Classic-Period Cultural Currents in Southern and Central Veracruz explores the diverse traditions and dynamic interactions along the Mexican Gulf lowlands at the height of their cultural florescence. Best known for their elaborate ballgame rituals and precocious inscriptions with long-count dates, these cultures served as a critical nexus between the civilizations of highland Mexico and the lowland Maya, influencing developments in both regions.

Eleven chapters penned by leading experts in archaeology, art history, and linguistics offer new insights into ancient iconography and writing, the construction of sociopolitical landscapes, and the historical interplay between local developments and external influences at Cerro de las Mesas, Tres Zapotes, Matacapan, and many lesser-known sites. The result is a new, vibrant perspective on ancient lifeways along the Mexican Gulf lowlands and an important updated source for future research in the region.

This synthesis of modern economic anthropology goes to the heart of a thriving subdiscipline and identifies the fundamental practical and theoretical problems that give economic anthropology its unique strengths and vision.

More than any other anthropological subdiscipline, economic anthropology constantly questions and debates the practical motives of people as they go about their daily lives. Tracing the history of the dialogue between anthropology and economics, the authors move economic anthropology beyond the narrow concerns of earlier debates and place the field directly at the center of current issues in the social sciences. They focus on the unique strengths of economic anthropology as a meeting place for symbolic and materialist approaches and for understanding human beings as both practical and cultural. In so doing, the authors argue for the wider relevance of economic anthropology to applied anthropology and identify other avenues for interaction with economics, sociology, and other social and behavioral sciences.

The second edition of Economies and Cultures contains an entirely new chapter on gifts and exchange that critically approaches the new literature in this area, as well as a thoroughly updated bibliography and guide for students for finding case studies in economic anthropology.

Anthropologist Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’thist Iraqi government by the United States and its allies in 2003, Kurdistan became a recognized part of the federal Iraqi system. The Region is now integrated through technology, media, and migration to the rest of the world.

Focusing on household life in Kurdistan’s towns and villages, King explores the ways that residents connect socially, particularly through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories. She emphasizes that patrilineages (male ancestral lines) seem well adapted to the Middle Eastern modern stage and viceversa. The idea of patrilineal descent influences the meaning of refuge-seeking and migration as well as how identity and place are understood, how women and men interact, and how “politicking” is conducted.

In the new Kurdistan, old values may be maintained, reformulated, or questioned. King offers a sensitive interpretation of the challenges resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity. Honor killings still occur when males believe their female relatives have dishonored their families, and female genital cutting endures. Yet, this is a region where modern technology has spread and seemingly everyone has a mobile phone. Households may have a startling combination of illiterate older women and educated young women. New ideas about citizenship coexist with older forms of patronage.

King is one of the very few scholars who conducted research in Iraq under extremely difficult conditions during the Saddam Hussein regime. How she was able to work in the midst of danger and in the wake of genocide is woven throughout the stories she tells. Kurdistan on the Global Stage serves as a lesson in field research as well as a valuable ethnography.

For years, conventional scholarship has argued that minority groups are better served when the majority groups that absorb them are willing to recognize and allow for the preservation of indigenous identities. But is the reinforcement of ethnic identity among migrant groups always a process of self-liberation? In this surprising study, Carmen Martínez Novo draws on her ethnographic research of the Mixtec Indians’ migration from the southwest of Mexico to Baja California to show that sometimes the push for indigenous labels is more a process of external oppression than it is of minority empowerment.

In Baja California, many Mixtec Indians have not made efforts to align themselves as a coherent demographic. Instead, Martínez Novo finds that the push for indigenous identity in this region has come from local government agencies, economic elites, intellectuals, and other external agents. Their concern has not only been over the loss of rich culture. Rather, the pressure to maintain an indigenous identity has stemmed from the desire to secure a reproducible abundance of cheap “Indian” labor. Meanwhile, many Mixtecs reject their ethnic label precisely because being “Indian” means being a commercial agriculture low-wage worker or an urban informal street vendor—an identity that interferes with their goals of social mobility and economic integration.

Bringing a critical new perspective to the complex intersection among government and scholarly agendas, economic development, global identity politics, and the aspirations of local migrants, this provocative book is essential reading for scholars working in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and ethnic studies.

This book features chapters that examine the various ways of belonging in the Middle East. Belonging can mean fitting in, feeling at home, feeling a part; this kind of belonging is profoundly social. Belongings can be possessions, objects closely associated with one’s deepest notions of identity. Both kinds of belongings pertain to people and the kindreds, ethnic groups, and nations (and/or states) they call their own. Belongings of both kinds are, more often than not, emplaced and territorialized.

