Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala, 1650-1750
by Martha Few
from University of Texas Press
Women Who Live Evil Lives documents the lives and practices of mixed-race, Black, Spanish, and Maya women sorcerers, spell-casters, magical healers, and midwives in the social relations of power in Santiago de Guatemala, the capital of colonial Central America. Men and women from all sectors of society consulted them to intervene in sexual and familial relations and disputes between neighbors and rival shop owners; to counter abusive colonial officials, employers, or husbands; and in cases of inexplicable illness.
Applying historical, anthropological, and gender studies analysis, Martha Few argues that women's local practices of magic, curing, and religion revealed opportunities for women's cultural authority and power in colonial Guatemala. Few draws on archival research conducted in Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain to shed new light on women's critical public roles in Santiago, the cultural and social connections between the capital city and the countryside, and the gender dynamics of power in the ethnic and cultural contestation of Spanish colonial rule in daily life.
Manipulative Monkeys: The Capuchins of Lomas Barbudal
by Susan Perry
from Harvard University Press
With their tonsured heads, white faces, and striking cowls, the monkeys might vaguely resemble the Capuchin monks for whom they were named. How they act is something else entirely. They climb onto each other's shoulders four deep to frighten enemies. They test friendship by sticking their fingers up one another's noses. They often nurse--but sometimes kill--each other's offspring. They use sex as a means of communicating. And they negotiate a remarkably intricate network of alliances, simian politics, and social intrigue. Not monkish, perhaps, but as we see in this downright ethnographic account of the capuchins of Lomas Barbudal, their world is as complex, ritualistic, and structured as any society.
Manipulative Monkeys takes us into a Costa Rican forest teeming with simian drama, where since 1990 primatologists Susan Perry and Joseph H. Manson have followed the lives of four generations of capuchins. What the authors describe is behavior as entertaining--and occasionally as alarming--as it is recognizable: the competition and cooperation, the jockeying for position and status, the peaceful years under an alpha male devolving into bloody chaos, and the complex traditions passed from one generation to the next. Interspersed with their observations of the monkeys' lives are the authors' colorful tales of the challenges of tropical fieldwork--a mixture so rich that by the book's end we know what it is to be a wild capuchin monkey or a field primatologist. And we are left with a clear sense of the importance of these endangered monkeys for understanding human behavioral evolution.
Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697-1768 (University of Arizona Southwest Center Book)
by Harry W. Crosby
from University of New Mexico Press
First published in 1994 and now available again, this Spanish Borderlands classic recounts Jesuit colonization of the Old California, the peninsula now known as Baja California. Jesuit missionaries founded their first settlement in 1697 and unintentionally created a Hispanic society that outlived the missions and their Indian converts. The author brings to light Jesuit missionization and culture, European-Indian contacts, mission and presidio operations, family social life, the unique peninsular economy, and the Jesuit expulsion. Four appendices provide data on Spanish kings, royal officials, Jesuit personnel and visitors, and founders of pre-1768 peninsular California families.
Historia De LA Antigua O Baja California/History of Ancient and Lower California: A New Translation from the Spanish Text, With a Review and Annotations (Spanish Studies, 14)
Las Misiones Antiguas: The Spanish Missions of Baja California
by Edward W. Vernon
from Edward W. Vernon
Las Misiones Antiguas is a photographic journey and written record of every peninsular mission and several visitas of Baja California. Each site was photographed and it’s position recorded using a G. P. S. instrument. The description of each mission includes oral history from area residents. Sketches record the configuration of sites not previously mapped, and in the case of the largest Baja California mission, Comondú, the foundation was traced and old photographs were utilized to generate a computer model.
This information was combined with historic photographs of many of the sites. More than 300 graphic images and a description of the history and major events at the sites make this book the most comprehensive source of information on these fascinating and rapidly deteriorating architectural treasures.
A Small Place
by Jamaica Kincaid
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
"If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him--why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen . . ."
So begins Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay, which shows us what we have not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up.
Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.
Historia de las ciencias/ The History of Science: La ciencia antigua, la ciencia en oriente y en la Europa medieval (Historia De La Ciencia)
Espana en la edad antigua: Hispania romana y visigoda (Biblioteca iberoamericana)
by Luis A Garcia Moreno
from Anaya
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