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In Mexico, as elsewhere, the national space, that network of places where the people interact with state institutions, is constantly changing. How it does so, how it develops, is a historical process-a process that Claudio Lomnitz exposes and investigates in this book, which develops a distinct view of the cultural politics of nation building in Mexico. Lomnitz highlights the varied, evolving, and often conflicting efforts that have been made by Mexicans over the past two centuries to imagine, organize, represent, and know their country, its relations with the wider world, and its internal differences and inequalities. Firmly based on particulars and committed to the specificity of such thin...
A special issue of PUBLIC CULTURE, this volume of essays examines modernity from transnational and transcultural perspectives, holding that within different cultures, there are different starting points of the transition to modernity that lead to differen
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS A riveting study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture, this immigrant family memoir recounts history with psychological insight and the immediacy of a thriller. In Nuestra América, eminent anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz traces his grandparents’ exile from Eastern Europe to South America. At the same time, the book is a pretext to explain and analyze the worldview, culture, and spirit of countries such as Peru, Colombia, and Chile, from the perspective of educated Jewish emigrants imbued with the hope and determination typical of those who escaped Europe in the 1920s. Lomnitz’s grandparent...
Death in Berlin traces rituals and perceptions surrounding death from the Weimar Republic to the building of the Berlin Wall.
In this revised and updated edition, Judith Friedlander places her widely acclaimed work in historical context. The book describes the lives of the inhabitants of an indigenous pueblo during the late 1960s and early 1970s and analyzes the ways that Indians like them have been discriminated against since early colonial times.
This anthology represents the culmination of a series of public discussions with some of the leading international anthropologists of today —organized by the editor, Sindre Bangstad—at the House of Literature in Oslo, Norway. Thus, it provides fresh and original insights into the lives and work of these leading scholars. It features conversations with Didier Fassin, Angelique Haugerud, Ruben Andersson, Claudio Lomnitz, David Price, Magnus Marsden, Richard Ashby Wilson, and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, in addition to an introduction by Sindre Bangstad and a preface by Thomas Hylland Eriksen.
Review: "Scholarly contribution to the understanding of national culture. First part studies cultural production and ideology in Morelos and in the Huasteca Potosina. Second part focuses on history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and relationship between the national community and racial ideology. Based on extensive field work and participant observation"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57. http://www.loc.gov/hlas/
Borderlands Media: Cinema and Literature as Opposition to the Oppression of Immigrants, by David E. Toohey, explores the ways in which immigrants, diaspora communities, and their allies use alternative media to reject oppression. This in-depth analysis of the immigrant experience makes use of a mixture of cinema, literary, and other artistic media from 1958 onward, combined with supporting social science and policy documents. Borderlands Media is an essential text for scholars and students engaged in questions of media's effect on the oppression of immigrants and diaspora communities.
Over the past fifteen years in Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extortion, Claudio Lomnitz examines the Mexican state in relation to this extreme violence, uncovering a reality that challenges the familiar narratives of “a war on drugs” or a “failed state.” Tracing how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and a burgeoning drug economy have shaped Mexico’s sociopolitical landscape, Lomnitz shows that the current crisis does not represent a tear in the social fabric. Rather, it reveals a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state and the economy in which traditional systems of policing, governance, and the rule of law have eroded. Lomnitz finds that power is now concentrated in the presidency and enforced through militarization, which has left the state estranged from itself and incapable of administering justice or regaining control over violence. Through this critical examination, Lomnitz offers a new theory of the state, its forms of sovereignty, and its shifting relation to capital and militarization.
The history of Mexico's fearless intimacy with death--the elevation of death to the center of national identity.