All of the chapters treat Middle Eastern collectivities as sites of anguished cultural projects. All use metaphor: national territory as woman, national resolve as cactus, and so on. None is reductionistic; belonging is rendered in its complexity, with its agonies as well as its joys. All could be identified with a growing genre of work on belonging. At the heart of each are the bonds that comprise belonging. Each one conveys both belonging’s messiness and its joys, and touches as much as it argues and elaborates.

Ancient cities were complex, political, and economic entities, but they also suffered from inequality, poor sanitation, and disease--often more than rural areas. Offering a balanced understanding of urbanism and a synthesis of previous research, Scott Hutson examines ancient Maya cities, including Chunchucmil, Tikal, and Dzibilchaltun, to determine why people chose to live in these urban environments. He argues that despite the hazards of urban life, Maya cities continued to lure residents for many centuries. With built forms that welcomed crowds, neighborhoods that offered domestic comforts, marketplaces that facilitated the exchange of goods and ideas, and opportunities to expand social networks and capital, Maya cities were used in familiar ways. 

By the Early Holocene (10,000 to 8,000 B>P.), small wandering bands of Archaic hunter-gatherers began to annually follow the same hunting trails, basing their temporary camps on seasonal conditions and the presence of food. The Pleistocene glaciers had receded by this time, making food more plentiful in some areas and living conditions less hazardous. Although these Archaic peoples have long been known from their primary activities as hunters and gatherers of wild food resouces, recent evidence has been found that indicates they also began rudimentary cultivation sometime during the Middle Holocene. 

Richard Jefferies--an Archaic specialist--comprehensively addresses the approximately 7,000 years of the prehistory of eastern North America, termed the Archaic Period by archaeologists. Jefferies centers his research on a 380-mile section of the Lower Ohio River Valley, an area rife with both temporary and long-term Archaic sites. He covers the duration of the Holocene and provides a compendium of knowledge of the era, including innovative research strategies and results. Presenting these data from a cultural-ecological perspective, emphasizing the relationships between hunter-gatherers and the environments in which they lived, Jefferies integrates current research strategies with emerging theories that are beginning to look at culture history in creative ways. 

Global tourism is perhaps the largest scale movement of goods, services, and people in history. Consequently, it is a significant catalyst for economic development and sociopolitical change. While tourism increasingly accounts for ever greater segments of national economies, the consequences of this growth for intercultural interaction are diverse and uncertain. The proliferation of tourists also challenges classic theoretical descriptions of just what an economy is. What are the commodities being consumed? What is the division of labor between producers and clients in creating the value of tourist exchanges? How do culture, power, and history shape these interactions? What are the prospects for sustainable tourism? How is cultural heritage being shaped by tourists around the world?

These critical questions inspired this volume in which the contributors explore the connections among economy, sustainability, heritage, and identity that tourism and related processes makes explicit. The volume moves beyond the limits of place-specific discussions, case studies, and best practice examples. Accordingly, it is organized according to three overarching themes: exploring dimensions of cultural heritage, the multi-faceted impacts of tourism on both hosts and guests, and the nature of touristic encounters. Based on ethnographic and archaeological research conducted in distinct locations, the contributors’ conclusions and theoretical arguments reach far beyond the limits of isolated case studies. Together, they contribute to a new synthesis for the anthropology of tourism while simultaneously demonstrating how emerging theories of the economics of tourism can lead to the rethinking of traditionally non-touristic enterprises—from farming to medical occupations.

In an increasingly globalized world, place matters more than ever. This concept especially holds true in Appalachian studies--a field that brings scholars, activists, artists, and citizens together around the region to contest misappropriations of resources and power and to combat stereotypes of isolation and intolerance. In Appalachia in Regional Context: Place Matters, Dwight B. Billings and Ann E. Kingsolver assemble scholars and artists from a variety of disciplines to broaden the conversation and challenge the binary opposition between regionalism and globalism. 

In addition to theoretical explorations of place, some of the case studies examine foodways, depictions of gendered and racialized Appalachian identity in popular culture, the experiences of rural LGBTQ youth, and the pitfalls and promises of teaching regional studies. Poems by renowned social critic bell hooks interleave the chapters and add context to reflections on the region. Drawing on cultural anthropology, sociology, geography, media studies, political science, gender and women's studies, ethnography, social theory, art, music, and literature, this volume furthers the examination of new perspectives on one of America's most compelling and misunderstood regions.