The Burnt Palace of Tula: A stratigraphic evaluation

The objective of these works was to explore the correlation that could exist between the tradition stated in historical documents and the archaeological ruins located outside the community of Tula de Allende in the state of Hidalgo, known by the inhabitants as El Cerro del Tesoro [The Hill of Treasure], a hobby consisting in the search for objects with ancestral roots.

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Shaping life: delights and misfortunes of female workers at cigarette factories in Porfirian times

This article is a first approach to the life and working conditions of the cigarette industry female workers in Mexico City during the last quarter of the XIX century.

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The study of intermediaries and the sociocultural dimension in the agricultural labor market

This work maintains that the presence of traditional labor intermediaries in the structuring and performance of certain rural labor markets creates interaction fields marked by processes of social mediation that favor their performance as cultural intermediaries in said contexts.

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Debate. Three ethnographic texts about the Guatemalan Indigenous woman

The anthropological study of gender and of women has been greatly developed since the publication of the book Woman, Culture and Society (1974), which contains, among its magnificent essays, that of Lois Paul, “The Mastery of Work and the Mystery of Sex in a Guatemalan Village”, where we are offered a fairly expressive description of the Mayan women of Zutuhíl language from San Pedro de la Laguna.

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Marie-Odille Marion, Entre anhelos y recuerdos, [Between yearnings and memories]. México: Plaza-Valdés, 1997.

For decades, folklore specialists, ethnography of communication, verbal interaction and anthropology have shown the leading role of narration in the reconstruction and critical explanation of the past, as well as in the construction of the narrating-I, its identity, its beliefs and arguments.

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Druzo Maldonado Jiménez, Deidades y espacio ritual en Cuauhnáhuac y Huaxtepec. Tlalhuicas y xochimilcas de Morelos (siglos XII-XVI), [Deities and ritual space in Cuauhnáhuac and Huaxtepec. Tlalhuica and Xochimilca of Morelos (XII-XVI centuries] Mexico, UNAM-IIA, 2000, 267 pp.

This book is the result of the author’s concern to extend the study of the main groups that in pre-Hispanic times, particularly immediately before the Conquest, inhabited most of the territory which nowadays conforms the state of Morelos. In this … [Texto completo]

Mesoamerica (Paul Kirchhoff)*

“Mesoamerica”, originally published in 1943, was an attempt to identify what the peoples and cultures of a specific part of the American Continent shared in common, and that which set them apart from the rest. To accomplish this goal, I imposed upon myself the restriction to register only those cultural traits that belonged exclusively to those peoples, without trying to portray their whole cultural life.

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They symbol as a mediation device between mind and culture

In this essay, we try a different path: first, we analyze the mind-culture problem in relation to two general views we have called universalism and cultural relativism-mental diversity; as a result of this inquiry, we have sketched an intelligibility frame we will denominate symbolic constructionism which intends to set the foundations for an articulation, specifically between symbolic anthropology, sociocultural psychology and other social views regarding the mind-culture predicament. We believe that one way to accomplish this interdisciplinary purpose rests on treating the symbol as an articulating element.

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Anthropology as a literary work

With this article I would like to propose a phenomenological argument to sustain the idea evoked by several authors about anthropology having an interpretative character. This position may be defined as a set of two theses. The first thesis enunciates that culture can be read as a text (or texts). The second one admits that ethnography is a text (or texts) about texts. The first assumption defines the interpretative character of culture; the second one alludes to the descriptive character of ethnography.

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