The physical signs of Roman Catholicism pervade the Mexican countryside. Colonial churches and neighborhood chapels, wayside shrines, and mountaintop crosses dot the landscape. Catholicism also permeates the traditional cultures of rural communities, although this ideational influence is less immediately obvious. It is often couched in enigmatic idiom and imagery, and it is further obscured by the vestiges of pagan customs and the anticlerical attitudes of many villagers. These heterodox tendencies have even led some observers to conclude that Catholicism in rural Mexico is little more than a thin veneer on indigenous practice. In Mary, Michael, and Lucifer John M. Ingham attempts to develop a modern semiotic and structuralist interpretation of traditional Mexican culture, an interpretation that accounts for the culture's apparent heterodoxy. Drawing on field research in Tlayacapan, Morelos, a village in the central highlands, he shows that nearly every domain of folk culture is informed with religious meaning. More precisely, the Catholic categories of spirit, nature, and evil compose the basic framework of the villagers' social relations and subjective experiences.
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A modern semiotic and structuralist interpretation of traditional Mexican culture that accounts for the culture's apparent heterodoxy.
Preface 1. Introduction 2. Setting, People, and Village 3. History 4. The Family 5. Ritual Kinship 6. The Faces of Evil 7. The Ceremonial Cycle 8. The Struggle with Evil 9. Los Aires 10. Syncretism and Social Meanings: An Overview Notes Bibliography Index
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In Mary, Michael, and Lucifer, there is a wonderful blending of the religious with other cultural domains.... The manuscript contains the best discussion of Mexican peasant ideas about biological conception that I know [and] outstanding analyses of folk medicine, male drinking patterns, and the moral qualities of the landscape in and around Tlayacapan.
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"In Mary, Michael, and Lucifer, there is a wonderful blending of the religious with other cultural domains... The manuscript contains the best discussion of Mexican peasant ideas about biological conception that I know [and] outstanding analyses of folk medicine, male drinking patterns, and the moral qualities of the landscape in and around Tlayacapan." -- Stanley Brandes, professor of anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780292751101
Publisert
1986-06-01
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Texas Press
Vekt
454 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
UP, G, 05, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
228
Forfatter
Om bidragsyterne
John M. Ingham is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.