An observant undergraduate once emailed me in the wee morning hours before an exam: “Does June Nash ever sleep?” A fine question. Nash’s newest book, Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization, is written with the same urgency as a human-rights delegation report from the region of her concern, Chiapas. Mayan Visions addresses “indigenous social movements and their challenge to the course of globalization” (p. 27), drawing on Nash’s near-half-century span of research in Chiapas and generously cited research from Chiapas, Mexican and foreign NGOs, government, community- and movement-based scholarship, and the academy. Mayan Visions provides both a detailed political-economic history of Chiapas before and after the 1994 Zapatista uprising and an interesting experiment, in which the confirmed materialist Nash engages postmodernism. It is also one more case study in Nash’s career-long query regarding the future of people who rely on collectively held resources to cultivate directly much of their subsistence and who are treated by the state as obstacles to the extraction of mineral and biological resources in the territories they occupy.

In her opening chapter, Nash defines the “Mayan visions” of her title as those “distinct worldviews that place Mayans (and other indigenous societies) at the center of a collective enterprise to maintain the world in balance” (p. 2) that includes distinctive processes of democratization, biosphere management, and gender relations.

After the introduction, four chapters analyze periods of Chiapas’s indigenous-state relations, from the colonial Indian republics to the Indian pueblos to the “institutional revolutionary communities” that emerged after 1917 (chapter 2), to the rise and fall of the PRI’s nationalist redistributive policies in the 1970s, their impact on Maya family and community processes, and the indigenous and nonindigenous mobilizations convoked in the 1980s and early 1990s, particularly those centered on the 1991 Agrarian Law (chapter 3). Chapter 4 covers the “radical democratic mobilization” between January 1, 1994, and the February 1996 San Andres accords and the subsequent formation of autonomous communities in the Chiapas highlands and Lacandon rainforest. Chapter 5 describes the militarization, low-intensity conflict, and Chiapas peace movement that have developed in the wake of the Mexican government’s broken promises.

Nash affirms the contribution of postmodern theories to anthropology and of globalization for subsistence and semisubsistence producers. Nash’s use of the globalization perspective serves her project well, with clear roots in her ongoing political-economic perspective. But there are difficulties integrating her postmodern explorations with her commitment to people whom she does not consider fragmented, hybrid, or willingly deterritorialized but, rather, deeply rooted in a real place, responsible for 500 years of ongoing concerns, such as their real need to produce actual things from the earth. Her allegiance is to “the whole history of the conflict of real material interests that are structurally sustained through the institutions of a society that we once thought of as the class struggle” (p. 222).

At points, Nash’s postmodern experiment veers towards romanticizing community, the Maya, and the Zapatistas. For example, Nash asserts that despite world-market pressures, people in Chiapas operate by a distinct cultural logic, not limited by Western Cartesian assumptions. Community is the “habitus” of indigenous peoples, who value dignity, autonomy, collectivity, and the moral validation of power in their pluriethnic vision. There are even some disconcerting moments when Nash’s gender analysis reifies the storied Maya gender duality, such as her statement that women “are the ones teaching the next generation autonomy during the early years that define future behavior” (p. 199).

Fortunately, Nash dissects the contradictions of Chiapas. She reveals how gender complementarity can undergird a brutal neoliberal-reinforced “traditional” patriarchy in Chiapas that polices Maya women’s education and political participation and imposes responsibility for (and little authority over) subsistence, child-rearing, and culture-carrying. She pinpoints where the discourse of community involutes under certain pressures into conformism, cultural cleansing, and murder. For example, she discusses how the Maya ideologies of harmonious balance between community and cosmos, men and women, initially drew her in during her first fieldwork in Amatenango del Valle in the 1950s but a decade later barely masked the cumulative evidence of murderous conflict in the guise of diviner/curer-guided witchhunts. Particularly gripping is her analysis of how state-of-siege policies of the post-Zapatista PRI in effect imposed the “closed corporate peasant community” on rural Chiapas, which exploded during the 1997 Acteal massacre, in which indigenous men served as killers.

In the book’s conclusion, Nash looks to the promise of the convergence of indigenous advocates with international human rights advocates, “alliances [that] will help open space for the development of a transnational civil society that cultivates multicultural coexistence” (p. 254). This reviewer appreciates Nash’s Vision, as well as her solidarity with subsistence producers and looks forward to a more critical reading of the transnational alliances Nash participated in as a study tour leader, international elections observer, and nonviolent bodyguard for the Zapatistas. Mayan Visions is well worth the read for Nash’s clear analysis of the violence of change cloaked and worked out in the region’s gender dynamics, the discourse of costumbre or “traditions” of divining-curing and intolerance of religious pluralism, and the neoliberal order’s dependence on low-intensity conflict.