One Photographer Showcases Mexico’s Gender-Defying Indigenous Community

[DriftingCrow]

One Photographer Showcases Mexico's Gender-Defying Indigenous Community
http://www.buzzfeed.com/skarlan/one-photographer-showcases-mexicos-gender-defying-indigenous
Author: Sarah Karlan Source: BuzzFeed

The culture in the Zapotec communities of southern Mexico celebrates and cherishes a group of individuals considered a third gender, referred to as "Muxes."

. . . photographer Nicola "Ókin" Frioli traveled to Juchitán to capture this culture through his lens for the series, "We Are Princesses in a Land of Machos."

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Pictures shown in the link.

[mountainhun]

As a student of anthropology, it's very useful to have examples like this.  While every society's expression of culture is adapted to each individual group, the important principle that these pictures illustrate, as Margaret Mead's work did, that a society's norms of behavior are completely culturally derived.  There are no biological laws that say women and men have to act a certain way, it's all in our heads.  And that is possibly the most liberating thing that the study of anthropology has brought into the world.