INTRODUCTION: ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON INDIGENOUS RESURGENCE IN CHIAPAS

Abstract

This introduction places the papers in this collection within the context of research on Chiapas since the 1994 rebellion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and Chiapas itself into the longer-term national scenario of indigenous politics in Mexico, showing how these historically and ethnographically grounded studies contribute not only to understanding developments in Mexico and Chiapas but also to anthropological analyses of the relationships between states and regional social movements in general. Although the collection sheds new light on the EZLN itself, by advancing the ethnography of the political life of the communities in which it operates and the ethnography of the movement itself as an organization, it also serves to ‘decenter’ the EZLN in the anthropology of Chiapas, thereby strengthening broader perspectives on indigenous assertiveness in southern Mexico. Exploring a variety of different forms of indigenous responses to a changing world and a changing state, the papers not only chart the variation that exists within and between indigenous communities themselves but also show ‘the state’ itself to be far less coherent and unitary than it is often painted in activist accounts.

Key Words:

• indigenous movements
• Mexico
• Chiapas
• history
• politics

Notes

1. Major anthropological milestones in English would include the special issue of Journal of Latin American Anthropology, edited by Lynn Stephen and George Collier in 1997 (Volume 3, Number 1), a special issue in 2000 of Latin American Perspectives, subsequently republished in revised form as a book (Rus, Hernández, and Mattiace, 2003), and June Nash's book Mayan Visions (Nash 2001), although one might argue that the appeal to the idea of a common “Maya” identity to define the indigenous people of Chiapas suggested by the titles of the latter two works is more of a hindrance than a help from the point of view of the kind of analysis that the authors are actually trying to pursue. It is unfortunate that key works in Spanish for understanding the origins of the Zapatista rebellion and the movement's organization, in particular Leyva and Ascencio's Lacandonia al Filo de Agua (1996), have never been translated into English.

2. In practice, as Escalona's paper illustrates, in some regions, government agrarian authorities allowed even ejidos more opportunities to manage their affairs in the own way than the law technically allowed.

3. Another important contribution to this stream of literature is the paper by Rubin (1996) that serves as the starting-point of Agudo Sanchíz's article. A book on southern Mexico that adopts regionalized “bottom-up” perspectives as an alternative to a “state-centered” approach is Stephen (2002), which looks at how the EZLN rebellion was understood in other parts of Mexico, in particular Oaxaca, through the lens of the different symbolic meanings assigned to the national icon of Emiliano Zapata in different kinds of rural communities.