The decline of community in Zinacantán

Description

"This ambitious, wide-ranging work shows how national economic prosperity and government expansion in Mexico during the 1970's transformed a relatively closed peasant community into a more outwardly connected, socially differentiated society marked by dissension and overt conflict." "In 1960 the men of Zinacantan formed a tight-knit community of peasant corn farmers, even dressing in a distinctive costume that set them apart from their neighbors. Most of them were dedicated to local ceremonial life, they shut out the world around them and concentrated on each other. About a decade later, the national government built roads and began to exploit the region's vast hydroelectric and petroleum resources. By the early 1980's, many of the men had stopped farming; they often dressed in Western clothes, engaged in bitter political battles, and differed in their dedication to local ceremonial life. What happened to Zinacantan, and why?" "The three parts of the book focus on the economic, political, and social aspects of the transformation of Zinacantan. Economic life is shown to be directly influenced by national and global events, while social status is circumscribed by local patterns of relationships and political activity is somewhere in between." "The author takes a localist stance, asserting that generalizations about local life that are derived from principles of global political economy simply replace the limitations of earlier community studies with a different kind of oversimplification. He also relects positivist/postmodernist obsessions with absolute truth, arguing for socially constructed, limited, broadly shared, socially useful knowledge as an alternative."--Jacket.

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