Microfinance among the Maya: Tracking the Progress of Borrowers

Microfinance has become an increasingly widespread tool for fostering economic growth among the poor in developing countries. This study tracks the progress of 239 borrowers in a Guatemalan microfinance institution from 1994 to 1999. Results from the study show that rapid gains in employment within the sample enterprises after initial credit access were followed by a protracted period of stagnation in employment growth. Other results highlight gender differences in response to credit access, showing — surprisingly — that the long–run growth in hired labour for female entrepreneurs was slightly greater than that for male entrepreneurs.     

The Meanings of Conversion: Treaty Law,State Knowledge,and Religious Identity among Russian Captives in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

This article examines the role of religious conversion in the rules worked out, on paper and in practice, between the Ottoman and Russian empires for the return of captives following their frequent eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conflicts. The author shows that the abolition of ransom led the Ottoman state to take the central role in the liberation of captives in private hands in its territories. For cultural and fiscal reasons, this required the state to define a test for captives’ conversion to Islam, a matter which had previously been communally and religiously defined. The author traces the changing conversion tests used, and the ways they were manipulated by both captors and captives for their own ends, arguing that the legal definition of conversion undermined official trust, and perhaps community trust more broadly, in conversion's social role. This discussion sheds light on the connections between state knowledge, centralisation, and identity, while suggesting that Ottoman state intervention in matters of slavery and conversion, which has previously been seen as a product of the consciously reforming nineteenth-century Tanzimat, emerged earlier as a pragmatic result of Ottoman participation in the international arena.     

Development and Discourse among the Maya of Southern Belize

This article explores the discourse of development in southern Belize, and the appropriateness of post‐development ideas to understand its effects. It investigates a prevailing notion in development texts from the region that population pressure represents an environmental threat, an odd image for a country with so few inhabitants and so many trees. It also examines the consequences of apparent attempts by the government to employ development projects to defuse local contention over plans to privatize Maya land tenure. While post‐developmentalists have opened up fruitful avenues of analysis this study suggests that some of their conclusions are overstated. In particular, it questions the de‐politicizing effect of development discourse, and the notion of grassroots movements searching for alternatives to development, amounting to a ‘rejection of the entire paradigm’.     

The Conservation of Maya Cultural Heritage: Searching for Solutions in a Troubled Region

Abstract

Maya archaeological heritage continues to be a victim of looting, urbanization, and development despite the increased visibility of the issue within the field of archaeology. This article provides a generalized network analysis of the destruction of Maya cultural heritage in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, and EI Salvador based on interviews conducted in 2006 by the Maya Area Cultural Heritage Initiative (MACHI) with archaeologists, government officials, non-governmental organizations, and Maya leaders. According to informants, interest among local people to conserve archaeological sites has been deeply affected by a lack of education about both Maya archaeology and the national and international laws assuring protection of cultural heritage; many local people, including members of modern Maya groups, see little value in the conservation of the Precolumbian past. MACHI suggests that an effective way to mitigate looting and the wanton destruction of Maya cultural heritage is through the promotion of a variety of educational initiatives (ranging from informal to institutional, for both children and adults) that seek to combine the knowledge of Western archaeological science with indigenous ways of knowing the past. Such initiatives could encourage the construction of positive relationships between indigenous and other local peoples and archaeological remains.     

Rethinking the Anthropology of Religious Change: New Perspectives on Revitalization and Conversion Movements

This article reviews the history of anthropological engagements with religious change. Anthony Wallace made one of the most important contributions to this work by developing the first comprehensive model of revitalization movements. In recent years, contributions to the field have burgeoned in response to a renewed anthropological interest in globalization and transnational religious and social forms. Wallace's work has an ongoing relevance for much of this contemporary writing, in that many of the “new” theorists share many of the concerns that he first explored. However, they differ in their conceptualization of the processes and political contexts of change.     

Iranian Zoroastrians in Canada: Balancing Religious and Cultural Identities

Canada, now the number-one destination for Iranian migrants, is home to one of the world's most dynamic Zoroastrian communities, in which Iranians are increasingly represented and are playing ever more visible roles in maintaining and transforming the tradition. While exile has in some ways reunited Iranian and Parsi (South Asian) Zoroastrians after more than 1,000 years of separation, cultural and in some cases religious differences mean that they continue largely to live in separate spheres even while sharing their places of worship. Iranian Zoroastrians in Canada participate in some social settings as Iranians, in others as Zoroastrians, and in still others as Canadians, but to a large extent they remain a community unto themselves separate from these other three. Even so, their generally progressive interpretations of Zoroastrianism are having an influence on Parsi communities worldwide as well as on Zoroastrians in Iran, and being often recognized as “original Iranians” they are playing important roles in promoting awareness of Iranian culture within the broader community.     

Little house in the jungle: The causes of variation in house size among modern Kekchi Maya

Interpreting variation in the size and quality of houses is a difficult task for the archaeologist. Are larger houses a sign of a larger household, of a higher-status household, or of a household which has lived at the site longer than others? This paper uses ethnographic data on the Kekchi Maya to test these alternative explanations. The discussion reveals a complex relationship between social positions, wealth, and house size. It is suggested that houses serve different symbolic functions in settlements with different kinds of economies.     

The Land of Morgan: Its Conquest and its Conquerors

The cairn on Hardendale Nab was excavated in 1986 in advance of destruction by quarrying, and this allowed the reconstruction of a complex sequence of development. Construction of the cairn appears to have begun in the Early Bronze Age, although it might have been earlier. Phase 1 comprised a simple cist burial, and small earthen mound, with a number of secondary burials made in and around the original monument. Unusual rectangular features might have been used for pyres. Phase 2 saw the erection of a round enclosure around the mound, which was later (Phase 3) filled with loose limestone rubble. Again burials, both cremations and inhumations, were cut into the rubble, and bone scattered over and amidst it, with an apparent focus on the southern part of the structure. The entire complex was buried by a further layer of rubble in Phase 4, into which several further burials, this time inhumations, were cut. The excavation produced an unusually large amount of environmental evidence, much of it associated with the use of the cairn as a roost by owls in Phases 2 and 3.