BEING INDIAN IN HUEYAPAN: A REVISED AND UPDATED EDITION
by Judith Friedlander, 2006, Palgrave Macmillan, 304 pages, $24.95 paperback
In this updated version of her classic 1975 text on culture and identity in Mexico, Judith Friedlander revisits the question of indigenousness and identity politics in the 21st century. Despite the many changes that have occurred in Mexico during the last 30 years, and despite the relative successes of the EZLN and in creating a “voice” for Mexico’s indigenous, she remains skeptical about the use of identity as an organizing strategy to combat the oppression that indigenous communities have faced for centuries, particularly as those strategies are now complicated by the onset of neoliberal globalization. Perhaps most interestingly, Friedlander has once again taken stock of the role of the anthropologist in Mexico, providing a brief but informative history of the field and reconsidering her original injunction against field research in developing countries and her call for a focus on “questions closer to home.”
Examining the question of North America’s role in indigenous communities is no less relevant today than it was 30 years ago, particularly given the North American activist interest in the recent mobilizations in Oaxaca. The essential skepticism of this book, and the history it provides around the construction of “Indianness,” should be essential reading for the North American solidarity activists.
ANOTHER ARABESQUE: SYRIAN-LEBANESE IDENTITY IN NEOLIBERAL BRAZIL
by John Tofik Karam, 2007, Temple University Press, 232 pages, $24.95 paperback
Tracing the construction of arab ethnicity and the role of Brazilians of Arab descent in the neoliberal period, John Tofik Karam demonstrates how Arab identity has been fostered in the context of market logistics and trade ties between Brazil and the Middle East and North Africa. He describes in detail how Arab identity has intensified under liberalization, and how organizations such as the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce have harnessed the “alleged commercial propensities” of Middle Easterners to bolster export markets and thereby Brazilian economic development. “Once disparaged as economic pariahs and still questioned as sly store owners, Middle Easterners have also gained recognition as the parceiros (partners) of national and state elites in Brazil,” Karam writes.
This exhaustive ethnography approaches Arab Brazilian lives as an interconnected whole, examining not only business but also politics, marriage and interpersonal relationships, leisure and tourism. In the context of Brazilian “racial democracy,” Karam details the ways in which ethnicity has been subsumed into a market model, and the mechanisms through which Arab identity has been commodified and the Arab community “made into a consumer niche” within Brazil.
DISSIDENT WOMEN: GENDER AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN CHIAPAS
Speed, Hernández Castillo and Stephen, eds., 2006, University of Texas Press, 318 pages, $22.95 paperback
This edited volume traces the ways in which women participants in struggles for land and representation have begun to “demand the democratization of gender relations within the family, the community, and social and political organizations,” as well. Situated specifically within the post-NAFTA context of southern Mexico in the neoliberal period, the book begins with key primary documents relating to the position of women within the EZLN specifically, and within indigenous culture more broadly. By taking an overall look at how gender has been incorporated into discussions of indigenous identity and rights, and examining the genealogy of women’s organizing in Chiapas both before and after 1994, the authors provide a framework within which to analyze the case studies that follow, which examine particular campaigns and mobilizations by women around issues such as domestic violence and women’s health.
The book follows the lives of women and organizations that, the editors admit, might not consider themselves feminists or leftists. But, they say, these women are “dissidents across many spheres of life,” and in attempting to build a national indigenous women’s movement, they are fighting to bring justice to their lives, communities and nation.
