Healing roles and rituals involving alcohol are a major source of power and identity for women and men in Highland Chiapas, Mexico, where abstention from alcohol can bring a loss of meaningful roles and of a sense of community. Yet, as in other parts of the world, alcohol use sometimes leads to abuse, whose effects must then be combated by individuals and the community. In this pioneering ethnography, Christine Eber looks at women and drinking in the community of San Pedro Chenalhó to address the issues of women’s identities, roles, relationships, and sources of power. She explores various personal and social strategies women use to avoid problem drinking, including conversion to Protestant religions, membership in cooperatives or Catholic Action, and modification of ritual forms with substitute beverages. The book’s women-centered perspective reveals important data on women and drinking not reported in earlier ethnographies of Highland Chiapas communities. Eber’s reflexive approach, blending the women’s stories, analyses, songs, and prayers with her own and other ethnographers’ views, shows how Western, individualistic approaches to the problems of alcohol abuse are inadequate for understanding women’s experiences with problem and ritual drinking in a non-Western culture. In a new epilogue, Christine Eber describes how events of the last decade, including the Zapatista uprising, have strengthened women's resolve to gain greater control over their lives by controlling the effects of alcohol in the community.

Maya Exodus offers a richly detailed account of how a group of indigenous people has adopted a global language of human rights to press claims for social change and social justice. Anthropologist Heidi Moksnes describes how Catholic Maya in the municipality of Chenalhó in Chiapas, Mexico, have changed their position vis-à-vis the Mexican state—from being loyal clients dependent on a patron, to being citizens who have rights—as a means of exodus from poverty. Moksnes lived in Chenalhó in the mid-1990s and has since followed how Catholic Maya have adopted liberation theology and organized a religious and political movement to both advance their sociopolitical position in Mexico and restructure local Maya life. She came to know members of the Catholic organization Las Abejas shortly before they made headlines when forty-five members, including women and children, were killed by Mexican paramilitary troops because of their sympathy with the Zapatistas. In the years since the massacre at Acteal, Las Abejas has become a global symbol of indigenous pacifist resistance against state oppression. The Catholic Maya in Chenalhó see their poverty as a legacy of colonial rule perpetuated by the present Mexican government, and believe that their suffering is contrary to the will of God. Moksnes shows how this antagonism toward the state is exacerbated by the government’s recent neoliberal policies, which have ended pro-peasant programs while employing a discourse on human rights. In this context, Catholic Maya debate the value of pressing the state with their claims. Instead, they seek independent routes to influence and resources, through the Catholic Diocese and nongovernmental organizations—relations, however, that also help to create new dependencies. This book incorporates voices of Maya men and women as they form new identities, rethink central conceptions of being human, and assert citizenship rights. Maya Exodus deepens our understanding of the complexities involved in striving for social change. Ultimately, it highlights the contradictory messages marginalized peoples encounter when engaging with the globally celebrated human rights discourse.

Most recent books about Chiapas, Mexico, focus on political conflicts and the indigenous movement for human rights at the macro level. None has explored those conflicts and struggles in-depth through an individual woman's life story. The Journey of a Tzotzil-Maya Woman of Chiapas, Mexico now offers that perspective in one woman's own words. Anthropologist Christine Eber met "Antonia" in 1986 and has followed her life's journey ever since. In this book, they recount Antonia's life story and also reflect on challenges and rewards they have experienced in working together, offering insight into the role of friendship in anthropological research, as well as into the transnational movement of solidarity with the indigenous people of Chiapas that began with the Zapatista uprising. Antonia was born in 1962 in San Pedro Chenalhó, a Tzotzil-Maya township in highland Chiapas. Her story begins with memories of childhood and progresses to young adulthood, when Antonia began working with women in her community to form weaving cooperatives while also becoming involved in the Word of God, the progressive Catholic movement known elsewhere as Liberation Theology. In 1994, as a wife and mother of six children, she joined a support base for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Recounting her experiences in these three interwoven movements, Antonia offers a vivid and nuanced picture of working for social justice while trying to remain true to her people's traditions.

