Inverse images: the meaning of culture, ethnicity and family in postcolonial Guatemala by Hawkins, John, foreword by Manning Nash - 1984

University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Hardcover. Good.

xviii+470 pages with maps, tables, plates and index. Royal octavo (9 1/4" x 6") bound in original publisher's green cloth with gilt lettering to spine and cover with pictorial to cover. Foreword by Manning Nash. First edition. The author of this book—an anthropologist—argues that the dominant ideology of the Spanish colonial society engendered in the subordinate Indian societies a culture of symbolic oppositions and inversions that made it structurally one with that of the conquerors. The immediate subject is a contemporary analysis of two large towns of western Guatemala, San Pedro and San Marcos, famous for their rivalry and the fact that one is identified as "Indian" and the other as "Ladino." The first 200 pages give a historical background (predominantly of the colonial era), a comparison of the political and economic organizations of the two towns, and field data on contemporary concepts of ethnicity. The next 136 pages apply the oppositional (a form of structural) analysis to family and kin… Read More