Abstract
This book, in a broader context, deals with the largest contemporary North Mexican native group - the Tarahumara/Rarámuri. The author divided it into three parts, in which he first tries to capture the genesis of Tarahumara and some other native groups of northern Mexico from prehistoric times to the arrival of the first Spanish conquerors and missionaries.
The second part focuses on some theoretical concepts such as ethnic, social and cultural identity, indigenism, internal colonialism, etc. The third part is the largest and is the result of the author's ethnographic and archival research between Tarahumara in 1992, 1996 and 2001.
After demographic introduction, the author deals with the socially adaptive mechanisms that have emerged from colonial times: ritual godfathers as a form of maintaining social and interethnic boundaries, ejido as a "modern" closed corporate community and ultimately analyzing Ejido Munerachi as an adaptive (socio-ecological) area of the refuge region type and he shows the possible consequences that might arise if some Pre-Christian cultural features disappear from Tarahumara everyday life. He concludes that they are primarily intra-ethnic or intra-ejido socially adaptive mechanisms that more determine the future of a community like Ejido Munerachi than its traditional cultural "supports", however they are old.