Search results

This article introduces this issue of American Behavioral Scientist in several ways: (a) It provides background information about the conference on which the issue is based, (b) it provides an intellectual and historical context for the idea of the public representation of culture and history in American society, (c) it develops several substantive propositions (derived from different articles in the issue) dealing with factors that produce cententious conflicts over the public representation of culture and history, and (d) it summarizes the articles in the issue in the order that they appear.

Introduction -- Nature as culture -- Culture as nature -- History as culture.

Structural analysis : past, present and future. History of social structural analysis / Charles Crothers. Social structure : the future of a concept / Douglas V. Porpora -- Culture and social structure. How are structures meaningful? : cultural sociology and theories of structure / Lynn Spillman. Agency, structure and deritualization : a comparative investigation of extreme disruptions of social order / J. David Knottnerus -- Global power, hegemonic decline, and cultural narratives / Albert J. Bergesen. Situating hybridity : the positional logics of a discourse / Jonathan Friedman -- A structural theory of the five thousand year world system / Barry K. Gills and Andre Gunder-Frank. Evolutionary pulsations in the world system / George Modelski and William R. Thompson. Paradigms bridged : institutional materialism and world-systemic evolution / Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall. Ecology in command / Sing C. Chew. Applications of elementary theory to structures of antiquity / Brent Simpson and David Willer -- Micro and macro structures : interactions and organizations. Gender, institutions and difference : the continuing importance of social structure in understanding gender inequality in organizations / Amy S. Wharton. Social structure and social exchange / Joseph Whitmeyer and Karen S. Cook. Social organizations across space and time : the policy process / Peter M. Hall and Patrick J. W. McGinty. Acts, persons, positions, and institutions : legitimating multiple objects and compliance with authority / Henry A. Walker, Larry Rogers, and Morris Zelditch

Mayas from Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico, narrate strikingly similar stories that are part of their oral tradition. These similarities reflect the fact that Mayas from both areas share a common cultural tradition dating to pre-Hispanic times and a basic pattern of beliefs central to the Mesoamerican cultural complex. At the same time, the stories contain notable differences that can be explained historically and traced both to pre-Hispanic or post-Hispanic developments as they combined with ecological conditions. In this study, we compare the present expression of a series of Earth Lord accounts and explain interesting differences that we observed between two groups of Maya Indians. Our results suggest that the differences can be traced to the diverse ways by which peasants are incorporated at various degrees into the capitalist system, mainly through trade or through wage labor or combinations of these with other forms of production.