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" 'If you want to know who you are and where you come from, follow the maíz.' That was the advice given to author Roberto Cintli Rodriguez when he was investigating the origins and migrations of Mexican peoples in the Four Corners region of the United States. Follow it he did, and his book Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother changes the way we look at Mexican Americans. Not so much peoples created as a result of war or invasion, they are people of the corn, connected through a seven-thousand-year old maíz culture to other Indigenous inhabitants of the continent. Using corn as the framework for discussing broader issues of knowledge production and history of belonging, the author looks at how corn was included in codices and Mayan texts, how it was discussed by elders, and how it is represented in theater and stories as a way of illustrating that Mexicans and Mexican Americans share a common culture. Rodriguez brings together scholarly and traditional (elder) knowledge about the long history of maíz/corn cultivation and culture, its roots in Mesoamerica, and its living relationship to Indigenous peoples throughout the continent, including Mexicans and Central Americans now living in the United States. The author argues that, given the restrictive immigration policies and popular resentment toward migrants, a continued connection to maíz culture challenges the social exclusion and discrimination that frames migrants as outsiders and gives them a sense of belonging not encapsulated in the idea of citizenship. The "hidden transcripts" of corn in everyday culture--art, song, stories, dance, and cuisine (maíz-based foods like the tortilla)--have nurtured, even across centuries of colonialism, the living maíz culture of ancient knowledge. "--

The study of the relationship between language and thought, and how this apparently differs between cultures and social groups, is a rapidly expanding area of enquiry. This book discusses the relationship between language and the mental organisation of knowledge, based on the results of a fieldwork project carried out in the Kingdom of Tonga in Polynesia. It challenges some existing assumptions in linguistics, cognitive anthropology and cognitive science and proposes a new foundational cultural model, 'radiality', to show how space, time and social relationships are expressed both linguistically and cognitively. A foundational cultural model is knowledge that is repeated in several domains and shared within a cultural homogeneous group. These knowledge structures are lenses through which we interpret the world and guide our behaviour. The book will be welcomed by researchers and students working within the fields of psycholinguistics, anthropological linguistics, cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and cognitive science