Mayan People Within and Beyond Boundaries: Social Categories and Lived Identity in the Yucatan

Anthropologists, folklorists, the National Geographic, and tourist brochures all refer to the people of the Yucatan as Maya when the people themselves think of the Maya as their long dead ancestors and themselves as mestizos. What does it mean for Maya ethnography that the name provides no bridge between the fields of anthropological science and local practice? InMayan People Within and Beyond Boundaries,Peter Hervik explores this question and its implications through a new approach to ethnography called "shared social experience." The book provides a basis for overcoming the exclusive focus on "author," "text," and "discourse" in contemporary postmodernist ethnography, while still conveying important ethnographic information.

Peter Hervik received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and spent one year as a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 1995, he has been part of the steering committee of a Bosnian refugee project in Scandinavia, and has been researching Danish responses to emerging multiculturalism. He has been a lecturer at the University of Oslo and currently teaches at the University of Copenhagen