When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846
Author(s):
Ramon Gutierrez
Label: Stanford University Press
Publisher(s):
Stanford University Press
Studio: Stanford University Press
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
Binding: Paperback
List Price: $26.95
Our Price: $24.25
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Similar Items:
The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Studies in North American Indian History)
Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
Changes in the Land, Revised Edition: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
Aztecs: An Interpretation (Canto)
The Spanish Frontier in North America (The Lamar Series in Western History)
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
Moon, Sun and Witches
Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945
Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West
Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma: The American Portraits Series
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
This social history of one remote corner of Spain's colonial American empire uses marriage as a window into intimate social relations, examining the Spanish conquest of America and its impact on a group of indigenous peoples, the Pueblo Indians, seen in large part from their point of view.
Customer Reviews
Unfounded and Inappropriate
This "scholarly work" should be taken for what it is, fiction. Gutierrez uses the accounts of Spanish conquistadores in an attempt to explain Puebloan culture in New Mexico. How then can Gutierrez claim that he is giving a voice to the Puebloan peoples by explaining their story through European accounts? Gutierrez is a prime example of why historians should leave the business of understanding and interpreting other cultures to anthropologists. The description of Puebloan culture, ideology, and social structure given by Gutierrez are misleading and largely untrue. If you truly wish to know about Pueblo prehistory or the culture of Pueblo people, read peer reviewed academic works by archaeologists and anthropologists, not this work of fictitious fluff by an unqualified writer!
Excellent Work
This is an excellent book. While the book has received some criticism, anyone who has read them will realize that they have little value. The passionate nature of the attacks on this book make it obvious that the attitude they are written in is anything but scholarly. It's true that there are assumptions and subtleties that could trouble some people, but they should be no problem for the intelligent and alert reader. Note that most of the things that were questioned about the book were very clearly explained in the introduction of the text.
Valuable, but approach with caution
This book is valuable if for no other reason than its presumption that sexuality has a history, and its tracing of the emergence of modern forms of sexuality thorugh the colonial documents of the Spanish conquest of New Mexico. One should not be seduced by Gutierrez's title into thinking that his text is riddled with pithy and complicated observations about the intersection of race, power and sexuality. Rather, the text itself manifests and speaks quietly of new questions and possible answers to be gleaned from considering colonial conquest as a two-way event; one in which the conqueror is affected as much as the conquered. It is, I think, a radical idea to examine how the symbol/belief system of Pueblo indians interfaced and ultimately facilitated their conquest. Similar, it is interesting to observe the colonialist system of self-other become undermined by conquest, hopelessly buttressed by extreme racist measures, and ultimately falls, playing out an Hegelian dialect- the seeds of destruction are immanent to creation. At the root of the author's project is the notion that people are conquered, subjected, not so much by the sword but by the imposition of discourse, which as Foucault reminds us is always negotiated between power and resistance.
Glimpse of past encounters.
This book in not of the divulgative kind. It is more of a scholarly work. Sometimes too heavy, insistent and lenghty. But it provides a very intersting glimpse in the past of the SouthWest and the conflicts that the encounters between the indians and the spaniards caused. The inability of the spaniards to deal with ancient indian customs in one hand and the church and morals they brought with themselves, remnants of a dying world, in the other, the deception the indians suffered as they applied their own beliefs to the spaniards, the codes and whims that regulated the sexuality of these two vastly different worlds...it all makes for an exciting subject and a great diary of the life in the U.S a long time ago. The author doesn't portray the indians as free of prejudice like they would want us to believe these days, neither are the spaniards just mere enslavers and ill-guided colonists. The views are more balanced and make better sense. Even centering the thesis aroun! d sexual matters was very illustrative and rich.
PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT SOME OF THE CONTENT THAT WE MAKE AVAILABLE TO YOU THROUGH THIS APPLICATION COMES FROM AMAZON WEB SERVICES. ALL SUCH CONTENT IS PROVIDED TO YOU "AS IS." THIS CONTENT AND YOUR USE OF IT ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND/OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME.
Powered by PNAmazon © 2003-2007 ttgapers.com
