Goodman, Felicitas D. 2001. Maya apocalypse. Seventeen years with the women of a Yucatán village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. xx + 544 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0 253 33908 1.

Hervik, Peter. 2003. Mayan people within and beyond boundaries. Social categories and lived identity in Yucatán. New York and London: Routledge. xxxi + 214 pp. Pb.: £18.99. ISBN: 0 415 9426 7.

Nash, June C. 2001. Mayan visions. The quest for autonomy in an age of globalisation. New York and London: Routledge. xix + 303 pp. Pb.: £15.99. ISBN: 0 415 92861 3.

More than half a century after Robert Redfield first used his rural–urban continuum to explain cultural change in Mexico, Mayan scholars now contend with subtly different and equally paradoxical scales: the individual and collective, agency and constraint, continuity and change, participant and observer, and, of course, the local and global. We live in a world where information, identities, beliefs, cognition, social relations, economies and politics are no longer isolated phenomena but rather linked to the global network that connects us all. Yet, on the other hand, we live and have collective beliefs, social concerns, ideas of self and intimacies that appear and feel more local than global. June C. Nash, Felicitas D. Goodman and Peter Hervik deal with the paradoxes of our contemporary world by utilising distinct styles, theories, methods, individuals and means of analysis in their representations of the lives and struggles of the Mayan people of Mexico.