About

Paul K. Eiss is an associate professor of anthropology and history in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. He has conducted extensive archival and ethnographic research in Mexico, focusing on practices and rhetoric of collective violence and self-defense in contemporary Mexico, as well as studies of mestizaje and performance in Yucatán, particularly in Yucatecan teatro regional from the early 19th century to the present. His research also explores indigeneity, translation, and the politics of memory in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Yucatán. Eiss earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2000. He is the author of the book 'In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Community and the Politics of History in Yucatán,' which was published by Duke University Press in 2010 and received the María Elena Martínez Book Prize in Mexican History (2011) and the Latin American Studies Association Social Sciences Book Prize (2012). His scholarly work includes editing collections on Latin American politics and performance, as well as numerous refereed articles and book chapters that analyze themes such as ethnicity, state formation, collective memory, and indigenous sovereignty in Mexico and Latin America.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Information Retrieval
• Library science
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• Construction of Maya Space: Causeways, Walls, and Open Areas from Ancient to Modern Times

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2024-09-25

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This volume aims to explore how “Maya people of the ancient past and more recent present connected and divided the spaces they used” through close attention to causeways, walls, rails, boundary markers, house lots, and features built inside caves (p. 3). The 14 chapters authored by 33 scholars from the United States, Mexico, and Canada, mostly archaeologists, focus almost entirely on Maya sites in Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and Belize (rather than Guatemala, Chiapas, or Honduras). Notwithstanding its equally expansive temporal reach, the volume's principal focus is on the Classic and Postclassic periods. Two chapters draw on contemporary observation to elucidate earlier patterns of house lot use and demarcation, and two others consider railways and military fortifications in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Specialists in Maya archaeology will find much of interest. Several case studies highlight new developments in the study of intra- and intersite causeways, as scholars consider them not only as vehicles for geopolitical integration but also in terms of their economic and ritual functions, how they demarcated community spaces, and how they were conditioned on, and contributed to, systems of power, inequality, and exploitation. Chapters consider how walls, beyond the defensive functions that the field tends to emphasize, guide and channel social behavior; connect politics, ritual, and economic life; and spatially demarcate relations between sites inhabited and controlled by commoners and elite lineage groups. Two chapters stress cave archaeology's growing importance in Maya archaeology, emphasizing how caves expressed the cosmogonic features of Maya thought and were important in defining relations between people and between human and nonhuman actors. Students will find methodologically instructive the discussion of how recent technologies like lidar have transformed archaeological research, and they also will appreciate two chapters that stress how contemporary ethnographic and ecological observation of the built environment can enrich archaeological analysis by elucidating the meaning of similar ancient structures. Each chapter provides detailed morphological descriptions and illustrations of sites and features, and each is accompanied by an extensive bibliography of related scholarship, of particular value for specialists.Readers, like this reviewer, without an archaeological background but with an interest in Maya culture and history in more recent periods will also find much of value. To be sure, 12 out of 14 chapters are focused temporally on ancient Maya archaeology, undermining somewhat the volume's claim to consider Maya space “from ancient to modern times.” Nonetheless, ethnographers and historians of the more recent past will appreciate the editors’ call for an approach to the built environment that broaches “memory work” and “placemaking” in ways that attend to the “intent and agency” of Maya people (p. 8; emphasis in original), and in particular their suggestion to do so in ways that transcend the “simple dichotomy of connectivity and barriers” (p. 13). A few contributions will likely appeal to a more interdisciplinary readership, particularly Holley Moyes's excellent analysis (in the vein of Henri Lefebvre) of the “production of space” in ancient Maya cave sites—an archaeological study that also draws on ethnographic literature and iconography to provide a cultural, cosmological, and phenomenological analysis of caves as constructed environments. Other chapters provide interesting points of connection to spatial issues in modern or contemporary contexts: Jennifer Mathews's consideration of narrow-gauge Decauville railways as a form of commodity-production-driven modernizing infrastructure in the late nineteenth century, one she compares to recent train-centered development projects in Yucatán and Guatemala; Alejandra Badillo Sánchez's analysis of how military structures transformed rebel Maya territory into federally claimed territory at the twentieth century's turn; and Grace Lloyd Bascopé and Elias Alcocer Puerto's “ethnoecological” analysis of the vital, yet beleaguered, place of the traditional solar in one contemporary Yucatecan pueblo.Notwithstanding such modern and contemporary points of reference, this volume's ambitious temporal reach is somewhat problematic. The collection leapfrogs from the ancient Maya to the relatively recent past, jumping over the colonial and early national periods. As a result, critical questions relating to the impacts of colonialism, capitalism, and modern governance go unasked. What might the historical archaeology of roads, walls, house lots, and markers reveal about spatial aspects of Maya society under Spanish colonial rule, amid forced resettlement in reconstructed pueblos and towns, forced labor, religious missionizing, and related systems of control and surveillance? How might community titles and land litigation—typically containing abundant reference to boundary markers, and sometimes drafted in Maya by pueblo dwellers—provide historical archaeologists insights into the meaning of walls, markers, and lots for the Maya as they contended with the incursions of haciendas and with the sweeping mid to late nineteenth-century land titling and privatization measures? Do the postcolonial persistence of albarradas and markers in Maya pueblos and towns, the overlay of roads and procession routes over ancient causeways, pathways, and sacred sites, and the solares adjoining housing for indebted workers on nineteenth- and twentieth-century henequen haciendas reflect the colonial or capitalist incorporation of Maya constructions of space? Or does it reflect the Maya's active resistance, adaptation, or innovation in response to the strictures of colonialism, commodity capitalism, and class and racial subjugation?While covering such topics in detail might fall outside any single volume's scope, a concluding chapter or epilogue could have been a way to raise such questions. Even in the absence of that, this valuable volume provides generative interdisciplinary questions to explore in future research into Maya space, whether conducted by archaeologists, historians, or ethnographers.

