Political Ecology in a Yucatec Maya Community is the third volume in a series of reports by E. N. Anderson and his local colleagues based on nearly 15 years of intermittent fieldwork in Chunhuhub, a Mayan town in Mexico’s Quintana Roo state. The two previous volumes provide much of the ethnographic detail drawn on here: an ethnobotanical monograph, Those Who Bring the Flowers (ECOSUR, 2003), and an ethnozoological account coauthored with Felix Medina Tzuc, Animals and the Maya in Southeast Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2005). Anderson is a veteran of four decades of ethnographic field research on two continents. His early work on Chinese ethnobiology and nutrition is well known. At the time of life when most anthropologists are satisfied to recline in their academic armchairs, Anderson undertook a second major ethnographic effort among the Yucatec Maya. These books are the fruits of that effort.

In Political Ecology, Anderson gives free rein to the broad sweep of his moral engagement with the political and ecological crises of the modern world, with Chunhuhub’s recent history grist for the mill. Anderson’s critical commentaries are strongly worded and often idiosyncratic, challenging any resort to easy answers, but at times frustrating in dismissing the seemingly incontrovertible. For example, for Anderson, “the worldwide rural environmental crisis appears to be by far the most serious and immediate threat facing our species” (p. 211), yet he dismisses global capitalism (or “Wall Street devils” [pp. 206–207]) as a primary factor, arguing instead that “much of the problem is caused by inefficiency and waste” (p. 13). He clearly leans toward individual motivation as opposed to institutionalized power as ultimately causal, both of crises and of their resolutions (p. 215).

He is generous in his praise of Mayan environmental knowledge and traditional ecological values but faults locals for overhunting and overharvesting local forests. Although it is impossible to simply characterize Anderson’s complex arguments, they boils down to this: “The leading question in economic and social action, for Chunhuhub as for the world, becomes one of trading long-term, wide-flung interests against narrow, short-term ones” (p. 11). His analysis, however, offers little hope for a positive outcome either for Chunhuhub or for the world, given that “subsistence maize farming is a fading trail” (p. 219) and that the younger generation in Chunhuhub seems little interested in lessons their elders might offer. Even the most aware of the senior generation voted in 2004 to privatize their ejido under provisions of the neoliberal amendments to Article 27 pushed through the Mexican congress by ex-president Salinas Gortari. Anderson dismisses as “nostalgic” the “dream” of some anthropologists (myself included) “of saving indigenous ways of life” (p. 213).

Although generous with opinions and advice, Anderson does not fail to offer a wealth of detail about Chunhuhub, its environment, history, people, and politics, with special focus on local agroecology, forest management, and medical recourses. Chunhuhub is unique—as is every rural town in Mexico and the world. Yet Chunhuhub also is “strikingly reminiscent of the small Indiana and Texas towns” (p. 205) where Anderson grew up. Anderson clearly identifies several features of the town that set it apart from better-known Mexican communities. First, although “indigenous” in that it is a largely Mayan town that occupies the site of an ancient Mayan settlement, it is also recent, the oldest residents having come from elsewhere to settle there, recolonizing the forests depopulated in the aftermath of the Caste Wars of the latter half of the 19th century. For this reason, or because of what Anderson characterizes as a distinctive Yucatec Mayan “intensely familial” social orientation, the town lacks such collective institutions (p. 77) as the Zapotec guelaguetza and the powerful corporate identity that has characterized the Tzeltal and Tzotzil communities of the Chiapas central highlands. Chunhuhub is rather an open town characterized by fluid membership and malleable identity (p. 153). Perhaps as a consequence, Chunhuhub has avoided the often-violent conflicts in highland Mayan communities between traditional Catholic Maya and the new wave of evangelical converts.

Anderson, on several occasions, points to overpopulation as a contributing factor to ecological degradation in and around Chunhuhub. It is not clear, however, whether this “overpopulation” is due to continuing high fertility rates (as he suggests at one point [p. 195]) or to continuing high rates of in-migration, primarily from elsewhere in the Yucatan peninsula. He makes excellent use of detailed government census data but leaves this key issue unresolved. Consider that Chunhuhub’s population has grown from zero in 1940 to 3,453 in 1990 to more than 6,000 by 2000 (occupying ejidal lands of 143 square kilometers). This expansion is clearly due almost entirely to in-migration. It is likely that Classic Mayan populations in this region were as high or higher. Furthermore, Anderson does not comment on the dramatic decline in Mexican fertility rates over the past few decades and the likely correlation between that decline and increased educational opportunities for girls.

Chunhuhub thus contrasts sharply with the Zapotec town with which I am most familiar, an indigenous town that has continuously occupied the same communal lands (although the best for agriculture are held as “private property” by local families) for more than 1,000 years, a town that is very strongly corporate and endogamous, which has so far balanced internal population growth with available farmland by a pattern of circular migration that “exports” labor in exchange for cash and commodity inputs without disenfranchising the migrants. As in Chunhuhub, however, religious conflicts are muted, in sharp contrast to the situation in many highland Mayan areas, perhaps because religious distinctions in both communities have no evident economic basis.

Although Anderson at times is darkly pessimistic (e.g., “There is a very real chance that humans will not only exterminate themselves but will destroy all higher life forms in the process” [p. 205]), he offers some hope in his concluding chapter, looking forward to a Chunhuhub linked to the wider world by means of its computer-savvy youth and wise citizens, who may be capable of distinguishing destructive federal development schemes from small-scale marketing experiments tailored to local soils, climate, and human values. But in the final analysis, it is not clear if this Chunhuhub of the future will remain at heart a Mayan town.