Allen J. Christenson's Books

The Burden of the Ancients

Maya Ceremonies of World Renewal from the Pre-columbian Period to the Present

By: Allen J. Christenson

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The Burden of the Ancients

Maya Ceremonies of World Renewal from the Pre-columbian Period to the Present

By: Allen J. Christenson

In Maya theology, everything from humans and crops to gods and the world itself passes through endless cycles of birth, maturation, dissolution, death, and rebirth. Traditional Maya believe that human beings perpetuate this cycle through ritual offerings and ceremonies that have the power to rebirth the world at critical points during the calendar year. The most elaborate ceremonies take place during Semana Santa (Holy Week), the days preceding Easter on the Christian calendar, during which traditionalist Maya replicate many of the most important world-renewing rituals that their ancient ancestors practiced at the end of the calendar year in anticipation of the New Year’s rites. Marshaling a wealth of evidence from Pre-Columbian texts, early colonial Spanish writings, and decades of fieldwork with present-day Maya, The Burden of the Ancients presents a masterfully detailed account of world-renewing ceremonies that spans the Pre-Columbian era through the crisis of the Conquest period and the subsequent colonial occupation all the way to the present. Allen J. Christenson focuses on Santiago Atitlán, a Tz’utujil Maya community in highland Guatemala, and offers the first systematic analysis of how the Maya preserved important elements of their ancient world renewal ceremonies by adopting similar elements of Roman Catholic observances and infusing them with traditional Maya meanings. His extensive description of Holy Week in Santiago Atitlán demonstrates that the community’s contemporary ritual practices and mythic stories bear a remarkable resemblance to similar cultural entities from its Pre-Columbian past.

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Page Count

376

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1477310266

ISBN 13

9781477310267

Art and Society in a Highland Maya Community

The Altarpiece of Santiago Atitlán

By: Allen J. Christenson

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Art and Society in a Highland Maya Community

The Altarpiece of Santiago Atitlán

By: Allen J. Christenson

A study of a major piece of modern Mayan religious art.

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Page Count

261

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292789831

ISBN 13

9780292789838

Moss & Adams’ Heart Disease in Infants, Children, and Adolescents, Including the Fetus and Young Adult

By: Hugh D. Allen

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Moss & Adams’ Heart Disease in Infants, Children, and Adolescents, Including the Fetus and Young Adult

By: Hugh D. Allen

The 9th edition of the gold standard in pediatric cardiology offers up-to-date, comprehensive coverage of this challenging and rapidly changing field. New chapters based on reader requests, two new associate editors, new contributing authors, and an enhanced digital version of the text make Moss and Adams’ Heart Disease in Infants, Children, and Adolescents the reference you’ll turn to when caring for patients. From cover to cover, this award-winning two-volume resource provides the authoritative, state-of-the-art information you need when caring for young patients with heart disease. New, reader-requested chapters cover Development of Myocardial Structure and Function, Global Challenge of Heart Disease, Impact of Congenital Heart Disease on Other Organ Systems, Non-Compaction Cardiomyopathy, Beyond the Cardiac Device, and Transition to Adult Care. All chapters have been updated and revised, including vital new information on genetics and embryo development. Two new associate editors, Drs. Daniel J. Penny and Frank Cetta, offer fresh perspectives in their areas of expertise. Enhanced digital access includes the full text; bonus question and answer sections similar to those on the pediatric cardiology board examination; videos of echoes, angiograms, aortic arch anomalies, open-heart operations, and more; and phonocardiograms with accompanying audio of various heart sounds and murmurs.

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Page Count

4808

Publisher

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Published Date

ISBN 10

1496300262

ISBN 13

9781496300263

Art and Society in a Highland Maya Community

The Altarpiece of Santiago Atitlán

By: Allen J. Christenson

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Art and Society in a Highland Maya Community

The Altarpiece of Santiago Atitlán

By: Allen J. Christenson

Allen J. Christenson offers us in this wonderful book a testimony to contemporary Maya artistic creativity in the shadow of civil war, natural disaster, and rampant modernisation. Trained in art history and thoroughly acquainted with the historical and modern ethnography of the Maya area, Christenson chronicles in this beautifully illustrated work the reconstruction of the central altarpiece of the Maya Church of Tz'utujil-speaking Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. The much-loved colonial-era shrine collapsed after a series of destructive earthquakes in the twentieth century. Christenson's close friendship with the Chávez brothers, the native Maya artists who reconstructed the shrine in close consultation with village elders, enables him to provide detailed exegesis of how this complex work of art translates into material form the theology and cosmology of the traditional Tz'utujil Maya. With the author's guidance, we are taught to see this remarkable work of art as the Maya Christian cosmogram that it is. Although it has the triptych form of a conventional Catholic altarpiece, its iconography reveals a profoundly Maya narrative, replete with sacred mountains and life-giving caves, with the whole articulated by a central axis mundi motif in the form of a sacred tree or maize plant (ambiguity intended) that is reminiscent of well-known ancient Maya ideas. Through Christenson's focused analysis of the iconography of this shrine, we are able to see and understand almost firsthand how the modern Maya people of Santiago Atitlán have remembered the imagined universe of their ancestors and placed upon this sacred framework their received truths in time present." Gary H. Gossen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Latin American Studies, University at Albany, SUNY Allen Christenson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University. " . . . an engaging, quietly intense book that is in part ethnography, in part pre-Columbian art history and in part a meditation on the nature of identity and cultural authenticity. It records, with diligence and grace, the endurance and transformation of belief in the face of natural and political disaster."--Times Literary Supplement, August 16, 2002

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