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Becoming Maya
"In Becoming Maya, Wolfgang Gabbert has interwoven history and ethnography to trace 500 years of Yucatec history, covering colonial politics, the rise of plantations, nineteenth-century caste wars, and modern reforms - always with an eye toward the complexities of ethnic categorization. According to Gabbert, class has served as a self-defining category as much as ethnicity in Yucatan, and although we think of caste wars as struggles between Mayas and Mexicans, he shows that each side possessed a sufficiently complex ethnic makeup to rule out such pat observations." "Grounded in field studies and archival research and boasting an exhaustive bibliography, Becoming Maya is the first English-language study that examines the roles played by ethnicity and social inequality in Yucatan history. By revealing the highly nuanced complexities that underlie common stereotypes, it offers new...
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