Not available to order
Publication date:
16 October 2015Length of book:
290 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739183564
Honduras in Dangerous Times: Resistance and Resilience explores how the people of Honduras use cultural resources to resist and to change the conditions of their society, to critique those conditions, and to create the pieces of a better future in the midst of a dangerous present. The book explores ideas and practices which support systems of dominance and submission in Honduras and the ways in which people have slowly developed a broad culture of resistance and resilience. This culture includes struggling for land and environmental preservation against extractive industries, promoting natural local food and sustainable technology to replace foreign agribusiness, bringing a corrupt legal and political system to account by invoking concepts of human rights and laws routinely ignored, bending institutional religion to issues of social justice, and expressing protest and visions of a better society through popular culture. The book highlights the special contribution of the country’s indigenous peoples in resistance; it also discusses the powerful role of the United States in shaping Honduran economic, political, and military life, and what people-to-people solidarity with Hondurans means for citizens of the United States. The book concludes by presenting Honduran popular resistance in a context of late neoliberalism in Honduras and in relation to other Latin American social movements. Honduras in Dangerous Times shows that Hondurans resist in the face of violence and oppression not only because they are resilient, but also that they are resilient because they resist. Resistance keeps hope alive and change possible.
Honduras did not receive much media attention until a 2009 military coup removed Manuel Zelaya’s elected government from power. Since then, the Central American country has been firmly at the forefront of Latin American activist and academic attention. Strong and well-organized popular resistance to the coup altered how many outside observers thought about the country. The resilience of this resistance, however, came as no surprise to anthropologist Phillips, who has accompanied social movements in that country for more than 40 years. In this important and compelling book, Phillips documents a range of Indigenous, religious, cultural, legal, and political forms of resistance to long-standing patterns of exploitation and domination. A final chapter examines US governmental intervention in Honduras, and international people-to-people solidarity movements that counter political and economic interference in the country’s internal affairs. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries.