Annotation After more than 500 years of marginalisation, Latin America's forty million Indians have gained political recognition and civil rights. Here, social scientists explore the important role of religion in indigenous activism, showing the ways that religion has strengthened indigenous identity and contributed to the struggle for indigenous rights.

Robert Torrance's wide-ranging, innovative study argues that the spiritual quest is rooted in our biological, psychological, linguistic, and social nature. The quest is not, as most have believed, a rare mystical experience, but a frequent expression of our most basic human impulses. Shaman and scientist, medium and poet, prophet and philosopher, all venture forth in quest of visionary truths to transform and renew the world. Yet Torrance is not trying to reduce the quest to an "archetype" or "monomyth." Instead, he presents the full diversity of the quest in the myths and religious practices of tribal peoples throughout the world, from Oceania to India, Africa, Siberia, and especially the Americas. In theorizing about the quest, Torrance draws on thinkers as diverse as Bergson and Piaget, van Gennep and Turner, Pierce and Popper, Freud, Darwin, and Chomsky. This is a book that will expand our knowledge—and awareness—of a fundamental human activity in all its fascinating complexity.

The author discusses the study of religion, including its history, gods and pantheons, demons and monsters, and morality and power.

“This elegantly written and thoroughly researched ethnography” is the definitive study of the Mixe people of mountain Oaxaca (Ethnohistory). The Mixe of Oaxaca is the first extensive ethnography of the Mixe, with a special focus on Mixe religious beliefs and rituals and the curing practices associated with them. It records the procedures, design-plan, corresponding prayers, and symbolic context of well over one hundred rituals. First published in 1991, The Mixe of Oaxaca was hailed as a model of ethnographic research. For this edition, Frank Lipp has written a new preface in which he comments on the relationship of Mixe religion to current theoretical understandings of present-day Middle American folk religions.

Indigenous groups are not often recognized as driving forces in the push for economic development. However, in development efforts across Latin America, governments and corporations have begun to see ethnic cultural difference as an advantage. Ethnic Entrepreneurs explores how diverse groups historically seen as obstacles to development have become valuable to state and regional development initiatives. From collaboration between a Maya organization and Walmart to a UN-sponsored program that recruits diasporic Latinos, states and corporations are pursuing strategies that complement regional neoliberal shifts. This book examines how ethnic difference is produced through development policy, breaking down the micropolitics of identity and development. It uncovers surprising convergences between ethnic community businesses and corporate social responsibility practices and illuminates how formulations of ethnic difference influence not only changing cultural identifications, but also the political and moral projects that shape Latin America.

The 1994 Zapatista uprising of Chiapas' Maya peoples against the Mexican government shattered the state myth that indigenous groups have been successfully assimilated into the nation. In this wide-ranging study of identity formation in Chiapas, Aída Hernández delves into the experience of a Maya group, the Mam, to analyze how Chiapas' indigenous peoples have in fact rejected, accepted, or negotiated the official discourse on "being Mexican" and participating in the construction of a Mexican national identity. Hernández traces the complex relations between the Mam and the national government from 1934 to the Zapatista rebellion. She investigates the many policies and modernization projects through which the state has attempted to impose a Mexican identity on the Mam and shows how this Maya group has resisted or accommodated these efforts. In particular, she explores how changing religious affiliation, women's and ecological movements, economic globalization, state policies, and the Zapatista movement have all given rise to various ways of "being Mam" and considers what these indigenous identities may mean for the future of the Mexican nation. The Spanish version of this book won the 1997 Fray Bernardino de Sahagún national prize for the best social anthropology research in Mexico.

In Mayalogue, Native Mayan scholar Victor Montejo provides an alternative reading and interpretation of cultures, challenging Western ethnocentric approaches that have marginalized Native knowledge and worldviews in the past. He proposes instead a methodology for studying culture as a unified whole, a radical departure from the compartmentalized sections of knowledge recognized by Western scientific tradition. Offering a strong critique of traditional anthropological studies, with its terms and categories that have denigrated Indigenous cultures throughout the centuries, Montejo's postcolonial work aims to dismantle the colonialist construction of Indigenous cultures, giving way to a Native approach that balances insider and outsider descriptions of a particular culture. Developed from an Indigenous Maya perspective, Mayalogue is a contribution to the dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, students, and general audiences in the social sciences and humanities, and will be an essential text in decolonizing the minds of those who engage in the study of cultures anywhere in the world in the twenty-first century.