Table of Contents
Introduction.
How Did a Boy from Minnesota End Up in the Lacandon Jungle?
Why Write a Book About the Lacandon?
How Twenty Years with the Lacandon has Influenced My Life and Approach to the Discipline of Anthropology.
1. Lacandon: The Last Lords of the Rain Forest?
Romantic Images.
Sixteenth — Seventeenth Centuries: Chol-Lacandon.
Eighteenth Century: Yucatec Lacandon.
Lacandon In the Nineteenth Century.
Lacandon In the Twentieth Century.
Lacandon 1980-2000.
2. Reconstructing the Traditional Lacandon.
Who Is Lacandon?
What Is a Traditional Lacandon?
Lacandon Life from 1790-1903.
Men and Women's Work.
Religion.
Marriage and Household Life.
The Disappearance of Traditional Religion.
Selling the Traditional Lacandon.
Two Case Studies and Concluding Thoughts.
3. Watching Life and Death in a Lacandon Community.
An Overview of Women, Men, and Work.
Women's Work.
Child Birth and Infant Mortality.
Men's Work.
Family Examples.
4. 1970-2000, Three Decades of Change.
Government, Oil and Immigration, an Overview.
Family Relations and Traditional Agriculture.
Roads, Bows and Arrows, and Tourism.
Adapting Agricultural to Tourism: Comparing Two Communities.
Women, Tourism, and Work.
Some Consequences of Tourism
5. The Decline of Traditional Religious Practices in Nahá.
Cosmology.
Ritual Places.
Ritual Implements.
Edible Offerings.
Ritual and Agriculture.
Healing and Ritual.
The Demise of Religion.
6. The Decline of Traditional Healing Practices.
Lacandon Categories of Sickness.
Curing Through Prayer.
Therapeutic Incantations.
Curing Strings.
Medicinal Plants.
The Decline of Healing Rituals.
7. 20 Years Among the Lacandon: Some Lessons Learned.
What is Lacandon Culture?
What People Say is Different From What They Do.
Marriage, Fatherhood, and My Position in the Community.
Involved Objectivity: or Why I Ran into a Burning House to Look for Someone Else's Children.
Glossary.
Appendix One: A Kin Chart of Chan K?in Viejo's Family.
References Cited.
Index.
