Foreign Rights

This work is the synthesis of more than thirty years of research in Mexico and the culmination of a long collaboration between the anthropologist Pierre Beaucage and an indigenous organization devoted to the reappropriation of Amerindian culture, Taller de Tradición Oral. This work describes the development, by Nahua peasants, of a complex and sustainable form of conservation for their tropical mountain environment. The author focuses on systems of representation which integrate taxonomies of flora and fauna by esta blishing the human body as the fundamental metaphor of the cosmos. The importance of this work of systematization is clearly apparent in the current context, in which indigenous people are reclaiming, as an integral part of their identity, their own ways of establishing relations with material and symbolic environments. The work provides a wealth of maps, figures, tables and photography.