Overview

Now available in English, Thunder Doesnt Live Here Anymore explores the highly unusual worldview of the Teenek people of Tantoyuca, whose self-deprecating cosmology diverges quite radically from patterns of positive cultural identity among other indigenous groups in Mexico. The Teenek speak of themselves as dirty, dumb, ignorant, and fearful, a vocabulary that serves to justify the Teeneks condition of social and spatial marginality in relation to their mestizo neighbours. However, as Anath Ariel de Vidas argues in this masterful ethnography, this self-denigration -- added to the absence among the Teenek of emblematic Indian features such as traditional costumes, agricultural rituals, specific ceremonies, or systems of religious cargoes or offices -- are not synonymous with collective anomie. Rather, as Ariel de Vidas demonstrates, their seeming ontological acceptance of a marginal social and economic condition is -- in its own peculiar way -- a language of indigenous resistance.

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9780870817700

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Reviews

The ethnographic corpus in this study is very rich and diverse consisting of origin myths, tales ( relatos ), dances, healing practices, beliefs about sorcery, toponyms and sacred geography, and the practices and beliefs of local Teenek Catholicism. . . . [A] very rich and original ethnography of a culture of marginality. -- Journal of Latin American Studies, 38, 2006

In this text, the reader will find a brilliant approach to key issues in the study of indigenous regions of contemporary Mexico - i.e. ethnic identity, cultural intermixing and acculturation in a context of marginality. --Bulletin of Latin American Research, 24:3. 2005 The ethnographic corpus in this study is very rich and diverse consisting of origin myths, tales (relatos), dances, healing practices, beliefs about sorcery, toponyms and sacred geography, and the practices and beliefs of local Teenek Catholicism. . . . [A] very rich and original ethnography of a culture of marginality. --Journal of Latin American Studies, 38, 2006 Without exaggeration, one of the masterworks of current anthropology on Amerindian societies. --Alain Breton, Universite de Paris

The ethnographic corpus in this study is very rich and diverse consisting of origin myths, tales (relatos), dances, healing practices, beliefs about sorcery, toponyms and sacred geography, and the practices and beliefs of local Teenek Catholicism. . . . [A] very rich and original ethnography of a culture of marginality. --Journal of Latin American Studies, 38, 2006 In this text, the reader will find a brilliant approach to key issues in the study of indigenous regions of contemporary Mexico - i.e. ethnic identity, cultural intermixing and acculturation in a context of marginality. --Bulletin of Latin American Research, 24:3. 2005 Without exaggeration, one of the masterworks of current anthropology on Amerindian societies. --Alain Breton, Universit de Paris

A novel contribution to the field of ethnographic studies dedicated to Mexico.

Author Information

Anath Ariel de Vidas is a lecturer for the Sociology and Anthropology Department at the University of Haifa in Israel. Teresa Lavender Fagan is a freelance translator and has published more than a dozen book-length translations, including Jean Bottero's The Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia.

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