The dramatic January 1, 1994, emergence of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico, brought the state's indigenous peoples to the attention of the international community. Yet indigenous peoples in Chiapas had been politically active and organized for years prior to the uprising. This compelling volume examines in detail these local and regional histories of power and resistance, powerfully bolstered by gripping and heartrending details of oppression and opposition. Situated broadly within the field of political anthropology, the authors trace the connections between indigenous culture and indigenous resistance. Their case studies include the Tzotzils and Tzeltals of the highland region, the Tojolabals of eastern Chiapas, northern Ch'ol communities, the Mams of eastern and southeastern Chiapas, and the settler communities of the Lacandon rain forest. In the wake of the Chiapas rebellion, all of these groups have increasingly come together around common goals, the most important of which is autonomy. Three essays focus specifically on the issue of Indian autonomy_in both Zapatista and non-Zapatista communities. Offering a consistent and cohesive vision of the complex evolution of a region and its many cultures and histories, this work is a fundamental source for understanding key issues in nation building. In a unique collaboration, the book brings together recognized authorities who have worked in Chiapas for decades, many linking scholarship with social and political activism. Their combined perspectives, many previously unavailable in English, make this volume the most authoritative, richly detailed, and authentic work available on the people behind the Zapatista movement.

In the late 1830s an uprising of mestizos and Maya destroyed Guatemala's Liberal government for imposing reforms aimed at expanding the state, assimilating indigenous peoples, and encouraging commercial agriculture. Liberal partisans were unable to retake the state until 1871, but after they did they successfully implemented their earlier reform agenda. In contrast to the late 1830s, they met only sporadic resistance. Reeves confronts this paradox of Guatemala's nineteenth century by focusing on the rural folk of the western highlands. He links the area of study to the national level in an explicitly comparative enterprise, unlike most investigations of Mesoamerican communities. He finds that changes in land, labor, and ethnic politics from the 1840s to the 1870s left popular sectors unwilling or unable to mount a repeat of the earlier anti-Liberal mobilization. Because of these changes, the Liberals of the 1870s and beyond consolidated their hold on power more successfully than their counterparts of the 1830s. Ultimately, Reeves shows that community politics and regional ethnic tensions were the crucible of nation-state formation in nineteenth-century Guatemala.

The Encyclopedia of Women in World History captures the experiences of women throughout world history in a comprehensive, 4-volume work. Although there has been extensive research on women in history by region, no text or reference work has comprehensively covered the role women have played throughout world history. The past thirty years have seen an explosion of research and effort to present the experiences and contributions of women not only in the Western world but across the globe. Historians have investigated womens daily lives in virtually every region and have researched the leadership roles women have filled across time and region. They have found and demonstrated that there is virtually no historical, social, or demographic change in which women have not been involved and by which their lives have not been affected. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History benefits greatly from these efforts and experiences, and illuminates how women worldwide have influenced and been influenced by these historical, social, and demographic changes. The Encyclopedia contains over 1,250 signed articles arranged in an A-Z format for ease of use. The entries cover six main areas: biographies; geography and history; comparative culture and society, including adoption, abortion, performing arts; organizations and movements, such as the Egyptian Uprising, and the Paris Commune; womens and gender studies; and topics in world history that include slave trade, globalization, and disease. With its rich and insightful entries by leading scholars and experts, this reference work is sure to be a valued, go-to resource for scholars, college and high school students, and general readers alike.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, thousands of Mayas were expelled, often violently, from their homes in San Juan Chamula and other highland communities in Chiapas, Mexico, by fellow Mayas allied with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). State and federal authorities generally turned a blind eye to these human rights abuses, downplaying them as local conflicts over religious conversion and defense of cultural traditions. The expelled have organized themselves to fight not only for religious rights, but also for political and economic justice based on a broad understanding of human rights. This pioneering ethnography tells the intertwined stories of the new communities formed by the Mayan exiles and their ongoing efforts to define and defend their human rights. Focusing on a community of Mayan Catholics, the book describes the process by which the progressive Diocese of San Cristóbal and Bishop Samuel Ruiz García became powerful allies for indigenous people in the promotion and defense of human rights. Drawing on the words and insights of displaced Mayas she interviewed throughout the 1990s, Christine Kovic reveals how the exiles have created new communities and lifeways based on a shared sense of faith (even between Catholics and Protestants) and their own concept of human rights and dignity. She also uncovers the underlying political and economic factors that drove the expulsions and shows how the Mayas who were expelled for not being "traditional" enough are in fact basing their new communities on traditional values of duty and reciprocity.