Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship - Hardcover

Stack, Trevor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826352529 ISBN 13: 9780826352521

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press, 2012

Synopsis

While much has been written about national history and citizenship, anthropologist Trevor Stack focuses on the history and citizenship of towns and cities. Basing his inquiry on fieldwork in west Mexican towns near Guadalajara, Stack begins by observing that people talked (and wrote) of their towns' history and not just of Mexico's.

Key to Stack's study is the insight that knowing history can give someone public status or authority. It can make someone stand out as a good or eminent citizen. What is it about history that makes this so? What is involved in knowing history and who is good at it? And what do they gain from being eminent citizens, whether of towns or nations?

As well as academic historians, Stack interviewed people from all walks of life--bricklayers, priests, teachers, politicians, peasant farmers, lawyers, and migrants. Resisting the idea that history is intrinsically interesting or valuable--that one simply must know the past in order to understand the present--he explores the very idea of "the past" and asks why it is valued by so many people.

About this title

From the Author:

It has been wonderful to hear from such a variety of people - academics, undergraduates and the broader public - that the book is accessible and interesting and fun to read. I kept the book short in the hope of living up to the Mexican maxim: "the good when brief is twice as good". It is short because I left much of the academic debate to the journal articles that I have published on history and memory; genres of speech or writing, of which history is just one example; citizenship, especially the tension between belonging to a place and being cosmopolitan; and the urban and its relation to the national. It is readable because I make use of narrative throughout the book, telling the story not just of things that happened during my fieldwork in Mexico but also how I got interested in the topic to begin with and how my thoughts developed during the twenty years that it took to write the book. The book is relevant because I link my observations in Mexico to my personal experience of history at school in Scotland and during my undergraduate studies in History at Oxford, as well as to the comparative fieldwork that I did in California, where I looked at ideas of history among Mexican migrants and found quite similar ideas among Anglo Californians. I am delighted that readers and reviewers have not only enjoyed the book but have found that the book sheds light on why people value history not only in the Mexican towns that I studied but in the world beyond them.

From the Back Cover:

"Trevor Stack gives us a textured and sensitive ethnography of what history is for the residents of a Mexican town, revealing the multiple ways that popular notions of local history diverge from ideas about what constitutes national history, as well as how history as it is understood by townspeople is different from the history written by academics. Wielding a keen ethnographic eye and a lucid pen, Stack has written a book that is at once theoretically sophisticated and highly accessible, bridging anthropology and history in imaginative ways." - Joanne Rappaport, Georgetown University, co-author of Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes."Trevor Stack has written a deceptively simple yet important book that is a delight to read. Focusing on several small communities in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, he sets out to answer two basic questions: what is history? And why do people find it interesting? Bringing the eye and ear of an expert ethnographer to these questions, he shows a genuine, but critical, respect for history and in a crucial move relates the different notions of history he finds in his Mexican communities to the construction of citizenship at both local and national levels. Historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and those from many other disciplines will find much to ponder in this finely written account that manages to avoid professional jargon while making an important and complex set of arguments." - Daniel James, Bernardo Mendel Chair of Latin American History, Indiana University, author of Doña María's Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0826352529
• ISBN 13: 9780826352521
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 184