Table of Contents

• Foreword: Complex Performance in Santiago Atitlán (by Davíd Carrasco)
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One. Establishing Place and Imagining Community
  • 1. What in the World Is Going On in Santiago Atitlán?
  • 2. The Atiteco Mayas at the End of the Twentieth Century
  • 3. The Flowering of the Dead (Coauthored with Martín Prechtel)
• Part Two. History, Peripherality, and Social Pluralism
  • 4. Conquest and Adaptation in Santiago Atitlán
  • 5. On Enlightenment, Liberalism, and Ladinos
• Part Three. Death of Community, Resurrection of Autonomy
  • 6. Under the Gun in Santiago Atitlán
  • 7. When Immortals Die
  • 8. Season of the Witch: The New Millennium in Santiago Atitlán
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

Promotional Information

This classic study of cultural continuity and change in an indigenous Guatemalan community is now updated to reveal how the forces of globalization are shredding the very fabric of communal and religious life.

About the Author

Robert S. Carlsen recently retired from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, where he taught for twenty years, and is now an independent researcher. He conducted twenty-five years of field research in Atitlán, where he learned Tz'utujil, was accepted in a local cofradía (Mayan/Catholic religious society), and was a firsthand witness to la violencia.