The Mobius Strip

A Spatial History of Colonial Society in Guerrero, Mexico

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by Jonathan D. Amith

Stanford University Press

Due/Published October 2005, 688 pages, cloth

ISBN 0804748934

The Möbius Strip explores the history, political economy, and culture of space in central Guerrero, Mexico, during the colonial period. This study is significant for two reasons. First, space comprises a sphere of contention that affects all levels of society, from the individual and his or her household to the nation-state and its mechanisms for control and coercion. Second, colonialism offers a particularly unique situation, for it invariably involves a determined effort on the part of an invading society to redefine politico-administrative units, to redirect the flow of commodities and cash, and, ultimately, to foster and construct new patterns of allegiance and identity to communities, regions, and country. Thus spatial politics comprehends the complex interaction of institutional domination and individual agency. The complexity of the diachronic transformation of space in central Guerrero is illustrated through an analysis of land tenure, migration, and commercial exchange, three salient and contested aspects of hispanic conquest. The Mobius Strip, therefore, addresses issues important to social theory and to the understanding of the processes affecting the colonialization of non-Western societies.

"The Möbius Strip is the most thorough empirical account of 'place making' and 'place breaking' that I have read. Jonathan Amith delivers a minutely detailed picture of land-tenure, migration, trade, and political conflict over two and a half centuries."--Claudio Lomnitz, New School University

In the style of French histoire totale, Jonathan Amith has made an important and eloquent intervention in colonial Mexican economic history. But he has also brought the lenses of anthropology (his own mother discipline), political economy, humanistic and economic geography, and intellectual history to focus on the ways in which modern scholars can reconstruct social relations in local and regional communities both in time and space. As much a theoretical and methodological manual as an intense study of very particular and often difficult sources, Amith's fascinating study sacrifices none of the rich detail of eighteenth-century economic life in the Iguala Valley and the great Taxco silver mining district. In the end, he gives us a spatial history showing how the interactions of rural farmers, agricultural magnates, wealthy miners, colonial officials, and imperial policy made and unmade places over the course of a century.--Eric Van Young, University of California, San Diego, author of The Other Rebellion: Violence and Popular Ideology in the Struggle for Mexican Independence, 1810-1921