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Tortillas for the Gods: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals

di Evon Zartman Vogt

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1711,237,506 (2)1
They swore oaths, both personal and professional. From the Plain at West Point, through the Mexican War, to the carnage of Shiloh. They were fighting for country, for a way of life and for family. Classmates carried more than rifles and sabers into battle. They had friendships, memories, children and wives. They had innocence lost, promises broken and glory found. Duty, Honor, Country is history told both epic and personal so we can understand what happened, but more importantly feel the heart-wrenching clash of duty, honor, country and loyalty. And realize that sometimes, the people who changed history, weren't recorded by it. This book is big, almost twice the length of my usual books, because the story demands a large scale. Reviews for Mayer's books: "Exciting and authentic. Don't miss this one." W.E.B. Griffin "Mayer had me hooked from the very first page." Stephen Coonts "Fascinating, imaginative and nerve-wracking." Kirkus Reviews "Will leave you spellbound." Book News "Mayer has established himself as one of today's better military writers. A background in Special Operations gives him credibility and understanding from having been there and done that." Airpower Journal "A treat for military fiction readers." Publishers Weekly Our story starts in 1840, in Benny Havens tavern, just outside post limits of the United States Military Academy. With William Tecumseh Sherman, a classmate, a plebe, and Benny Havens' daughter coming together in a crucible of honor and loyalty. And on post, in the West Point stables, where Ulysses S. Grant and a classmate are preparing to saddle the Hell-Beast, a horse with which Grant would eventually set an academy record, and both make fateful decisions that will change the course of their lives and history. The key to this series is a simple fact I had to memorize as a plebe at West Point: Who commanded the major battles of the Civil War? -- There were 60 important battles of the War. In 55 of them, graduates commanded on both sides. That struck me as utterly fascinating and disturbing on a core level. After all, how did men who went to the same Academy, who swore the same oath of allegiance, end up fighting each other? So I decided to take a handful of fictional character and insert them into history, to rub elbows with those who would become great and those who would become infamous. And have them live through events, both epic and personal. The story ranges from West Point; to a plantation in Natchez, the richest city in the United States where cotton was king; to the only mutiny in the United States Navy; to St. Louis where Kit Carson is preparing to depart on a famous expedition to the west with Fremont that would eventually bring California into the Union; to Mexico, where the United States Army suffered its highest casualty rate to this day and brought most of the western United States into the Union; to the founding of the Naval Academy; to John Brown's hanging; to the firing on Fort Sumter; through First Bull Run; the first battle of ironclads, the Monitor and Virginia; and culminating in the epic battle of Shiloh, where the United States had more casualties in one battle than in all previous wars combined and the face of warfare changed forever. This is history told both epic and personal so we can understand intellectually what happened, but more importantly feel the heart-wrenching struggle of duty, honor, country and loyalty coming into collision. This first book will be followed by more books, taking our characters through the Civil War and beyond, into the Plains Wars and further. As they say at West Point: Much of the history we teach, was made by people we taught.… (altro)
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I don't know what to make of this book, honestly. It's an exhaustive- and exhausting- compendium and analysis of Zinacanteco ritual behavior. But is it an ethnography? You so rarely get a sense of the Zinacantecos as individuals, in contrast to Don Eustacio (of Redfield's Chan Kom) or June Nash's informants. There's something to be said for not following the basic formula for writing ethnography when you're describing a culture, but Vogt flips it upside down- he attempts to describe a culture without talking about it at all. I know that this is just one portion of the voluminous writings of the Harvard Chiapas Project, but it seems so strange out of context. I just read two hundred pages about the Zinacantecos, and all the knowledge I gained from it can be summed up in:

hot != cold
rising sun != setting sun
culture != nature

I think what Vogt's doing here is really cool- and therein lies the problem. Vogt is trying to roll the universe up in a ball, to have this perfect cohesion. In so many ways, it feels more like Vogt's play-pretty than a real report on a real people. There's this weird undercurrent in the book of Vogt's "got you now!" moments; he very clearly thinks he knows this stuff better than his informants do. It's not like he's just pulling it from nowhere- it's not uncommon for ritual actors to lose metapragmatic awareness of their own rituals- but he takes it to an extreme that I'm just not comfortable with.

