Yaqui Women: Contemporary Life Histories - Paperback

by Jane Holden Kelley (Author)

The four life histories collected here--personal accounts of the Yaqui wars, deportation from Sonora in virtual slavery, life as soldaderas with the Mexican Revolutionary army, emigration to Arizona to escape persecution, the rebuilding of the Yaqui villages in post-Revolutionary Sonora, and life in the modern Yaqui communities--constitute remarkable documents of human endurance, valuable for both their historical and their anthropological insights. In addition, they shed new light on the roles of women, a group that is underrepresented in studies of Yaquis as well as in life history literature. Based on the belief that the life history approach, focusing on individual rather than cultures or societies, can contribute significantly to anthropological research, the book includes a discussion of life history methodology and illustrates its applicability to questions of social roles and variations in adaptive strategies.

Back Jacket

Yaqui Women belongs to more traditional anthropology-an anthropology that accepted a more documentary style. However, when the interviews with the women were being done in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the main research goals shared some of the anthropological concerns of today.

Author Biography

Jane Holden Kelley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Calgary, is also the author, with Rosalio Moisés and William Curry Holden, of A Yaqui Life: The Personal Chronicle of a Yaqui Indian, available as a Bison Book.