Cheran: A Sierra Tarascan Village.: (Smithsonian Institution. Institute of Social Anthropology. Publication)

By Ralph Leon Beals

Book Overview

First published in 1946, Ralph L. Beal's Cheran: A Sierra Tarascan Village is a classic study of a Tarascan Indian community on the verge of modernization within Mexico. Situated in west-central Mexico, Cheran was one of the most isolated mountain towns until about 1940, when a highway connected it to larger cities. With Cheran poised for rapid modernization, Beals & other anthropologists arrived in 1940 to begin an intensive study of the Tarascan community & its five thousand inhabitants before their lives were inextricably altered by modern life. After two years of gathering data about Cheran's geography, agriculture, manufacturing, food use, government, religious ceremonies, fiestas, & general lifeways, Beals published their findings as Publication No. 2 of the Smithsonian Institution's Institute of Social Anthropology. Cheran is a valuable resource for today's anthropologists, providing a solid, empirical foundation for comparison to similar communities & for tests of acculturative theories. This paperback edition contains a follow-up introduction the author wrote in 1973 & a new foreword by George M. Foster that discusses the impact of Beals's groundbreaking work on further studies of Cheran & similar communities. RALPH L. BEALS was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, & the author or coauthor of more than a dozen books, among them An Introduction to Anthropology, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians, & Ethnology of the Western Mixe. GEORGE M. Foster, who wrote the foreword, is professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, & the author of Tzintzuntzan: Mexican Peasants in a Changing World.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0837131669
• ISBN13: 9780837131665
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Praeger Pub Text
• Length: 225 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.