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How are spiritual power and self-transformation cultivated in street ministries? This book provides an in-depth analysis of Pentecostal ministries in Puerto Rico that were founded and run by self-identified “ex-addicts,” ministries that are also widespread in poor Black and Latino neighborhoods in the U.S. mainland. The book melds cultural anthropology and psychiatry. Through the stories of ministry converts, the book examines key elements of Pentecostalism: mysticism, ascetic practice, and the idea of other-worldliness. It then reconstructs the ministries' strategies of spiritual victory over addiction: transformation techniques to build spiritual strength and authority through pain and discipline; cultivation of alternative masculinities based on male converts' reclamation of domestic space; and radical rupture from a post-industrial “culture of disposability.” By contrasting the ministries' logic of addiction with that of biomedicine, the book rethinks roads to recovery, discovering unexpected convergences with biomedicine while revealing the allure of street corner ministries.

One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is a comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region. It is a story of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, to the formation of the Tiwanaku and Pucara civilizations, and to the double conquest of the region, first by the powerful neighboring Inca in the fifteenth century and a century later by the Spanish Crown. Based on more than fifteen years of field research in Peru and Bolivia, the book brings together a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, including material not previously published. It brings together intimate knowledge of the ethnography and archaeology in this region to bear on major theoretical concerns in evolutionary anthropology. The book provides a broad comparative framework for evaluating how these complex societies developed. After giving an overview of the region's archaeology and cultural history, it discusses the history of archaeological research in the Titicaca Basin, as well as its geography, ecology, and ethnography. The book then synthesizes the data from six archaeological periods in the Titicaca Basin within an evolutionary anthropological framework. Titicaca Basin prehistory has long been viewed through the lens of Inca intellectuals and the Spanish state. This book demonstrates that the ancestors of the Aymara people of the Titicaca Basin rivaled the Incas in wealth, sophistication, and cultural genius.

Using ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Brazilian hospitals, this book shows how plastic surgeons and patients navigate the public health system to transform beauty into a basic health right. The book historically traces the national concern with beauty to Brazilian eugenics, which established beauty as an index of the nation's racial improvement. From here, the book explains how plastic surgeons became the main proponents of a raciology of beauty, using it to gain the backing of the Brazilian state. Beauty can be understood as an immaterial form of value that the book calls “affective capital,” which maps onto and intensifies the social hierarchies of Brazilian society. Patients experience beauty as central to national belonging and to gendered aspirations of upward mobility, and they become entangled in biopolitical rationalities that complicate their ability to consent to the risks of surgery. This book explores not only the biopolitical regime that made beauty a desirable national project, but also the subtle ways in which beauty is laden with affective value within everyday social practices—thus becoming the terrain upon which race, class, and gender hierarchies are reproduced and contested in Brazil.

Two of the world's most pressing needs—biodiversity conservation and agricultural development in the Third World—are addressed in this multidisciplinary investigation in geography. The book challenges current opinion by showing that the world-renowned diversity of crops grown in the Andes may not be as hopelessly endangered as is widely believed. It uses the lengthy history of small-scale farming by Indians in Peru, including contemporary practices and attitudes, to shed light on prospects for the future. During prolonged fieldwork among Peru's Quechua peasants and villagers in the mountains near Cuzco, evidence that much of the region's biodiversity is being skillfully conserved on a de facto basis was found to be convincing, as has been true during centuries of tumultuous agrarian transitions. Diversity occurs unevenly, however, because of the inability of poorer Quechua farmers to plant the same variety as their well-off neighbors and because land use pressures differ in different locations. Social, political, and economic upheavals have accentuated the unevenness, and this book's geographical findings are all the more important as a result. Diversity is indeed at serious risk, but not necessarily for the same reasons that have been cited by others. The originality of this study is in its correlation of ecological conservation, ethnic expression, and economic development.

This synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives a view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on a range of sources, it documents the crucial role played by language in cultural conquest: how colonial Mayan emerged in the age of the cross, how it was taken up by native writers to become the language of indigenous literature, and how it ultimately became the language of rebellion against the system that produced it. The book includes analyses of the linguistic practices of both missionaries and Mayas—as found in bilingual dictionaries, grammars, catechisms, land documents, native chronicles, petitions, and the forbidden Maya Books of Chilam Balam. It presents an approach to the study of religious and cultural conversion that aims to illuminate the history of Latin America and beyond.

This ethnography set in contemporary Peru provides an analysis of the making and unmaking of class consciousness among the urban poor. The author's research strategy is multifaceted; through interviews, participant observation, and survey research she digs deeply into the popular culture of the social activists and shantytown residents she studies. The result is a penetrating look at how social movements evolve, how poor people construct independent political cultures, and how the ideological domination of oppressed classes can shatter. This work is a new chapter in the growing literature on the formation of social movements, chronicling the transformation of Peru's poor from a culture of deference and clientelism in the late 1960s to a population mobilized for radical political action today.

This book tells the stories of tequila and mezcal, two of Mexico’s most iconic products, to investigate the politics of protecting local products in a global market. As people have yearned to connect with the people and places that produce their food, the concept of terroir—the taste of place—has become increasingly salient. Tequila and mezcal are both protected by denominations of origin (DOs), legal designations based on the notion of terroir. The DOs link production to particular regions, while quality standards guarantee each product’s safety and authenticity. Advocates argue that the DOs and the standards ensure the reputation of Mexico’s national spirits, expand market opportunities, and protect Mexico’s cultural heritage. But the institutions that regulate tequila and mezcal ultimately protect the interests of a small group of powerful global elites more than anyone else. The growing global demand for tequila and mezcal has led to fame and fortune for a handful of people, while excluding and marginalizing many others. The cases analyzed in this book illustrate the limitations of relying on alternative markets to protect food cultures and rural livelihoods. Because arguments about how to define and regulate tequila and mezcal have been conducted within the parameters of the global marketplace, they have privileged consumers while largely ignoring the perspectives of producers, farmers, workers, and communities. There is a need to move beyond market-based models to create more democratic, participatory, and inclusive ways of protecting and valuing local foods and drinks, as well as the people who make them.

In the two decades since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, Mexico has seen an epidemic of diet-related illness. While globalization has been associated with an increase in chronic disease around the world, in Mexico, the speed and scope of the rise has been called a public health emergency. The shift in Mexican foodways is happening at a moment when the country’s ancestral cuisine is now more popular and appreciated around the world than ever. What does it mean for their health and well-being when many Mexicans eat fewer tortillas and more instant noodles, while global elites demand tacos made with handmade corn tortillas? This book examines the transformation of the Mexican food system since NAFTA and how it has made it harder for people to eat as they once did. The book contextualizes NAFTA within Mexico’s approach to economic development since the Revolution, noticing the role envisioned for rural and low-income people in the path to modernization. Examination of anti-poverty and public health policies in Mexico reveal how it has become easier for people to consume processed foods and beverages, even when to do so can be harmful to health. The book critiques Mexico’s strategy for addressing the public health crisis generated by rising rates of chronic disease for blaming the dietary habits of those whose lives have been upended by the economic and political shifts of NAFTA.

While becoming less relevant in the United States, shopping malls are booming throughout urban Latin America. But what does this mean on the ground? Are shopping malls a sign of the region's “coming of age”? This is the first book to answer these questions and explore how malls and consumption are shaping the conversation about class and social inequality in Latin America. Through original and insightful ethnography, the author shows that class in the neoliberal city is increasingly defined by the shopping habits of ordinary people. Moving from the global operations of the shopping mall industry to the experience of shopping in places like Bogotá, Colombia, the book is an indispensable book for scholars and students interested in consumerism and neoliberal politics in Latin America and the world.

Can we address the issue of nationalism without polemics and restore it to the domain of social science? This book takes a major step in that direction by applying anthropological tools to the study of national culture. The book's sweeping interpretation of Mexican national ideology constructs an entirely new theoretical framework for the study of national and regional cultures everywhere. With an analysis of culture and ideology in internally differentiated regional spaces—in this case Morelos and the Huasteca in Mexico—the book links ethnographic and historical research 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.