Maya Resurgence in Guatemala


Book Description

Across Guatemala, Mayan peoples are struggling to recover from decades of cataclysmic upheaval--religious conversions, civil war, displacement, military repression. Richard Wilson carried out long-term research with Q’eqchi’-speaking Mayas in the province of Alta Verapaz to ascertain how these events affected social organization and identity. He finds that their rituals of fertility and healing--abandoned in the 1970s during Catholic and Protestant evangelizations--have been reinvented by an ethnic revivalist movement led by Catholic lay activists, who seek to renovate the earth cult in order to create a new pan-Q’eqchi’ ethnic identity.




The Democracy Development Machine


Book Description

Nicholas Copeland sheds new light on rural politics in Guatemala and across neoliberal and post-conflict settings in The Democracy Development Machine. This historical ethnography examines how governmentalized spaces of democracy and development fell short, enabling and disfiguring an ethnic Mayan resurgence. In a passionate and politically engaged book, Copeland argues that the transition to democracy in Guatemalan Mayan communities has led to a troubling paradox. He finds that while liberal democracy is celebrated in most of the world as the ideal, it can subvert political desires and channel them into illiberal spaces. As a result, Copeland explores alternative ways of imagining liberal democracy and economic and social amelioration in a traumatized and highly unequal society as it strives to transition from war and authoritarian rule to open elections and free-market democracy.The Democracy Development Machine follows Guatemala's transition, reflects on Mayan involvement in politics during and after the conflict, and provides novel ways to link democratic development with economic and political development. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.




The Blood of Guatemala


Book Description

Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the Guatemalan state slaughtered more than two hundred thousand of its citizens. In the wake of this violence, a vibrant pan-Mayan movement has emerged, one that is challenging Ladino (non-indigenous) notions of citizenship and national identity. In The Blood of Guatemala Greg Grandin locates the origins of this ethnic resurgence within the social processes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century state formation rather than in the ruins of the national project of recent decades. Focusing on Mayan elites in the community of Quetzaltenango, Grandin shows how their efforts to maintain authority over the indigenous population and secure political power in relation to non-Indians played a crucial role in the formation of the Guatemalan nation. To explore the close connection between nationalism, state power, ethnic identity, and political violence, Grandin draws on sources as diverse as photographs, public rituals, oral testimony, literature, and a collection of previously untapped documents written during the nineteenth century. He explains how the cultural anxiety brought about by Guatemala’s transition to coffee capitalism during this period led Mayan patriarchs to develop understandings of race and nation that were contrary to Ladino notions of assimilation and progress. This alternative national vision, however, could not take hold in a country plagued by class and ethnic divisions. In the years prior to the 1954 coup, class conflict became impossible to contain as the elites violently opposed land claims made by indigenous peasants. This “history of power” reconsiders the way scholars understand the history of Guatemala and will be relevant to those studying nation building and indigenous communities across Latin America.




Re-Enchanting the World


Book Description

In considering the interplay between contemporary Protestant practice and native cultural traditions among Maya evangelicals, this work documents the processes whereby some Maya have converted to different forms of Christianity and the ways in which the Maya are incorporating Christianity for their own purposes.




Tecpan Guatemala


Book Description

This book discusses the indigenous people of Tecpan Guatemala, a predominantly Kaqchikel Maya town in the Guatemalan highlands. It seeks to build on the traditional strengths of ethnography while rejecting overly romantic and isolationist tendencies in the genre.




The Maya of Guatemala


Book Description

MAYA: A PEOPLE IN RESISTANCE ‘As I go around the world, people seem surprised that we indigenous people of Central America still exist’, noted the Maya Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchú in 1992. More than 500 years after the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, the Maya, descendants of one of the greatest pre-Columbian civilizations, not only exist but are thriving. The survival of 21 different Maya speaking peoples in Guatemala is a living testimony to their powers of resistance. In recent years, the brutal conquest of their cities and mountain lands by Spanish conquistadores in the early sixteenth century, has been replayed in all its horrors. In the 1980s alone, the Guatemalan army is conservatively estimated to have murdered 20,000 Maya. Whole villages were wiped out, as at least 120,000 fled into Mexico and 500,000 became internal refugees. The MAYA OF GUATEMALA studies the Maya world in depth: the history, culture, beliefs and responses to the nonindigenous world. The author, Phillip Wearne, a journalist with long experience in Central America, looks at the Maya cultural resurgence of recent years – the product of both fearsome oppression and international geo-political changes of the 1980s. This is a story of indomitable will, a plea for solidarity and international support for a people who want to reclaim their identity as one of the ‘first peoples’ of the world. It is also a story of resistance and resurgence on behalf of the Maya who in the words of one internal refugee ‘want to come out of the mud, the cold, the shadows and into the sunshine’. Please note that the terminology in the fields of minority rights and indigenous peoples’ rights has changed over time. MRG strives to reflect these changes as well as respect the right to self-identification on the part of minorities and indigenous peoples. At the same time, after over 50 years’ work, we know that our archive is of considerable interest to activists and researchers. Therefore, we make available as much of our back catalogue as possible, while being aware that the language used may not reflect current thinking on these issues.




