Christine Eber

“Take my water”:: liberation through prohibition in San Pedro Chenalhó, Chiapas, Mexico

This article explores changing views of alcohol in San Pedro Chenalhó, a township in highland Chiapas, Mexico that has been profoundly transformed by the Zapatista democracy movement. The first part of the article provides an overview of drinking in Chenalhó in the 1970s and 1980s when alcohol was still a strong symbol of community solidarity and an important part of healing ceremonies. The second part describes the period since the Zapatista uprising, a period in which indigenous women have begun to intensify their involvement in the political affairs of their communities. In their search for autonomy and to recover pride and dignity, both women and men supporters of the Zapatista movement reject alcohol as a symbol of political and economic domination. A commentary examines the relationship between the critiques of alcohol that have developed in Chenalhó since the 1970s and political economy perspectives in alcohol studies. Both explanatory frameworks focus on the power structures in which alcohol sales and use are embedded.

Obstacles facing women’s grassroots development strategies in Mexico

Women in the indigenous township of San Pedro Chenalho, Chiapas have responded to economic crisis and structural adjustment in Mexico with cooperative survival strategies. While women have obtained a certain level of empowerment through these strategies, they have also faced severe obstacles to the development and success of their grassroots initiatives. This article examines the transformative potential of the womens collective projects, analyzes the obstacles they face, and considers the implications of the case of Chenalho for other marginalized communities facing similar impediments to grassroots development.

The Gift That Keeps Giving

imagine dividing up the universe of themes differently, but they all do a competent and at times inspiring job of reviewing not only classic historical interpretations but also the concepts and tropes they are based on. My personal favorite was the chapter on kinship, which discussed not only standard anthropological concepts such as lineality and affinity and how they apply to the deep past (were australopithecine groups centered around male kin or female kin?) but also other forms of “kinshipping” (which seems to be the term adopted in the book for forming relations between people generally). I had never before thought about things such as houses, meals, and rites as “sensory traps” for relating Paleolithic hominids! Other readers will no doubt find their own riches in other chapters. It is remarkable how a conceptual makeover can bring a traditionally closed or dull subject back to life. For sheer idea content and thought-provokingness, the last chapter, “Scale,” coauthored by Stiner, Earle, Smail, and Schryock, stands out. The basic argument of the chapter is that scale itself is an important parameter of social process and hence of history; qualitatively different processes happen in cities than in hamlets, in groups of 5,000 people than in groups of 50, or in large brains than in small brains. The pattern of deep history consists of repeated plateaus, or “Jcurves,” where an organizational threshold such as community size is crossed, followed by rapid, often exponential, change until we reach the limits of what is possible within the current scale of things. This characterizes social evolution as conditioned by brain size, the beginnings of agricultural worlds, social hierarchies, cities, and the industrial, urban world. While I happen to disagree with some of the particular interpretations proposed, that is beside the point. The real point is that historical processes may have their own emergent structures that give coherent patterning at scales of analysis far beyond what historians or archaeologists routinely undertake. There is one health warning of negative side effects: Deep History may create in the reader a deep dissatisfaction with the basic concepts found in the overwhelming bulk of anthropological, archaeological, and historical writing. Looked at with fresh eyes, most current work comes across as unreflective, uncreative, and trapped within unexamined concepts. For example, the book shows incisively how the “tree” metaphor that underlies historical linguistics and historical genetics derives ultimately from biblical sources and limits our ability to understand the full range of historical processes that create linguistic and genetic patterns. Yet (aside from intriguing new explorations such as those outlined in the chapter on language) the vast bulk of work in these fields is still conducted using these concepts. The same is true for other fields. The coevolution models proposed for domestication are sadly far from general in archaeology; much paleoanthropology still aims to explain the uniqueness of humans as instances of exceptionalism. The challenge is to translate the exceptional provocativeness of these ideas into the normal practice of making history. The Gift That Keeps Giving

“If You Can’t See the Face, You Can’t See the Misery”

age and gender. For example, my own research shows that although adult men make up the majority of unauthorized migrants, the undocumented crossings of women and children are nearly always facilitated by a coyote or, more commonly, a coyota (woman coyote). Spener mentions women migrants and coyotas only in passing, and the gendered dynamics of unauthorized entry would be worth exploring further. Similarly, given the large number of children living in the United States without documents—the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that one-sixth of the undocumented population, approximately 1.7 million migrants, are children—a focus on how very young people cross would be a significant contribution to understanding the nuanced politics of borders. While these can be difficult migrants to reach, they warrant attention, especially since they are often the clandestine among the clandestine. Spener calls his discussion a “unique case” (p. 25) rooted in a particular historical moment and focused on a specific region along one international divide, although it is also germane to the increasing globality of the movement of people across borders without state authorization. As I was writing this review, I saw Nick Broomfield’s film Ghosts (2006), based on the true story of 23 Chinese migrants who died while cockling in Morecambe Bay in 2004, and was struck by the similarities in what initially seem to be two very different clandestine crossings. In the film, “snakeheads” (Chinese coyotes) facilitate the passage of undocumented migrants from China to the United Kingdom, a journey that takes six months, costs

Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town: Water of Hope, Water of Sorrow

25,000, and includes unauthorized travel across multiple borders by bus, foot, boat, and truck. Despite differences in the details, flows to the north within the Americas and from China to Europe—as well as numerous other crossings throughout the world—share dimensions in that they happen despite militarized borders, simultaneously underscore and undermine state power, and pose grave risk to human lives. Through Spener’s lens, we see the permeability of borders and the resourcefulness and resiliency of those crossing international boundaries without papers. His book emphasizes the ways that nation-state borders are porous while also exposing the state’s ability to quickly shift tactics in its crackdown on undocumented migration. Given that “illegal” crossings have been undertaken by millions of “otherwise law-abiding people” over the past century (p. 122), it is clear that borders will continue to be crossed clandestinely even as nation-states increase control of such movement. As one migrant described to Spener, people cross “day after day, day after day” (p. 73). The fact that border enforcement is both futile and dangerous to migrants poses “moral ambiguities” (p. 205) and perpetuates what Spener calls the “normalization of suffering” (p. 226). By situating the work of coyotes within the context of state power, Spener leaves us wondering who is actually crossing the line. Reference Cited