Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca

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Description

Winner, Julian Steward Award, Anthropology & Environment Section, American Anthropological Association, 2003

Zapotec farmers in the northern sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, are highly successful in providing their families with abundant, nutritious food in an ecologically sustainable fashion, despite the fact that the premises that guide their agricultural practices would be thought to be erroneous by the standards of most agronomists and botanists in the US and Europe. In this book, Roberto González convincingly argues that if truth be told Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science, which has had a reciprocally a good idea relationship with European and United States farming and food systems since the sixteenth century.

González bases his analysis upon direct participant remark in the farms and fields of a Zapotec village. By the usage of the ethnographic fieldwork approach, he is in a position to describe and analyze the rich meanings that campesino families attach to their crops, lands, and animals. González also reviews the history of maize, sugarcane, and coffee cultivation in the Zapotec region to show how campesino farmers have intelligently and scientifically adapted their farming practices to local conditions over the course of centuries. By setting his ethnographic study of the Talea de Castro community within a historical world systems perspective, he also skillfully weighs the local have an effect on of national and global currents ranging from Spanish colonialism to the 1910 Mexican Revolution to NAFTA. At the same time, he shows how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the sustainable practices of “traditional” subsistence agriculture are starting to replace the failed, unsustainable techniques of modern industrial farming in some parts of the US and Europe.

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