Creating Culture, Performing Community

High up in the mountains of the Sierra P'urhpecha, in the state of Michoacn, Mxico, lies the small community of Santo Santiago de Angahuan. Angahuan has a richly complex culture where the traditional and the modern blend: P'urhpecha continues to be the principal language of communication; almost every troje, a type of log cabin, has a TV and radio; most people have cell phones and access to social media; women wear their traditional dress; young people wear Gap and Abercrombie clothes; and almost every weekend there are community celebrations, rituals, and festivals. Creating Culture, Performing Community explores the ways in which the people of Angahuan create and curate their cultural practices and how, by doing so, they perform what it means to be an active member of the P'urhpecha community. Through a deep ethnographic account of ritual practices, author Mintzi Auanda Martnez-Rivera focuses on the tembuchakua, or wedding rituals, analyzing their creation, performance, and transformation within the P'urhpecha community. By proposing alternative approaches to understanding indigeneity, Martnez-Rivera showcases how people carefully transform their cultural practices and rearticulate and perform their identities. Thus Creating Culture, Performing Community has three main aims: to analyze how people create their own culture; to showcase how cultural practices are performed to reflect particular ideas of what it means to be a member of a community; and to move beyond limited understandings of indigenous identity and cultural practices.