Dear Neter@s,
In our second bouquet of reviews this month we offer you analyses of five books covering the countries of Chile, Mexico and the Andean region. They also deal with the topics of U.S. and Latin American Historiography, colonial medicine, modern propaganda, presidential politics, indigenous political systems, and cultural anthropology. We invite you to take pleasure and benefit fromtheir reading. I offer you simple summaries to whet your appetite
Susan E. Ramirez (Texas Christian University) offers us a close analysis of the peculiar work of cultural anthropologist Denise Arnold and archaeologist Christine Hastorf in the book _Heads of State_. In this book Arnold and Hastorf look at the symbolic power of heads in the Andes, and elaborate a hypothesis about cultural practice and indigenous political systems. In the review, Ramirez tells us she found merit in the discussion on the importance of heads in centripetal versus centrifugal polities. Also useful was the discussion on the Andean heterarchichal system of organization, teeming with overlays, multiplicity, and mixed ascendancy,but concurrent with patterns of relation. This argument relates with recent scholarshipthat point to a less centralized system of politics in the Andes than previously thought. Ramirez, however, found that from the historian point of view the book opens itself to a huge gap in time full of anachronisms, which tends to take some issues for granted (i.e., the concept of the Ayllu). Nevertheless, this is a book Ramirez recommends reading.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31882
Peter Villella (University of North Carolina in Greensboro) reflects on Sherry Field’s _Pestilence and Headcolds_. How would life be in a time when everybody, from the top-level ranks of society to the least known person, is dreadfully concerned with death? What underlying epistemologies would we find beneath the plethora of health and wellnesspractices people used to survive? Field’s book focuses on colonial Mexico and looks at the cultureof sickness and health in the time when epidemics and the loss of life were unprecedented. This is also the time in which people lived in the midst of two apparently opposing cosmologies; one informed by indigenous belief in the supernatural sources of illness and the other acquainted with the medieval humorism of Galenus. Field’s main contributions, according to Villella, are in the synthesis of thescholarship and in the broad interpretative framework. Despiteits structural limitations (i.e., extensiveness), the reader can learn about a world in which a cut, a minor infection and even a sniffle could be ground for distress.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31466
Thomas Schoonover (University of Louisiana at Lafayette) reviews Helen Delpar’s book, _Looking South_. Delpar’s contribution to scholarship is one that present historiography in a different package: as a narrative of the history of US people fascinated with the study of Latin America since the 19th Century. This is a study of both US, and Latin American History, but seen principally from the eyes of US writers. Here we learn about why the more formal and scholarly interest in Latin America began after the works of people like William H. Prescott and Washington Irving. Delpar informs the reader about the development of professional and academic institutions that led to the current forms of Latin American scholarship in the US. Schoonover argues that in telling us personal narratives Delpar has made historiography enjoyable to read.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31628
Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney tells us about a book that Silvia Borzutzky and Gregory B. Weeks have edited, which sheds light on why voters in Chile chose a government of the right to replace Michelle Bachelet. But this is not a pundit book attempting to explain in vain the inscrutable course of presidential elections. Instead, it is a collection of fine scholarly essays querying the historical post-Pinochet period. The focus is the Bachelet’s administration, as the book title would reveal: _The Bachelet Government_. That she was the first Chilean women president is just one of the many points of interest of her presidency. She also openly attempted the impossible: to promote a more equal society while still adhering to most of the neoliberal policies of her predecessors. As it happens often with political histories, the consensus of these authors is that the realities are more interesting and more complex than what they appear from a distance. At the end, you may not know everything with certainty, but after reading this book, Pieper Mooney affirms, at least you gain a better insight on why the nation took the direction it did in the last election.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31660
Andrae Marak reviews a book about the production of propaganda, governmental and otherwise, in post-revolutionary Mexico. The word propaganda often masquerades the manipulation of people’s opinions. Monica A. Rankin, however, uses a less narrow definition in her book, _¡Mexico, la patria!_. In it, she looks for patterns in the messages aimed at large Mexican audiences within the span of three periods: before WII, during WII and post-WII. The book offers suggestions, but avoids gauging the propaganda effects on people. It also brings new light into the U.S. and Mexico’s relations. Most interesting to me is how Rankin shows the symbolic (and discursive) co-option of the Mexican Revolution. In the 1940s, with the purpose of promoting national unity, the Ávila Camacho government successfully propagated the idea of the Mexican Revolution as a positive historical event that had set the nation on a democratic process. Taken as a whole, the nation-building messages behind all propaganda schemes, either from the right or from the left, were aimed to both industrialize and homogenize cultural Mexico. Marak recommends Rankin’s work as necessary for those studying post-revolutionary Mexico and those wanting to explore modern propaganda production.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32059
I want to thank our competent reviewers and dependable H-LatAm editors who have loaned me a “second pair of eyes” to read the reviews.
Cheers,
Dennis R. Hidalgo
