Crazy February: Death and Life in the Mayan Highlands of Mexico

by Carter Wilson

Book Overview

Products of the "imagination," such as novels, can be especially useful tools for understanding how things work in societies far removed from our own experience. Through the telling of a story, a sound ethnographic novel conveys more than information. It involves the reader in the dynamics of life in places where the rules for action are very different from the rules the reader makes his own decisions by. Some people believe ethnographic novels are...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520023994
• ISBN13: 9780520023994
• Release Date: April 1974
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Highly recommended

This is a remarkably good book. Anyone interested in Mexico, Chiapas, indigenous cultures, or the Zapatista rebellion of 1994 in Chiapas should regard this as essential reading. Wilson gives, in a very readable fictional format, a clear and fascinating account of traditional life, culture, and values in a highland indigenous community. Those who read this should also see Wilson's ¨A Green Tree and a Dry Tree¨ about a rebellion fomented by this same Indian community in 1969, a real event but also presented in the form of a novel.

The Best Anthro Fiction

Wilson's Crazy February is perhaps the best example of anthro fiction that I've read, and gives a much clearer idea of life in Chiapas than most anthro nonfiction. Crazy February gives the reader an acute sense of what it is really like to live there. I'd also recommend Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga as another wonderful example.

Indian life in Highland Chiapas

This is an excellent book. It captures the reality of life in an Indian village in Mexico during the 1950s and 1960s. The author spent considerable time in the highlands of Chiapas doing anthropological fieldwork, and his fictional work captures many of the aspects of ladino/Indian relations which continue to plague Mexico to this day. If you want a good, emotive background to the Zapatista rebellion, this is it! Also highly recommended: Wilson's fictional account of the Tzeltal uprising of the mid 18th century "A Green Tree and a Dry Tree"