While bodily practice has become a major area of investigation in cultural anthropology, its connection to ethnicity remains to be explored. Among the Yucatec Maya, however, one cultural value, tranquility, is enacted through bodily practices and also serves as an axis for ethnic distinction. M oreover, a specific logic associating tranquility with morality serves as an incisive critique of wealthier Others, all the more important as the Maya are incorporated into the global economy at the bottom of the class hierarchy. An understanding of ethnicity is incomplete without an ethnography of bodily practice and an investigation into how ethnic identity emerges daily in relation to embodied experiences. (Mexico, Maya, ethnicity, social class, embodiment)
This paper explores the utility and futility of the concept of resistance in relationship to urban popular movements in Cancun. While Cancun has become the most popular tourist destination in Mexico, the city is characterized by severe inequalities and neighborhood segregation, the legacy of city planning. Urban settler movements have organized to pressure the city and state governments for land for purchase, public works, and services; yet the power of these movements has been curtailed by government strategies of co-optation, orchestrated enthusiasm, and the bureaucratization of resistance. Many city residents expressed doubts that democratic elections and settler movements could ever successfully ameliorate their condition of poverty. [Mexico/social movements/poverty/segregation] Resistance to What? How? 67
This article examines the dialectical relationship between religious worship and the sense of self. Even while the postmodern self is fragmented and shifting, people may seek religious experiences that oblige them to enact integrated ways of being. In Yucatán in the 1990s, competing values of relationality and autonomy created psychic and socialfriction. Through their religious worship and life narratives, Yucatecan Pentecostal converts resolved some of this tension by constructing themselves as individuals. Rather than playing with hybridity, they opted for discipline, orthodoxy, and integration.
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