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The sociable sciences : Darwin and his contemporaries in Chile

Before genetics and the mapping of DNA, before ecology and global warming, adventurous and foolhardy souls were compelled into the wild because of their insatiable curiosity about the natural world. The work of these naturalists was intensely sociable: they explored together, dashed off irate letters to one another, haggled over specimens, commiserated over family tragedies, and traded favors of all kinds. And no one better exemplified this spirit of sociability than the European and Chilean scientists studying Chile in the nineteenth century. This lively and engaging history begins with a familiar pairing - Charles Darwin and Captain Robert Fitz-Roy aboard the Beagle - and goes on to trace the fortunes of colorful figures such as the happy-go-lucky Prussian adventurer Bernardo Philippi, who was murdered by indigenous people in the Strait of Magellan, and Claudio Gay, an amateur French botanist who became the father of the natural sciences in Chile. These Europeans taught Chileans a new way to see their own natural environment, inspiring a new generation of scientists in Chile and forging international networks that helped to shape the modern world.

New approaches to resistance in Brazil and Mexico

Bringing together historically and ethnographically grounded studies of the social and political life of Brazil and Mexico, this collection of essays revitalizes resistance as an area of study. Resistance studies boomed in the 1980s and then was subject to a wave of critique in the 1990s. Covering the colonial period to the present day, the case studies in this collection suggest that, even if much of that critique was justified, resistance remains a useful analytic rubric. The collection has three sections, each of which is preceded by a short introduction. A section focused on religious institutions and movements is bracketed by one featuring historical studies from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries and another gathering more contemporary, ethnographically-based studies. Introducing the collection, the anthropologist John Gledhill traces the debates about resistance studies. In the conclusion, Alan Knight provides a historian's perspective on the broader implications of the contributors' findings.

Online Duke University Press

The women's revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953

This book reinvigorates the debate on the Mexican Revolution, exploring what this pivotal event meant to women. The contributors offer a fresh look at women's participation in their homes and workplaces and through politics and community activism. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the volume illuminates the ways women variously accepted, contested, used, and manipulated the revolutionary project. Recovering narratives that have been virtually written out of the historical record, this book brings us a rich and complex array of women's experiences in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary era in Mexico.