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5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent ethnography, February 1, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichen Itza (Paperback)
Castañeda's study goes well beyond the common anthropological focus on the "impact" of tourism on Mayan communities, instead focusing on the complicated, historical relationships between Maya actors, anthropologists, and tourists at the well know archaeological site of Chichén Itzá, and the nearby - but not so well known - Maya community of Pisté. Castañeda's study weaves together the history of anthropology in Yucatan (with a particular focus on the works of Redfield and Steggarda), tourism (including a fascinating analysis of New Age spiritualists and Aztec revivalists during the equinox at Chichén Itzá), and local Maya actors (through an analysis of their engagement with anthropologists, tourists, and the Mexican state).
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Review by Lynn Stephen, from Contemporary Sociology, February 2, 2011
This review is from: In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichen Itza (Paperback)
In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichen Itza is a cleverly written, deeply probing "archaeology" of the physical, rhetorical, textual, symbolic, and cultural creation of one of Mexico's premier archaeological and tourist sites. The book also highlights the role of Chichen ItzB in the creation and maintenance of "Maya civilization in anthropology, tourism, nationalism, and the transglobal imagination of "the primitive." At a deeper level, author Quetzil Castafieda's concern is
with how cultures are "imported, exported, deported, transported, reported across cultural topographies." He implicates anthropology and anthropologists as part of cultural espionage that involves networks of power incorporating research foundations, governments, museums, science, capitalism, and regional power struggles.
... Castaneda's book is a refreshing mix of cultural studies and political economy. The second half has several
chapters where Castafieda's wit and intellectual creativity abound.
... In another, equally compelling passage, where he discusses how locals in the market have labeled him a government spy because he is always writing things down, Castaneda writes one of the most honest and searching descriptions of the power relations inherent in carrying out ethnography, stating that "espionage is constitutive of our disciplines."
From Lynn Stephen, Review of In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichen Itza by Quetzil Castaneda. In Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 26, No. 6. (Nov., 1997), pp. 781-782.
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