Zapotec Women (Texas Press Sourcebooks in Anthropology) - Hardcover

Stephen, Lynn

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9780292790643: Zapotec Women (Texas Press Sourcebooks in Anthropology)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292790643 ISBN 13: 9780292790643

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 1992

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What happens when indigenous culture is packaged for sale in the United States? How does capital accumulation affect relations between men and women, local politics, kinship, and reciprocal exchanges of goods and labor? In this innovative study of several Zapotec communities in and around Oaxaca, Mexico, Lynn Stephen explores these questions, looking at how commercial weaving for export has altered the lives of women since the Mexican Revolution.
Drawing on firsthand insights gleaned during two and a half years of fieldwork, Stephen shows that the expansion of capitalism has affected Zapotec women in different ways. She demonstrates how class and ethnicity as well as gender determine women's roles and standing in the community. Individual life histories complement her data, showing how women may hold a position of importance in one area (ritual life, weaving production, or local politics), while occupying a subservient position in another. She also compares Zapotec women's participation in local politics with that of other peasant women in Mexico.
Stephen concludes that while the commercialization of Zapotec weaving has produced class differentiation - as classic economic theories predict - it has also reinforced kin-based institutions that support a strong sense of local ethnic identity. These findings offer important new insights for the fields of economic and political anthropology, Latin American and Third World studies, and women's studies.

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From the Publisher:

"After it first appeared, Zapotec Women quickly became a must-read in the fields of gender and Latin American studies, and today it can fairly be regarded as a classic. This thoroughly revised edition is a tour-de-force. Not content to merely add a few pages at the beginning or end of chapters, Lynn Stephen has rethought several key conceptual frameworks and reconsidered the changes experienced in Teotitl�n del Valle over the past twenty years."— Matthew C. Gutmann, editor of Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America

From the Back Cover:

"In "Zapotec Women," Lynn Stephen presents a complex analysis of stereotypically strong women. She situates women's independence, forged in daily life, in Zapotec tradition that is framed by state-sponsored images of 'Mexican Indians' and market transformations that have regional, national, and international dimensions. Stephen's compelling analysis illuminates class, ethnic, and gender relations that are unexpected and contingent. She renders these social processes beautifully, leaving the reader with an appreciation of individual lives in the context of global transformation."--Patricia Zavella, coeditor of "Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader"

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