I think what he's doing is ultimately dishonest. To his credit, he lays it right out in the subtitle: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals- compare that to A Maya Village. That notwithstanding, I think his writing style is intentionally misleading. He does break it down into his report of the ritual followed by his analysis, but his analysis creeps into the report constantly. I get the sense, from what I know of him and how he writes, that he doesn't know he's being misleading; he just thinks he's right. This is exactly why I liked June Nash- with Nash, you can keep the text and toss the theory, but with Vogt, you've got to take it or leave it.

I'm also having a hard time seeing the utility of this document in general; I understand it as a theoretical text and as a historical report, but I don't think it has a lot of explanatory power in a larger context. It just feels like a catalogue to me- I guess that's nice if you're really into ritual behavior, but the things that I did get out of it- hot vs. cold, spatial relationships- have been articulated better and faster by other authors.

Do I think this is ultimately an ethnography? No. Do I think it has much value out of context? Not as much as Vogt thinks, apparently. Do I want my afternoon back? Sort of. ( )
  imnotsatan | Oct 9, 2008 |
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They swore oaths, both personal and professional. From the Plain at West Point, through the Mexican War, to the carnage of Shiloh. They were fighting for country, for a way of life and for family. Classmates carried more than rifles and sabers into battle. They had friendships, memories, children and wives. They had innocence lost, promises broken and glory found. Duty, Honor, Country is history told both epic and personal so we can understand what happened, but more importantly feel the heart-wrenching clash of duty, honor, country and loyalty. And realize that sometimes, the people who changed history, weren't recorded by it. This book is big, almost twice the length of my usual books, because the story demands a large scale. Reviews for Mayer's books: "Exciting and authentic. Don't miss this one." W.E.B. Griffin "Mayer had me hooked from the very first page." Stephen Coonts "Fascinating, imaginative and nerve-wracking." Kirkus Reviews "Will leave you spellbound." Book News "Mayer has established himself as one of today's better military writers. A background in Special Operations gives him credibility and understanding from having been there and done that." Airpower Journal "A treat for military fiction readers." Publishers Weekly Our story starts in 1840, in Benny Havens tavern, just outside post limits of the United States Military Academy. With William Tecumseh Sherman, a classmate, a plebe, and Benny Havens' daughter coming together in a crucible of honor and loyalty. And on post, in the West Point stables, where Ulysses S. Grant and a classmate are preparing to saddle the Hell-Beast, a horse with which Grant would eventually set an academy record, and both make fateful decisions that will change the course of their lives and history. The key to this series is a simple fact I had to memorize as a plebe at West Point: Who commanded the major battles of the Civil War? -- There were 60 important battles of the War. In 55 of them, graduates commanded on both sides. That struck me as utterly fascinating and disturbing on a core level. After all, how did men who went to the same Academy, who swore the same oath of allegiance, end up fighting each other? So I decided to take a handful of fictional character and insert them into history, to rub elbows with those who would become great and those who would become infamous. And have them live through events, both epic and personal. The story ranges from West Point; to a plantation in Natchez, the richest city in the United States where cotton was king; to the only mutiny in the United States Navy; to St. Louis where Kit Carson is preparing to depart on a famous expedition to the west with Fremont that would eventually bring California into the Union; to Mexico, where the United States Army suffered its highest casualty rate to this day and brought most of the western United States into the Union; to the founding of the Naval Academy; to John Brown's hanging; to the firing on Fort Sumter; through First Bull Run; the first battle of ironclads, the Monitor and Virginia; and culminating in the epic battle of Shiloh, where the United States had more casualties in one battle than in all previous wars combined and the face of warfare changed forever. This is history told both epic and personal so we can understand intellectually what happened, but more importantly feel the heart-wrenching struggle of duty, honor, country and loyalty coming into collision. This first book will be followed by more books, taking our characters through the Civil War and beyond, into the Plains Wars and further. As they say at West Point: Much of the history we teach, was made by people we taught.

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