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2003 — Julian Steward Award – Anthropology & Environment Section, American Anthropological Association
2002 — A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book

How Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science.

Zapotec farmers in the northern sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, are highly successful in providing their families with abundant, nutritious food in an ecologically sustainable fashion, although the premises that guide their agricultural practices would be considered erroneous by the standards of most agronomists and botanists in the United States and Europe. In this book, Roberto González convincingly argues that in fact Zapotec agricultural and dietary theories and practices constitute a valid local science, which has had a reciprocally beneficial relationship with European and United States farming and food systems since the sixteenth century.

González bases his analysis upon direct participant observation in the farms and fields of a Zapotec village. By using the ethnographic fieldwork approach, he is able to describe and analyze the rich meanings that campesino families attach to their crops, lands, and animals. González also reviews the history of maize, sugarcane, and coffee cultivation in the Zapotec region to show how campesino farmers have intelligently and scientifically adapted their farming practices to local conditions over the course of centuries. By setting his ethnographic study of the Talea de Castro community within a historical world systems perspective, he also skillfully weighs the local impact of national and global currents ranging from Spanish colonialism to the 1910 Mexican Revolution to NAFTA. At the same time, he shows how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the sustainable practices of "traditional" subsistence agriculture are beginning to replace the failed, unsustainable techniques of modern industrial farming in some parts of the United States and Europe.

Zion’s Last Frontier is a historical ethnography that documents the uniquely Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) ranching community around Capitol Reef National Park in south-central Utah over the last 150 years.

From the arrival of the first LDS pioneers in the 1870s to fifth- and sixth-generation descendants of those pioneers today, anthropologist Thomas E. Sheridan documents their ongoing struggles with the federal and state agencies that control 96 percent of the land they ranch. Changing policies and management philosophies profoundly impact the ranchers’ livelihoods and ways of life. Sheridan argues that the ranchers should qualify as Traditionally Associated People. Only one allotment on the Park remains, but the Park still allows ranchers to drive their cattle on horseback along the few canyons that cut through the Waterpocket Fold as they move their herds from their traditional summer grazing lands to their winter grazing lands.

Pushing beyond binary arguments, Sheridan offers an empathetic look at the lived experiences of rural communities often mischaracterized in debates over public lands and environmentalism. Tensions have been aggravated by a massive increase in the number of tourists that swarm the area in the warmer months and a steady increase in the number of seasonal residents who build second homes there.

Zion’s Last Frontier provides an in-depth look at the clash of cultures between the agrarian Old West and the New West of tourism and second-homers that is playing itself out across so many parts of the rural West today.