John M Watanabe
Biographic Data
| ID | 102449 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John M Watanabe |
| GIVEN NAMES | John M |
| FAMILY NAME | Watanabe |
| SIGNATURE | WATANABE J M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| ORCID | 0009-0002-0546-5862 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 196 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Deborah L. Nichols 1952–2022
Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds: Religion and Modernity in a Transnational K'iche' Community - by MacKenzie, C. James
Racing to the top: Descent ideologies and why Ladinos never meant to be mestizos in colonial Guatemala
This paper asks what mestizaje as presently conceived could have meant in colonial Latin America before modern notions of race, nation, state, or culture. It explores the term ladino in contemporary Chiapas and Guatemala that refers to people of mixed descent who identify as ‘not Indian.’ More than a substitute for mestizo, ladino represents a descent ideology that stresses parentage over race in pursuit of relative advantage within a stratified,…
Maya and Catholic Cultures in Crisis
In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucatán
In this book, anthropologist Paul K. Eiss writes against the grain in several productive ways about the Hunucmá region of far northwestern Yucatán. Concerned with neither the nineteenth-century Caste War that captivates so many anthropologists, nor the capitalist transformations and revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary) politics of henequen that attract historians, Eiss explores the notion of el pueblo — that allusive Spanish word for a place, …
Pluralizing Ethnographies: Comparison and Representation in Maya Cultures, Histories, and Identities
Being Like a State: A Historical Anthropology of Translocal Representation (in Both Senses of the Term)
This commentary addresses issues of representation in its delegative and political as well as sign-making senses intrinsic to bottom-up histories of state power and the meanings such power precipitates. Brokers as representatives in a political sense ideally reveal the dynamics, but also limits, of state power because, as Eric Wolf noted long ago, brokers by definition never work simply to resolve the contending interests they mediate but must al…
Pluralizing Ethnographies: Comparison and Representation in Maya Cultures, Histories, and Identities
Some Models in a Muddle: Lineage and house in Classic Maya social organization
This commentary addresses ethnographic and theoretical problems in the recent debate over lineages and houses in Classic Maya society. On the one hand, proponents of segmentary lineage models miss ambiguities between filiation and descent, residential and corporate groups in the Maya ethnographies they use for their analogies. On the other hand, supporters of Lévi-Strauss's house model fail to appreciate the relative instead of absolute differenc…
Silence and Solidarity across a Watershed of War: The Heritage of U.S. Complicity in Guatemala
Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Diane M. Nelson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. 427 pp. Rigoberta Menchú and tile Story of All Poor Guatemalans. David Stoll. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. 336 pp
With All the Means that Prudence Would Suggest: Procedural Culture and the Writing of Cultural Histories of Power about 19th-century Mesoamerica
With All the Means that Prudence Would Suggest: Procedural Culture and the Writing of Cultural Histories of Power about 19th‐century Mesoamerica
Current conceptions that treat hegemony as the virtual condition of political struggle rather than the actual exercise of power confuse the term with culture, favor disembodied discourses over meanings actually convey ed, and risk over‐generalizing domination and resistance into inescapable imperatives of state power and individual agency. These problems become particularly acute when historians and anthropologists seek to write cultural historie…
Culturing identities, the state, and national consciousness in late nineteenth-century western Guatemala1⋆
This paper examines the procedural culture that shaped ethnic and national identities in late nineteenth-century western Guatemala. Rooted in face-to-face encounters between departmentaljefes políticos(departmental governors) and local Maya communities, this procedural culture emerged from routines of governance such as annual municipal inspections, ethnic struggles for municipal control, and local efforts to title community lands that led Maya a…
Explaining Religion without Explaining It Away: "Trust, Truth, and the Evolution of Cooperation in Roy A. Rappaport's "The Obvious Aspects of Ritual
Moving beyond the ecological functionalism of Pigs for the Ancestors, Roy Rappaport's subsequent work on ritual explored how the "obvious aspects" of ritual's formalism and the need to perform it literally embody in its performers expressions of sanctity and truth that counter the threats of lying and alternative inherent in symbolic communication. He recognized that symbolic meaning and truth presuppose social cooperation and trust between indiv…
The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town
After a decade of military occupation known as la violencia, the Tz'utujil-speaking Maya of Santiago Atitlan stood up to the Guatemalan Army in 1990 and forced it to leave their town. Yet that act of solidarity did not close the widening internal divisions that threaten to destabilize the community from within. Ironically, after 500 years of resistance to physical and spiritual conquest, many Atitecos now seem eager to abandon traditional Mayan c…
Yucatán's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War
Yucatán's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War. Terry Rugeley. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. xxx. 243 pp., notes, bibliography, index
Indians Into Mexicans: History and Identity in a Mexican Town
The Covenants with Earth and Rain: Exchange, Sacrifice, and Revelation in Mixtec Sociality
The Covenants with Earth and Rain: Exchange, Sacrifice, and Revelation in Mixtec Sociality. JOHN MONAGHAN. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. xvi + 394 pp., illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index
Unimagining the Maya: Anthropologists, Others, and the Inescapable Hubris of Authorship
Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala. David Stoll
Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition
Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World
The Maya of Santiago Chimaltenango have experienced increasingly rapid, even violent, integration into Guatemalan society in the last fifty years, yet they still distinguish themselves ethnically from Spanish-speaking Guatemalans and other Maya. Why this sense of ethnic identity persists--and also changes--over time is the focus of Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World, a beautifully written ethnography of a Mam-speaking Maya town in the west…
Social/Cultural Anthropology: Class, Politics, and Popular Religion in Mexico and Central America . Lynn Stephen and James Dow , eds
Unfinished Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners between Two Wars. Paul Sullivan
Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540 To 1988
Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World
The Maya of Santiago Chimaltenango have experienced increasingly rapid, even violent, integration into Guatemalan society in the last fifty years, yet they still distinguish themselves ethnically from Spanish-speaking Guatemalans and other Maya. Why this sense of ethnic identity persists--and also changes--over time is the focus of Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World, a beautifully written ethnography of a Mam-speaking Maya town in the west…
From Saints to Shibboleths: Image, structure, and identity in Maya religious syncretism
Local concepts of Catholic saints in the Mam (Maya) town of Santiago Chimalten-ango in the western highlands of Guatemala reveal that syncretism there represents not an indiscriminate seamless fusion of Maya and Christian religiosity but a highly differentiated recombination of conventional forms that serves primarily to articulate the moral and physical-and thus ethnic-boundaries of the community. The symbolic reassortment of saints with other l…
Social relationships and ritualized greetings in adult male baboons (Papio cynocephalus anubis)
Explaining Religion without Explaining It Away: "Trust, Truth, and the Evolution of Cooperation in Roy A. Rappaport's "The Obvious Aspects of Ritual
Moving beyond the ecological functionalism of Pigs for the Ancestors, Roy Rappaport's subsequent work on ritual explored how the "obvious aspects" of ritual's formalism and the need to perform it literally embody in its performers expressions of sanctity and truth that counter the threats of lying and alternative inherent in symbolic communication. He recognized that symbolic meaning and truth presuppose social cooperation and trust between indiv…
The Covenants with Earth and Rain: Exchange, Sacrifice, and Revelation in Mixtec Sociality
The Covenants with Earth and Rain: Exchange, Sacrifice, and Revelation in Mixtec Sociality. JOHN MONAGHAN. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. xvi + 394 pp., illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index
In the World of the Sun: A Cognitive Model of Mayan Cosmology
Linguistic data from Mam, a contemporary Mayan language spoken in western Guatemala, is used to construct a cognitive model of Mayan cosmology. Terms for the directions, verb paradigms and the demarcation of time periods reveal a conception of space and time in which directionality, motion and time are inextricably linked to the movement of the sun. In Mam terms, direction does not exist independently of motion. Cardinal directions are defined as…
Some Models in a Muddle: Lineage and house in Classic Maya social organization
This commentary addresses ethnographic and theoretical problems in the recent debate over lineages and houses in Classic Maya society. On the one hand, proponents of segmentary lineage models miss ambiguities between filiation and descent, residential and corporate groups in the Maya ethnographies they use for their analogies. On the other hand, supporters of Lévi-Strauss's house model fail to appreciate the relative instead of absolute differenc…
Racing to the top: Descent ideologies and why Ladinos never meant to be mestizos in colonial Guatemala
This paper asks what mestizaje as presently conceived could have meant in colonial Latin America before modern notions of race, nation, state, or culture. It explores the term ladino in contemporary Chiapas and Guatemala that refers to people of mixed descent who identify as ‘not Indian.’ More than a substitute for mestizo, ladino represents a descent ideology that stresses parentage over race in pursuit of relative advantage within a stratified,…
Being Like a State: A Historical Anthropology of Translocal Representation (in Both Senses of the Term)
This commentary addresses issues of representation in its delegative and political as well as sign-making senses intrinsic to bottom-up histories of state power and the meanings such power precipitates. Brokers as representatives in a political sense ideally reveal the dynamics, but also limits, of state power because, as Eric Wolf noted long ago, brokers by definition never work simply to resolve the contending interests they mediate but must al…
In the World of the Sun: A Cognitive Model of Mayan Cosmology
Linguistic data from Mam, a contemporary Mayan language spoken in western Guatemala, is used to construct a cognitive model of Mayan cosmology. Terms for the directions, verb paradigms and the demarcation of time periods reveal a conception of space and time in which directionality, motion and time are inextricably linked to the movement of the sun. In Mam terms, direction does not exist independently of motion. Cardinal directions are defined as…
Continuities in Highland Maya Social Organization: Ethnohistory in Sacapulas, Guatemala. Robert M. Hill ii and John Monaghan
Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540 To 1988
Social relationships and ritualized greetings in adult male baboons (Papio cynocephalus anubis)
From Saints to Shibboleths: Image, structure, and identity in Maya religious syncretism
Local concepts of Catholic saints in the Mam (Maya) town of Santiago Chimalten-ango in the western highlands of Guatemala reveal that syncretism there represents not an indiscriminate seamless fusion of Maya and Christian religiosity but a highly differentiated recombination of conventional forms that serves primarily to articulate the moral and physical-and thus ethnic-boundaries of the community. The symbolic reassortment of saints with other l…
Unfinished Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners between Two Wars. Paul Sullivan
Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World
The Maya of Santiago Chimaltenango have experienced increasingly rapid, even violent, integration into Guatemalan society in the last fifty years, yet they still distinguish themselves ethnically from Spanish-speaking Guatemalans and other Maya. Why this sense of ethnic identity persists--and also changes--over time is the focus of Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World, a beautifully written ethnography of a Mam-speaking Maya town in the west…
Social/Cultural Anthropology: Class, Politics, and Popular Religion in Mexico and Central America . Lynn Stephen and James Dow , eds
Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition
Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala. David Stoll
Unimagining the Maya: Anthropologists, Others, and the Inescapable Hubris of Authorship
Indians Into Mexicans: History and Identity in a Mexican Town
The Covenants with Earth and Rain: Exchange, Sacrifice, and Revelation in Mixtec Sociality
The Covenants with Earth and Rain: Exchange, Sacrifice, and Revelation in Mixtec Sociality. JOHN MONAGHAN. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. xvi + 394 pp., illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index
The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town
After a decade of military occupation known as la violencia, the Tz'utujil-speaking Maya of Santiago Atitlan stood up to the Guatemalan Army in 1990 and forced it to leave their town. Yet that act of solidarity did not close the widening internal divisions that threaten to destabilize the community from within. Ironically, after 500 years of resistance to physical and spiritual conquest, many Atitecos now seem eager to abandon traditional Mayan c…
Yucatán's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War
Yucatán's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War. Terry Rugeley. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. xxx. 243 pp., notes, bibliography, index
Explaining Religion without Explaining It Away: "Trust, Truth, and the Evolution of Cooperation in Roy A. Rappaport's "The Obvious Aspects of Ritual
Moving beyond the ecological functionalism of Pigs for the Ancestors, Roy Rappaport's subsequent work on ritual explored how the "obvious aspects" of ritual's formalism and the need to perform it literally embody in its performers expressions of sanctity and truth that counter the threats of lying and alternative inherent in symbolic communication. He recognized that symbolic meaning and truth presuppose social cooperation and trust between indiv…
Culturing identities, the state, and national consciousness in late nineteenth-century western Guatemala1⋆
This paper examines the procedural culture that shaped ethnic and national identities in late nineteenth-century western Guatemala. Rooted in face-to-face encounters between departmentaljefes políticos(departmental governors) and local Maya communities, this procedural culture emerged from routines of governance such as annual municipal inspections, ethnic struggles for municipal control, and local efforts to title community lands that led Maya a…
With All the Means that Prudence Would Suggest: Procedural Culture and the Writing of Cultural Histories of Power about 19th-century Mesoamerica
With All the Means that Prudence Would Suggest: Procedural Culture and the Writing of Cultural Histories of Power about 19th‐century Mesoamerica
Current conceptions that treat hegemony as the virtual condition of political struggle rather than the actual exercise of power confuse the term with culture, favor disembodied discourses over meanings actually convey ed, and risk over‐generalizing domination and resistance into inescapable imperatives of state power and individual agency. These problems become particularly acute when historians and anthropologists seek to write cultural historie…
Silence and Solidarity across a Watershed of War: The Heritage of U.S. Complicity in Guatemala
Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Diane M. Nelson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. 427 pp. Rigoberta Menchú and tile Story of All Poor Guatemalans. David Stoll. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. 336 pp
Some Models in a Muddle: Lineage and house in Classic Maya social organization
This commentary addresses ethnographic and theoretical problems in the recent debate over lineages and houses in Classic Maya society. On the one hand, proponents of segmentary lineage models miss ambiguities between filiation and descent, residential and corporate groups in the Maya ethnographies they use for their analogies. On the other hand, supporters of Lévi-Strauss's house model fail to appreciate the relative instead of absolute differenc…
Pluralizing Ethnographies: Comparison and Representation in Maya Cultures, Histories, and Identities
Pluralizing Ethnographies: Comparison and Representation in Maya Cultures, Histories, and Identities
Being Like a State: A Historical Anthropology of Translocal Representation (in Both Senses of the Term)
This commentary addresses issues of representation in its delegative and political as well as sign-making senses intrinsic to bottom-up histories of state power and the meanings such power precipitates. Brokers as representatives in a political sense ideally reveal the dynamics, but also limits, of state power because, as Eric Wolf noted long ago, brokers by definition never work simply to resolve the contending interests they mediate but must al…
In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community, and the Politics of History in Yucatán
In this book, anthropologist Paul K. Eiss writes against the grain in several productive ways about the Hunucmá region of far northwestern Yucatán. Concerned with neither the nineteenth-century Caste War that captivates so many anthropologists, nor the capitalist transformations and revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary) politics of henequen that attract historians, Eiss explores the notion of el pueblo — that allusive Spanish word for a place, …
History (23 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Archaeology (15 works) · History (14 works) · Politics and Society in Latin America (14 works) · Anthropology (13 works) · Maya (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works)