  PublisherDOI

• Christopher Krupa: A feast of flowers review essays

  Focaal · 2023-10-25

  articleOpen access

  A feast of flowers is simultaneously grounded in the reality of place and the practice of face-to-face social relations while at the same time being thoroughly shaped by detailed attention to actual global geopolitical economy—not just vague references to globalization, but a thorough engagement with, in this case, finance capital and the way debt has driven Northern ambitions and generated a specific kind of social world in the Ecuador of the Global South.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Return to Ixil: Maya Society in an Eighteenth-Century Yucatec Town</i>. Mark Christensen and Matthew Restall. Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2019, 319 pp. $76.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-60732-921-3.

  Journal of Anthropological Research · 2021-05-14

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Impressum: Materialwiss. Werkstofftech. 5/2021

  Materialwissenschaft und Werkstofftechnik · 2021

  • Computer Science
  • Information Retrieval
  • Computer Science

  Citizenship: Wiley'sCorporateCitizenship initiativeseeks to address the environmental, social, economic,and ethical challenges faced in our business and which areimportant to our diverse stakeholder groups.S ince launching the initiative, we have focused on sharing our content with those in need, enhancing communityp hilanthropy, reducing our carbon impact, creating global guidelines and best practices forp aper use,e stablishing av endor code of ethics,a nd engaging our colleagues and other stakeholdersinour efforts.Followour progress at www.

  DOI

• In the Name of El Pueblo

  2020-10-08

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Alterity: Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico

  2018-04-17 · 5 citations

  bookSenior author
  Publisher

• Introduction: Mestizo acts

  2018-12-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  How is one to approach mestizaje in a way that is not definitionally predicated on ‘race,’ or at least, on a modernist formulation of race as phenotypically expressed biological difference? The contributors to this volume provide explorations of this question in varied national contexts (Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru), from the16th century to the present. They treat ‘mestizo acts’ neither as expressions of preexisting social identities, nor as ideologies enforced from above, but as cultural performances enacted in the in-between spaces of social and political life. Moreover, they show how ‘mestizo acts’ not only express or reinforce social hierarchies, but institute or change them – seeking to prove – or to dismantle – genealogies of race, blood, sex, and language in public and political ways.

  PublisherDOI

• Playing mestizo: festivity, language, and theatre in Yucatán, Mexico

  2018-12-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This article takes Yucatán’s ‘Monument to Mestizaje’ as the entry point to an analysis of mestizo culture in Yucatán in the 19th and 20th centuries. Providing three genealogies of mestizaje in Yucatán – focused on festivity, language, and theatre – this article takes a historical and performative approach; it focuses neither on the workings of ‘mestizo’ social identity nor on ideologies of mestizaje, but on the performance of mestizo acts in particular historical contexts and in politically charged ways. In festive dances, the speaking of ‘mixed’ Maya, and racial impersonations performed on stages of theatre or politics, Yucatecans enact mestizaje in ways that sometimes ratify hegemonic racial discourses, but other times leave them in pieces.

  PublisherDOI

• A Revolutionary Postmortem: Body, Memory, and History in Yucatán, Mexico, 1915–2015

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2018-10-29

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract General Salvador Alvarado earned renown as a visionary leader during and after his time as governor of Yucatán during the Constitutionalist revolution (1915–18), even contemplating a presidential run before his life was ended by an assassin's bullet. In ensuing decades, politicians, historians, and poets—whether admirers or detractors—repeatedly evoked his figure and his words as they celebrated, reviled, or sought to restore the Mexican Revolution and its legacies. This article takes the measure of Alvarado's political, corporeal, and textual powers over the century following his assumption of power in 1915, with attention to the ways that historical memory and historiography were central concerns of political action and discourse for Alvarado, as much for his partisans as for his critics. I argue that the history of Alvarado's physical and textual corpus—in life and after death—demonstrates how political power may operate beyond the present, with an emergent, future-oriented dimension that unfolds over time.

  PublisherDOI

• EPILOGUE:

  University of Arizona Press eBooks · 2018-04-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jens Schneider

  252 shared

• My Skudai

  Materials Science & Engineering

  252 shared

• Karlsruhe Wieser

  Materials Science & Engineering

  252 shared

• Aachen Berger

  Westsächsische Hochschule Zwickau

  252 shared

• Katja Kornmacher

  Materials Science & Engineering

  252 shared

• Aachen Christ

  John Wiley & Sons (Germany)

  252 shared

• Bochum Fischer

  FH Aachen

  252 shared

• Darmstadt Bobzin

  FH Aachen

  252 shared

Labs

• Paul K. Eiss LabPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Michigan

  2000

Awards & honors

• Maria Elena Martínez Book Prize in Mexican History (2011)
• Latin American Studies Association (Mexico Section) Social S…
• Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section, Humaniti…
• Society for Cultural Anthropology "Cultural Horizons" Prize…