Introduction

Specters of Colonialism: Building Postcolonial States and Making Modern Nations in the Americas

“…Closely related to debates about colonialism has been the emergence of new approaches to postcolonial state formation (Nugent 1993;Joseph and Nugent 1994) and growing efforts to engage critically with nationalism and nation making, often with an emphasis on peasants and indigenous peoples (Anderson 1991;Urban and Sherzer 1992;Sommer 1991;Smith 1992;Mallon 1995;Thurner 1997). At the same time, debates about how to conceptualize social structures and social change (elite power and subaltern resistance) in colonial and postcolonial Latin America have been revitalized by the interaction between revisionist Marxism and poststructuralism (Stern 1993b; Mallon 1994;Beverley and Oviedo 1995).1…”

Words and things in Yucatán: poststructuralism and the everyday life of Mayan multiculturalism

“…This analysis will require the casting of a critical, if largely sympathetic, eye towards poststructural theory and the political resonances that it has had in the lives of the communities that are studied by anthropologists. Though a number of scholars from the global South would characterize poststructuralism as fundamentally first‐world cultural capital (Beverley & Oviedo 1995; see also Hale 1999), this same body of continental theory inspired approaches to identity politics that were rooted in a progressive and even radical drive to democratize Western knowledge. For students of Mesoamerica working in the 1990s, critical discussions of representation and self‐representation offered a means of celebrating the politicized discursive strategies of indigenous people amidst a series of ‘culture wars’ in which texts such as David Stoll's critique of Nobel Prize Laureate Rigoberta Menchú had turned questions of authenticity and authority into the bases for heated debates (Arias 2001; Stoll 1999).…”