Forest Society: A Social History Of Peten, Guatemala (The Ethnohistory Series)

Forest Society: A Social History of Peten, Guatemala (The Ethnohistory Series)

In recent years, Mesoamerican anthropologists have been shifting the focus of their research from structural-functional analyses of small communities to studies of communities as the products of the interaction of microsocial and macrosocial processes. Greater attention is being given to relationships between ecology and society; between state power and local community culture; and among world economics, regional politics, and subregional sociocultural patterns. Forest Society examines the social history of Peten, in the lowlands of Northern Guatemala, in the context of these changing relationships. The author contends that, for 250 years, roughly from the 1720s to the 1970s, the sociocultural system of Peten endured with remarkable continuity, not in spite of changes in the hinterland region but, to an important degree, because of them. During that time, there was relatively little change in the socioeconomic composition of and the relationships between Peten's various social sectors and ethnic groups.