Department of Anthropology

Becoming An Ancestor: The Isthmus Zapotec Way of Death is the latest book by Anya Peterson Royce, Chancellors Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. Described as powerful and beautifully written and a model of ethnographic research and presentation, this book documents the communal and individual responses to death by the Isthmus Zapotec of Juchitn and traces the ways in which these beliefs and actions cut across many domains of Zapotec culture. This is an ethnography of death, what the Isthmus Zapotec of Juchitn believe about it, how they commemorate it, and how they grieve.