Mexican Rural Development and the Plumed Serpent: Technology and Maya Cosmology in the Tropical Forest of Campeche, Mexico

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This is the first ethnography to be written about a Campeche Maya community. It examines the surviving Maya traditional technologies and sacred cosmologies and discusses the potential for combining these with modern knowledge and technologies to form an efficient new system that will not only provide for ecologically responsible development but will also make possible the cultural survival of this threatened indigenous population.

Reviews

"Betty Faust's book on Mexican Rural Development and the Plumed Serpent is one of the most illuminating books I have read on a peasant community and how it copes with the natural environment and the encroaching modern world in the tropical forest of the Maya lowlands. The remarkable strength of Faust's study is based upon her enviable control of Maya archaeological prehistory and contemporary ethnography as well as her penetrating knowledge of the geology, climate, and agricultural patterns of the Yucatec Maya. Her exciting account and analysis of the patterns of water management, technologically and ritually, for sustainable agriculture in this Maya community are a must for scholars and laymen alike who wish to understand these technical and ceremonial processes."-Evon Z. Vogt Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus Harvard University
"Faust has provided an engaging ethnographic account on the Yucatec Maya....Her analysis correlates the social life of the Maya, their landscape, and ritual. Details on technological change and exploitation of water resources among the Maya provide a context for consideration of rural development and reflection on the potential for conservation of the natural world. The study is a personal narrative of engagement in the Maya culture by an anthropologist who is committed to advocacy."-Ellen R. Kintz, Ph.D. Chair, Department of Anthropology, SUNY Geneseo
"Most important is the insight [Faust] provides into the actual context of environmental management in the tropics--how indigenous people maintained a complex system over time, and why deforestation and decline have recently occurred. By combining the approaches of the interpretative humanist and the biological scientist, she brings a new and illuminating approach to notoriously difficult questions."-E. N. Anderson Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside
"The remarkable strength of Faust's study is based upon her enviable control of Mayan archaeological prehistory and contemporary ethnography as well her penetrating knowledge of the geology, climate, and agricultural patterns of the Yucatec Maya. Her exciting account and analysis of the patterns of water management, technologically and ritually, for sustainable agriculture in this Maya community are a must for scholars and laymen alike who wish to understand these technical and ceremonial processes."-Evon Z. Vogt Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus Harvard University
[O]ne can learn a great deal from it....[I]t is a valuable book indeed.-South Eastern Latin Americanist
Writing passionately, even sympathetically, and drawing on much recent scholarship, Faust has made a very personal yet valuable contribution to Maya Studies. Upper-division undergraduates and above.-Choice
"One can learn a great deal from it....It is a valuable book indeed."-South Eastern Latin Americanist
"[O]ne can learn a great deal from it....[I]t is a valuable book indeed."-South Eastern Latin Americanist
"Writing passionately, even sympathetically, and drawing on much recent scholarship, Faust has made a very personal yet valuable contribution to Maya Studies. Upper-division undergraduates and above."-Choice

Author Bio

BETTY BERNICE FAUST is a Researcher and the Academic Coordinator of Human Ecology at the Centro de Investigacin y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politcnico Nacional in Mrida, Mexico. She is a contributor to Women In Health (Bergin & Garvey, 1988).