What is history? And why do people value it? Basing his inquiry
on fieldwork near Guadalajara in west Mexico, anthropologist Trevor
Stack focuses on one reason for which people commonly value
history--knowing history is said to make for better citens, which
helps to explain why history is taught at schools worldwide and
history questions are included in citizenship tests. Stack combines
his Mexican fieldwork with his personal experience of history in
Scottish schools and at Oxford University to try to pinpoint what
exactly it is that makes people who know history seem like better
citizens.
Much has been written about national history and citizenship;
Stack concentrates instead on the history and citizenship of towns
and cities. His Mexican informants talked (and wrote) not only of
Mexican history but of their towns' histories, too. They acted, at
the same time, as citizens of their towns as well as of Mexico.
Urban history and citizenship are, the book shows, important yet
neglected phenomena in Mexico and beyond.
Rather than setting history on a pedestal, Stack treats it as
one kind of knowledge among many others, comparing it not just to
legend but also to gossip. Instead of focusing on academic
historians, he interviewed people from all walks of
life--bricklayers, priests, teachers, politicians, peasant farmers,
lawyers, laborers, and migrants--as well as drawing on a talk about
history by the famous Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo.
As an ethnography, Knowing History in Mexico provides a vivid
portrait of ethnicity, lands, migration, tourism, education,
religion, and government in a dynamic region of west Mexico that
straddles the urban and rural, modern and traditional.
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