The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current and comprehensive guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this Handbook also includes coverage of important new work by archaeologists on the Colonial and Republican periods. Unique among recent works, the text brings together in a single volume article-length regional syntheses and topical overviews written by active scholars in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology. The first section of the Handbook provides an overview of recent history and trends of Mesoamerica and articles on national archaeology programs and practice in Central America and Mexico written by archaeologists from these countries. These are followed regional syntheses organized by time period, beginning with early hunter-gatherer societies and the first farmers of Mesoamerica and concluding with a discussion of the Spanish Conquest and frontiers and peripheries of Mesoamerica. Topical and comparative articles comprise the remainder of Handbook. They cover important dimensions of prehispanic societies—from ecology, economy, and environment to social and political relations—and discuss significant methodological contributions, such as geo-chemical source studies, as well as new theories and diverse theoretical perspectives. The Handbook concludes with a section on the archaeology of the Spanish conquest and the Colonial and Republican periods to connect the prehispanic, proto-historic, and historic periods. This volume will be a must-read for students and professional archaeologists, as well as other scholars including historians, art historians, geographers, and ethnographers with an interest in Mesoamerica.




A Beauty That Hurts


Book Description

Though a 1996 peace accord brought a formal end to a conflict that had lasted for thirty-six years, Guatemala's violent past continues to scar its troubled present and seems destined to haunt its uncertain future. George Lovell brings to this revised and expanded edition of A Beauty That Hurts decades of fieldwork throughout Guatemala, as well as archival research. He locates the roots of conflict in geographies of inequality that arose during colonial times and were exacerbated by the drive to develop Guatemala's resources in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The lines of confrontation were entrenched after a decade of socioeconomic reform between 1944 and 1954 saw modernizing initiatives undone by a military coup backed by U.S. interests and the CIA. A United Nations Truth Commission has established that civil war in Guatemala claimed the lives of more that 200,000 people, the vast majority of them indigenous Mayas. Lovell weaves documentation about what happened to Mayas in particular during the war years with accounts of their difficult personal situations. Meanwhile, an intransigent elite and a powerful military continue to benefit from the inequalities that triggered armed insurrection in the first place. Weak and corrupt civilian governments fail to impose the rule of law, thus ensuring that Guatemala remains an embattled country where postwar violence and drug-related crime undermine any semblance of orderly, peaceful life.




Human Rights in Development: Yearbook 1999/2000 the Millennium Edition


Book Description

The twelfth in the series of yearbooks on "Human Rights in Development" the current millennium edition attempts to take stock of developments in the human rights arena since the Universal Declaration was adopted over half a century ago. The introductory overview article chronicles developments within the human rights field to date and sets the stage for a future scenario by looking at the respective roles of governments and the business community in respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights. An article on the World Trade Organisation follows the challenges posed by international trade in a human rights perspective. The appropriateness of so-called smart sanctions as a means of bolstering human rights is discussed in a third contribution. A fourth highlights the gender dimensions of the statute of the new international criminal court. The challenge of accommodating diversity and the rights of indigenous peoples in the new political dispensation of Guatemala is assessed in a fifth essay, whereas affirmative action policies within the context of Malaysia are examined in a sixth one. The difficulties inherent in designing, managing and evaluating aid programmes for human rights and democracy purposes is the theme of the penultimate contribution, whereas the final article considers the use of research in designing aid projects in the judicial system of Nepal. The Yearbook on "Human Rights in Development" is a joint project of European and Canadian research institutes and centres on human rights: the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen; the Danish Centre for Human Rights, Copenhagen; the Icelandic Human Rights Centre, Reykjavik; the Ludwig Boltzman Institute of Human Rights, Vienna; theInternational Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, Montreal; the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, Utrecht; the Norwegian Institute of Human Rights, Oslo; and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Lund. The Yearbook is geared to a broad readership, including government agencies, donors, embassies, the mass media, non-governmental organisations, the academic community, and the interested public at large.




Human Rights in Development, Volume 6


Book Description

The twelfth in the series of yearbooks on Human Rights in Development the current millennium edition attempts to take stock of developments in the human rights arena since the Universal Declaration was adopted over half a century ago. The introductory overview article chronicles developments within the human rights field to date and sets the stage for a future scenario by looking at the respective roles of governments and the business community in respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights. An article on the World Trade Organisation follows the challenges posed by international trade in a human rights perspective. The appropriateness of so-called smart sanctions as a means of bolstering human rights is discussed in a third contribution. A fourth highlights the gender dimensions of the statute of the new international criminal court. The challenge of accommodating diversity and the rights of indigenous peoples in the new political dispensation of Guatemala is assessed in a fifth essay, whereas affirmative action policies within the context of Malaysia are examined in a sixth one. The difficulties inherent in designing, managing and evaluating aid programmes for human rights and democracy purposes is the theme of the penultimate contribution, whereas the final article considers the use of research in designing aid projects in the judicial system of Nepal. The Yearbook on Human Rights in Development is a joint project of European and Canadian research institutes and centres on human rights: the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen; the Danish Centre for Human Rights, Copenhagen; the Icelandic Human Rights Centre, Reykjavik; the Ludwig Boltzman Institute of Human Rights, Vienna; the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, Montreal; the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, Utrecht; the Norwegian Institute of Human Rights, Oslo; and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Lund. The Yearbook is geared to a broad readership, including government agencies, donors, embassies, the mass media, non-governmental organisations, the academic community, and the interested public at large.