Interpretive anthropology taken as a goal in itself tends to preclude the concrete, historically situated analyses that are the core of ethnographic studies. However, attention to specific aspects of action and discourse in the various moments of a social movement's unfolding may enhance our understanding of that movement. This article analyzes a protest against conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund for the payment of Bolivia's national debt, seeking to show how the various participants interpreted the events in which they were involved. In trying to assess the movement's impact on the nation, the author interviewed leaders and followers and consulted numerous media reports during the three weeks of crisis. She concludes that textual interpretation is useful only when employed along with traditional methods of participant observation and the eliciting of informants' own interpretations. The analysis of complex social movements, that is, requires a description of people's responses at different moments in time, a situating of the participant observer in the events, and the inclusion of interpretations by the media. By eliciting a reflexive, multivocalic array of texts, the anthropologist can make new interpretations and build on past constructions as the historical context changes. [interpretive ethnology, social movements, Bolivian mining communities]

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Global integration heightens the cyclical crises of capitalism by incorporating the subsistence sectors of advanced and peripheral economies. World trends show a contraction in industrial production; the rise of unemployment, an increase in military spending and decline in social welfare, a reversal of capital flows from developing countries to developed economies, and a worldwide drop in real wages. The impact of these trends on communities in Mexico, Bolivia, and the United States where the author has done fieldwork is assessed in relation to current economic crises and the social movements that respond to them. The author shows that collective action to oppose the devastating effect on subsistence is more prevalent in marginal economies that are just beginning to experience the effect of capital penetration than in the industrial wastelands of developed countries. Theories of the crisis neglect those arenas where resistance and protest are most active: the urban barrios struggling for food and water, the rural laborers forced off of their land base, and the hunters and cultivators of the jungle. Luxemburg's thesis asserting the importance of the subsistence sector in capital accumulation acquires increasing significance at a time when those economies are threatened with extinction. Expanding the notion of subsistence production to include nonwage work allows us to theorize the significance of social reproduction in crisis conditions.

As they assert their rights to land, political participation, and their distinctive cultures, Mayas of Chiapas are redefining the modernist ideals of justice, liberty, and democracy for a postmodern age. Accustomed to cultural diversity, they have learned to live without attempting to eradicate or dominate the others in their midst. Their vision of progress still contains the communal values found in mythopoetic traditions from the preconquest period. But far from being primordial remnants of the past, these values have been enacted continually in everyday life since the conquest and may offer a model for pluriethnic and pluripolitical institutions as we enter the third millennium.

In this article, I trace consumption chains motivated by religious and secular rituals that have promoted demand for water, rum, and soft drinks in Mesoamerican communities for over 2,000 years. It describes transformations in the social organization of water systems, and how these transformations have affected indigenous communities in particular. In preconquest ceremonial centers the collective effort of the entire community contributed to the engineering of water projects and the celebration of deities who ensured the supply of water. Spanish rule brought a new array of saints, often identified with deities of natural forces, and with them cane sugar and rum with which Indians celebrated sacred holidays. Religious fraternities that once promoted imbibing of rum to facilitate communication with the gods and saints during the colonial and independence periods turned to Coca‐Cola and other commercial beverages in the 1970s. The Coca‐Cola Company promoted the health effects of their nonalcoholic drink and religious brotherhoods provided the infrastructure or local promotion of the drink during celebrations that once served locally distilled cane liquor in the annual cycle of fiestas. Federal concessions for extracting the groundwater of Chiapas now enable the company to produce their internationally sold products along with their newly featured bottled water. Rituals once made to the rain gods as givers of water are supplanted by political concessions to transnational corporations working with local officials in contemporary Mesoamerican communities. The transformation from ritual propitiation of the gods that engaged entire populations in collective action, to the private expropriation of water resources, has a profound impact on indigenous pueblos that are major consumers of these costly products.

The breaking-down of a social-control system based on belief in the guardianship of thespiritual ancestors and lheir temporal age&, the curers, is rejected i n a rising homicide rate as people turn lo individual sanctions when threatened. The acts o j limicide dijer i n their social signifitance according h who is killed, the context, the agency, and the motivation of the killer. Thirty-seven homicides between 1938 and 1965, analyzed in terms of these component variables, reject the con.icts arising from competitim i n new economic enterprises, the rising suspicion of curers' abuse oftheir supernatural power, and the loss of belief in the guardianship of the ancestors.social impact of homicide has caused T some analysts2 to treat it and its sup- Teklum is a predominantly Indian township of Mexico. The population of the town center-about 1,900-includes only one Ladino, or non-Indian, family, that of the schoolteacher. The sense of community is limited to people living in the center and in the four nearby hamlets (barrios).The town center is divided physically and socially into two endogamous sections, called "upper" and "lower." The outlying hamlets are linked to the nearest section by social and economic ties. The civil and religious posts of the town are, in local theory, apportioned evenly between the sections. This was in fact true until the 1950's; for each of the ranked posts had a paired complement, so that both sides of the dual division were represented, and the single posts of president and stndico (the president's administrative assistant) were alternated for each three-year term between the upper and lower sections.But with the recent increase in dealings between the national and regional administrative centers and the local communities, recruitment into o f k e as president and sindico has come to depend upon the candidates' possessing a knowledge of Spanish, literacy, and familiarity with the ways of Ladino society. Because of the relative scarcity of such skills, selection of these two officials has tended to ignore the former residence requirements relating to the dual division. Along with this change in the criteria for selecting these officials has come a decrease in the power and the authority exercised by the principules-elders from each side of the dual division who rose to their position by passing through all of the lower offices in the hierarchy-and a corresponding increase in the importance of the presidency.This dual division also affected the structure of the curing profession. The curers are men who can overcome sickness caused by witchcraft because of their possession of a n animal spirit (swayohel) and their knowledge of ritual. In each of the two sections of the town was a leading curer (staid P d J ) who, by virtue of his age, experience, and recognized authority, was able to control entry into the profession. Their function was to prevent as well as cure, for the leading curers were also charged with guarding their section against the entry of witchcraft. I n the last two decades,...

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