Abstract
PUB. No. 7 of the Institute of Social Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, by Robert C. West, may be specially welcomed because it deals with a population in its environment in western Mexico, and takes note of physical features, climate, agriculture, handicrafts, houses and settlements and material culture generally. The geognostic map is an interesting key to the environment and so are the maps, admittedly based on inadequate data none too reliable, of climatic features, especially the frequency of frost on the highlands. Tarascan was an indigenous language of pre-Spanish days; the conquerors misused the natives in mines and elsewhere, missionaries and others ‘hispanized' large numbers of the remainder on great eatancias (stock-raising farms) and haciendas (crop farms) ; so the old language lingers only in the poorer areas which Europeans did not wish to occupy. The recession of Tarascan speech is traced in maps for different periods. Wheat and barley were cultivated soon after the Spanish Conquest in order to pay the tribute demanded by the authorities, and Arabic modes of irrigation also came in. Each community had owned surrounding lands in which the chief apportioned the right of user among the villagers. Since the mid-nineteenth century, individual ownership has developed; but vestiges remain, and in some pueblos a head-of-family may have 2-4 hectares allotted sine die provided he does not leave the land untilled for more than two successive years. He may sell his right-of-user, but only to another member of the pueblo. The woodland is, at least in theory, communal property. The gradations from indigenous to more or less European tradition give pages of special interest to this book.
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Cultural Geography of the Tarascan Area, Mexico. Nature 162, 728–729 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/162728d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/162728d0