The history of Mexico's fearless intimacy with death-the elevation of death to the center of national identity. Death and the Idea of Mexico is the first social, cultural, and political history of death in a nation that has made death its tutelary sign. Examining the history of death and of the death sign from sixteenth-century holocaust to contemporary Mexican-American identity politics, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz's innovative study marks a turning point in understanding Mexico's rich and unique use of death imagery. Unlike contemporary Europeans and Americans, whose denial of death permeates their cultures, the Mexican people display and cultivate a jovial familiarity with death. This intimacy with death has become the cornerstone of Mexico's national identity. Death and Idea of Mexico focuses on the dialectical relationship between dying, killing, and the administration of death, and the very formation of the colonial state, of a rich and variegated popular culture, and of the Mexican nation itself. The elevation of Mexican intimacy with death to the center of national identity is but a moment within that history-within a history in which the key institutions of society are built around the claims of the fallen. Based on a stunning range of sources-from missionary testimonies to newspaper cartoons, from masterpieces of artistic vanguards to accounts of public executions and political assassinations-Death and the Idea of Mexico moves beyond the limited methodology of traditional historiographies of death to probe the depths of a people and a country whose fearless acquaintance with death shapes the very terms of its social compact.

A tale, never before told, of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal at the margins of the Mexican revolution. In this long-awaited book, Claudio Lomnitz tells a groundbreaking story about the experiences and ideology of American and Mexican revolutionary collaborators of the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon. Drawing on extensive research in Mexico and the United States, Lomnitz explores the rich, complicated, and virtually unknown lives of Flores Magon and his comrades devoted to the "Mexican Cause." This anthropological history of anarchy, cooperation, and betrayal seeks to capture the experience of dedicated militants who themselves struggled to understand their role and place at the margins of the Mexican Revolution. For them, the revolution was untranslatable, a pure but deaf subversion: La revolucion es la revolucion-"The Revolution is the Revolution." For Lomnitz, the experiences of Flores Magon and his comrades reveal the meaning of this phrase. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon tracks the lives of John Kenneth Turner, Ethel Duffy, Elizabeth Trowbridge, Ricardo Flores Magon, Lazaro Gutierrez de Lara, and others, to illuminate the reciprocal relationship between personal and collective ideology and action. It is an epic and tragic tale, never before told, about camaraderie and disillusionment in the first transnational grassroots political movement to span the U.S.-Mexican border. The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magon will change not only how we think about the Mexican Revolution but also how we understand revolutionary action and passion.

This book is the first social, cultural and political history of death in a country that has made death into a proprietary symbol. Through an examination of the history of the symbolism of death, this innovative study is a landmark in the comprehension of the unique, rich usage which Mexico has made of the image of death. Unlike contemporary Europeans and North Americans, whose denial of death is deeply imbedded in their cultures, Mexico cultivates a good-humored familiarity with death that has made death a cornerstone of the country's national identity.

Can we address the issue of nationalism without polemics and restore it to the domain of social science? Claudio Lomnitz-Adler takes a major step in that direction by applying anthropological tools to the analysis of national culture. His sweeping and innovative interpretation of Mexican national ideology offers an entirely new theoretical framework for the study of national and regional cultures everywhere. Exits from the Labyrinth confronts the study of national culture through a meticulously reasoned analysis of culture and ideology in two vast, internally differentiated regions - Morelos and the Huasteca in Mexico. After proposing a vocabulary and a conceptual framework for the analysis of cultural regions, Lomnitz-Adler describes many aspects of the local and regional cultures. In each case, he begins by placing the region within Mexican political and economic space (Morelos more central, in proximity to the capital, the Huasteca more peripheral). He explores key elements of Mexican cultural and intellectual history and shows that, because these regions have strikingly different ways of tying in to Mexican official history, the comparison between them has significant implications for the study of national culture. Lomnitz-Adler's informative ethnographic and historical research is then tied to two specific aspects of Mexican national ideology and culture: the history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and the relationship between the national community and racial ideology. Provocative and profound, Exits from the Labyrinth discusses the Latin American essayist tradition in relation to contemporary anthropology and incorporates the best of both intellectual approachesinto its own exploration of Mexican nationalism. Since the subject of nationalism is extremely important now, given the upsurge of regionalism and nationalism in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, the author's emphasis on the conceptualization of culture in space will contribute to discussions in many areas.