A sophisticated look at Mayan culture exploring Mayan behaviour, spirituality, identity, history and politics. Including an examination of the Maya Zapatista movement of 1994, Telling Maya Tales is also a record of the author's own efforts to move from traditional anthropological analysis to experiment with new forms of representation.

The Legacy of Mesoamerica: History and Culture of a Native American Civilization summarizes and integrates information on the origins, historical development, and current situations of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. It describes their contributions from the development of Mesoamerican Civilization through 20th century and their influence in the world community. For courses on Mesoamerica (Middle America) taught in departments of anthropology, history, and Latin American Studies.

The Legacy of Mesoamerica: History and Culture of a Native American Civilization summarizes and integrates information on the origins, historical development, and current situations of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. It describes their contributions from the development of Mesoamerican Civilization through 20th century and their influence in the world community. For courses on Mesoamerica (Middle America) taught in departments of anthropology, history, and Latin American Studies.

Four Creations is a collection of seventy-four stories told to Gary H. Gossen by Tzotzil Maya storytellers in San Juan Chamula, Mexico. Spanning four cycles of creations, destructions, and restorations from the dawn of cosmic order to the present era, this epic history reveals a distinctly Maya vision of the universe, grand in scope yet leavened with local humor, irony, and the Tzotzil narrators' own critical commentaries.

This story -- like all classic epics -- is hardly a pristine relic of the past. It relates events from ancient times with the goal of illuminating the present. Four Creations includes mythic accounts of modern history, such as the Wars of Independence, the Mexican Revolution, and the current Protestant evangelical movement. Presented in both transcribed Tzotzil and English translations, the texts are enlivened by more than one hundred Maya Indian drawings and by Gossen's extensive ethnographic and historical notes based on his conversations with the narrators. The result of five years of field research and more than thirty-five years of study, this volume matches the epic scope of the sixteenth-century K'iche' Maya epic, the Popol Vuh.

Miguel Leon-Portilla's Foreword situates Four Creations within the broader context of Mesoamerican culture and traditions, while the Afterword by Jan Rus relates this work to recent events in modern-day Chamula.

The forty-two stories presented in this book were told to Robert Laughlin in Tzotzil by Francisca Hernandez Hernandez, an elderly woman known as Dona Pancha, the only speaker of Tzotzil left in the village of San Felipe Ecatepec in Chiapas, Mexico. Laughlin and Dona Pancha's running conversation is the source for the stories, which means they are told in much the same way that stories are told in traditional native settings. Dona Pancha is bilingual in Tzotzil and Spanish, and the stories are presented here in English, Tzotzil, and Spanish. They range from mythological sacred stories to quasi-historical legends to historical accounts of life in the twentieth century."

A sophisticated look at Mayan culture exploring Mayan behaviour, spirituality, identity, history and politics. Including an examination of the Maya Zapatista movement of 1994, Telling Maya Tales is also a record of the author's own efforts to move from traditional anthropological analysis to experiment with new forms of representation.