The Social Basis of Sacred Spaces in the Prehispanic Andes: Ritual Landscapes of the Dead in Chimú and Inka Societies

Sacred landscapes are a subset of the diverse media that people use to make statements about social order. Mary Douglas has discussed two dimensions of social order—group and grid—and suggested connections between their varied conceptions and expressions in the culturally constructed landscape. I extend Douglas's concepts to a specific domain of sacred landscapes, funerary architecture. Drawing on two examples from the prehispanic Andes, I argue that differences in Chimú and Inka funerary landscapes represent different conceptions of social order. Archaeological investigations of sacred spaces as expressions of varying social experience deepen understanding of Andean societies and other ancient peoples.     

'United We Stand': American Attitudes toward (Muslim) Immigration Post-September 11th

Listen here, professor. You're the one that needs an American history lesson! You don't know nothing about Lady Liberty standing there in the harbor with her torch on high, saying 'Give me your poor, your dead-beats, your filthy.' -Archie Bunker All in the Family     

The Rise and Rise of Ecofeminism as a Development Fable: A Response to Melissa Leach's ‘Earth Mothers and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a Strategic Notion Rose and Fell’

This contribution offers a response to Melissa Leach's paper ‘Earth Mothers and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a Strategic Notion Rose and Fell’, published in an earlier issue of Development and Change. Leach's article examined the rise and fall of the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental carer’ in environment and development discourses. Specifically, it appeared concerned with the role of ‘the northern ecofeminist’ in popularizing this figure, and the notion that women have a special relationship with the environment. This response points to the reliance on the figure of the ‘northern ecofeminist’ as a foil to gender and development (GAD) discourses, and situates this anxiety over the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental carer’ in the context of some key feminist debates of the 1990s. Conflicts between GAD scholars and ecofeminists can be understood as one manifestation of tensions over essentialism in feminism. Attending to how conflicts over essentialism have been worked through in feminism could productively inform efforts to think through the nexus of gender, environment and development.     

The civilizing of San Pedro Sacatepequez: Further adventures in dichotomous thinking

Hawkins, John. Inverse Images: The Meaning of Culture, Ethnicity, and Family in Postcolonial Guatemala. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985. xvii + 470 pp. including plates, maps, appendices, footnotes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 cloth; $17.50 paper.