations associated with the foods, ingredients, and cooking practices that of marginalized and/or indigenous cultures. Contributors are particularly interested in how these foods intersect with politics, nationhood and governance, identity, authenticity, and conservation. OA Link
Nature and Antiquities Edited by Philip L. Kohl, Irina Podgorny, and Stefanie Gänger Nature and Antiquities analyzes how the study of indigenous peoples was linked to the study of nature and natural sciences. Leading scholars break new ground and entreat archaeologists to acknowledge the importance of ways of knowing in the study of nature in the history of archaeology. OA Link
Paleonutrition Mark Q. Sutton, Kristin D. Sobolik, and Jill K. Gardner The
study of paleonutrition provides valuable insights into shifts and
changes in human history. This comprehensive book describes the nature
of paleonutrition studies, reviews the history of research, discusses
methodological issues in the reconstruction of prehistoric diets,
presents theoretical frameworks frequently used in research, and
showcases examples in which analyses have been successfully conducted on
prehistoric individuals, groups, and populations. OA Link
Women Who Stay Behind Ruth Trinidad Galván Women Who Stay Behind examines the social, educational, and cultural resources rural Mexican women employ to creatively survive the conditions created by the migration of loved ones. Using narrative, research, and theory, Ruth Trinidad Galván presents a hopeful picture of what is traditionally viewed as the abject circumstances of poor and working-class people in Mexico who are forced to migrate to survive. OA Link
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