Richard N. Adams

Guatemalan Ladinization and History

Recent years have seen a significant increase in the use of history by social scientists. It is less and less common that studies in anthropology, sociology, and political science evaluate variables without attention to their antecedents. There still survive, however, concepts and theories built originally on synchronic assumptions. One of these theories, ladinization , has been the subject of considerable contention. “Ladinization” derives from “Ladino,” a term used in Guatemala and adjacent areas of Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras to refer to the non-Indian natives of those countries. I am not sure when “ladinization” entered the social science vocabulary, but it may have been with the work of North American anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s. It described what observers thought of as a process whereby Indians were becoming Ladinos or more Ladino-like. The term was not favored by Guatemalan Ladinos, who generally spoke of “civilizing” the Indians, by which they meant that Indian customs should be discarded in favor of Ladino. In espousing this theme, Guatemalan indigenistas of the “generation of the 20s” often blurred the relation of race to culture; some argued that Indians were capable of being “civilized,” others that such changes could only be secured by introducing Europeans to interbreeding.

Energy, Complexity, and Strategies of Evolution: As Illustrated by Maya Indians of Guatemala

Using free energy rate density (Φm) I differentiate two evolutionary strategies common to cosmic, biological, and cultural systems: the horizontal when energy increases proportional to mass, with no increase in complexity; and the vertical when it increases disproportionately to the mass and complexity increases. The vertical process is a continuing increase in complexity such that the system becomes vulnerable to collapse when energy sources fail. This is illustrated by a comparison of four Mayan Indian groups in Guatemala.

The apprenticeship in policy

Cyril S. Belshaw. The Sorcerers Apprentice: An Anthropology of Public Policy. New York and Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1976. xvi +342 pp. Index.

Patrons and politics

16.00 cloth,

Concluding Observations: the Evolution of Evolutionary Theory and Mechanisms

10.00 paper.

Some observations on social evolution from an energy structure approach

Arnold Strickon and Sidney Greenfield, eds. Structure and Process in Latin America: Patronage, Clientage, and Power Systems. A School of American Research Book. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973. vii + 256 pp. Figures, tables, references, and index.

Advances in the evolution of society

10.00.

An interpretation of geertz

These papers reveal the conviction that social evolution does manifest a certain kind of order, but that this order is not generated (although it may be influenced) by any set or class of externalities, exterior influences, or boundary conditions; nor is it guided by any inherent design or motivated by some master plan. Rather, the implicit assumption is that the orderly course of social evolution emerges in a Darwinian manner, with every event at once carrying something of the past but also inevitably incorporating something new, with the resultant emergent form being subject to selection (cf. Bateson, 1979). While this process yields continuities that are evident in hindsight, it does not encourage serious specific prediction for any serious distance ahead. Had this volume been prepared a decade or two ago, it is almost certain that there would still have been strong American materialist framework and Marxist flavour in the frameworks and concepts. Much of the evolutionary thinking in social anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by and evidenced in the work of Leslie White (1949, 1959) and secondarily Julian Steward (1955), and later by Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service ( 1960), Elman Service (1971) Morton Fried (1967), Maurice Bloch (1975), and of the Marxist framework of Jonathan Friedman and M.J. Rowlands (1978), Claude Meillaussoux (1981).2 Darwinism was not taken up readily by social anthropologists, even though his work was admired by Marx. The taints of &dquo;Social Darwinism&dquo; and Spencerian &dquo;organicism&dquo; were hard to avoid when one slipped into a Darwinian mode, and with or without the synthesis with genetics, Darwin’s emphasis on process

Studies of Mestizaje

Abstract This paper describes an approach to using non-equilibrium energy models for societal analysis on the social evolutionary level, and suggests that interrelation between energy consumption and societal regulatory activities is deterministic in certain respects, but not in others.

Introduction: Current Approaches to Classic and New Issues in Social Evolution

Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service, eds. Origins of the State. The Anthropology of Political Evolution. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978. 233 pp. Index. J. Friedman and M. J. Rowlands, eds. The Evolution of Social Systems. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978. xv 562 pp. Index.