Awards

• Winner of Best Book Award, New England Council of Latin American Studies 2005 (United States)

Overview

Selling handicrafts to tourists has brought the Maya peoples of Guatemala into the world market. Vendors from rural communities now offer their wares to more than 500,000 international tourists annually in the marketplaces of larger cities such as Antigua, Guatemala City, Panajachel, and Chichicastenango. Like businesspeople anywhere, Maya artisans analyze the desires and needs of their customers and shape their products to meet the demands of the market. But how has adapting to the global marketplace reciprocally shaped the identity and cultural practices of the Maya peoples? Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork, Walter Little presents the first ethnographic study of Maya handicraft vendors in the international marketplace. Focusing on Kaqchikel Mayas who commute to Antigua to sell their goods, he explores three significant issues: how the tourist marketplace conflates global and local distinctions. how the marketplace becomes a border zone where national and international, developed and underdeveloped, and indigenous and non-indigenous come together. how marketing to tourists changes social roles, gender relationships, and ethnic identity in the vendors' home communities. Little's wide-ranging research challenges our current understanding of tourism's negative impact on indigenous communities. He demonstrates that the Maya are maintaining a specific, community-based sense of Maya identity, even as they commodify their culture for tourist consumption in the world market.

Full Product Details

9780292705678

Table of Contents

Reviews

[A]n important addition to the literature on ethnic arts in Latin America, tourism, cultural identity, social change, and globalization. The Americas This book is not only very readable, but also highly informative in the subject area of performance, as well as place, and how indigenous peoples have become engaged in, and deal with, that slippery phenomenon called globalization. Journal of Latin American Geography Walter E. Little paints a complex and nuanced portrait of Maya identity formation in <cite>Mayas in the Marketplace. American Ethnologist

This is a fine grained ethnography of Kakchikel Maya vendors from communities outside Antigua, Guatemala, who sell hand-woven goods to tourists in one of the colonial city's marketplaces. Little studies the effects of globalisation and the expansion of tourism on the daily lives of vendors. He provides an exceptionally detailed and well rounded contribution to the literature on cultural identity and tourism, demonstrating why not all Maya are supporters of Maya nationalism and arguing that changing economic status does not automatically result in changing identity. --Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol 26, No. 2., April 2007

Author Information

Walter E. Little is Professor of Anthropology at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

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