The Mixtecs of Oaxaca: Ancient Times to the Present: 267 (The Civilization of the American Indian Series) - Hardcover

Ronald Spores (author) & Andrew K. Balkansky (author)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0806143819 ISBN 13: 9780806143811

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013

Synopsis

In this challenging and often humorous book, Louis Owens examines issues of Indian identity and relationship to the environment as depicted in literature and film and as embodied in his own mixedblood roots in family and land. Powerful social and historical forces, he maintains, conspire to colonize literature and film by and about Native Americans into a safe "Indian Territory" that will contain and neutralize Indians. Countering this colonial "Territory" is what Owens defines as "Frontier," a dynamic, uncontainable, multi-directional space within which cultures meet and even merge.Owens offers new insights into the works of Indian writers ranging from John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, and D'Arcy McNickle to N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor. In his analysis of Indians in film he scrutinizes distortions of Indians as victims or vanishing Americans in a series of John Wayne movies and in the politically correct but false gestures of the more recent Dances With Wolves. As Owens moves through his personal landscape in Oklahoma, Mississippi, California, and New Mexico, he questions how human beings collectively can alter their disastrous relationship with the natural world before they destroy it. He challenges all of us to articulate, through literature and other means, messages of personal and environmental — as well as cultural—survival, and to explore and share these messages by writing and reading across cultural boundaries.

About this title

Product Description:

The Mixtec peoples were among the major original developers of Mesoamerican civilization. Centuries before the Spanish Conquest, they formed literate urban states and maintained a uniquely innovative technology and a flourishing economy. Today, thousands of Mixtecs still live in Oaxaca, in present-day southern Mexico, and thousands more have migrated to locations throughout Mexico, the United States, and Canada. In this comprehensive survey, Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkanskyboth preeminent scholars of Mixtec civilizationsynthesize a wealth of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data to trace the emergence and evolution of Mixtec civilization from the time of earliest human occupation to the present. The Mixtec region has been the focus of much recent archaeological and ethnohistorical activity. In this volume, Spores and Balkansky incorporate the latest available research to show that the Mixtecs, along with their neighbors the Valley and Sierra Zapotec, constitute one of the world s most impressive civilizations, antecedent toand equivalent tothose of the better-known Maya and Aztec. Employing what they refer to as a convergent methodology, the authors combine techniques and results of archaeology, ethnohistory, linguistics, biological anthropology, ethnology, and participant observation to offer abundant new insights on the Mixtecs multiple transformations over three millennia."

Review:

"Drawing on spectacular archaeological finds and ethnohistorical advances, this book uses a fascinating multidisciplinary approach to examine a key region within Mesoamerica. It is sure to become a new classic on the Mixtecs, providing rich updates on pre-Columbian, and colonial, and modern-day cultural evolution and persistence."--Stephanie Wood, author of Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico

"In this ambitious book, Spores and Balkansky examine the Mixtec region of Oaxaca, Mexico, across hundreds of years. Blending new data with a synthesis of previous works on this famous Mesoamerican culture area, The Mixtecs of Oaxaca condenses more than forty years of Spores's indefatigable, interdisciplinary research with Balkansky's and other scholars' findings. The authors seek to join studies of the ancient past with the lived present, concluding that Mixtec culture, despite centuries of transformation, continues to survive in the heartland of Oaxaca."--Kevin Terraciano, coeditor of Mesoamerican Voices: Native-Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Guatemala and President of the American Society of Ethnohistory

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0806143819
• ISBN 13: 9780806143811
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328