Mayan People Within and Beyond Boundaries ─ Social Categories and Lived Identity in Yucatan

Mayan People Within and Beyond Boundaries explores the Maya of Yucatan, the Maya of academic institutions and the Maya of the tourist industry. It examines the interplay between the local and the external, academic categories of the Maya, and seeks to transcend the paradoxical and incongruent relationship between the social spaces that breathe life into the categories. The notion of "shared social experience" is introduced to embody a focus on reflexivity that goes beyond the subjective position of the author and helps demystify the coexisting subjectivities characteristic of ethnographic fieldwork. It provides a basis for overcoming the exclusive focus on "author," " text," and "discourse" in contemporary postmodernist ethnography, while still conveying important ethnographic information.

Peter Hervik has a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and has taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Currently he is researching the Danish response to emerging multiculturalism. Hervik is the Editor of Folk-the Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society.