Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala / Edition 1

by Kay B. Warren

Overview

In this first book-length treatment of Maya intellectuals in national and community affairs in Guatemala, Kay Warren presents an ethnographic account of Pan-Maya cultural activism through the voices, writings, and actions of its participants. Challenging the belief that indigenous movements emerge as isolated, politically unified fronts, she shows that Pan-Mayanism reflects diverse local, national, and international influences. She explores the movement's attempts to interweave these varied strands into political programs to promote human and cultural rights for Guatemala's indigenous majority and also examines the movement's many domestic and foreign critics.


The book focuses on the years of Guatemala's peace process (1987—1996). After the previous ten years of national war and state repression, the Maya movement reemerged into public view to press for institutional reform in the schools and courts and for the officialization of a "multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual" national culture. In particular, Warren examines a group of well-known Mayanist antiracism activists—among them, Demetrio Cojt!, Mart!n Chacach, Enrique Sam Colop, Victor Montejo, members of Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib', and grassroots intellectuals in the community of San Andr s—to show what is at stake for them personally and how they have worked to promote the revitalization of Maya language and culture. Pan-Mayanism's critics question its tactics, see it as threatening their own achievements, or even as dangerously polarizing national society. This book highlights the crucial role that Mayanist intellectuals have come to play in charting paths to multicultural democracy in Guatemala and in creating a new parallel middle class.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691058825
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	12/27/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kay B. Warren is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, after many years at Princeton University. She authored The Symbolism of Subordination: Indian Identity in a Guatemala Town, coauthored Women of the Andes: Patriarchy and Social Change in Two Peruvian Towns, and edited The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Nations. A Spanish version of Indigenous Movements and Their Critics will be published by the Maya press Cholsamaj in Guatemala.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Transcription of Maya Languages and Personal Names
Introduction: Democracy, Marginality, and Ethnic Resurgence	3
1	Pan-Mayanism and Its Critics on Left and Right	33
2	Coalitions and the Peace Process	52
3	In Dialogue: Maya Skeptics and One Anthropologist	69
4	Civil War: Enemies Without and Within	86
5	Narrating Survival through Eyewitness Testimony	113
6	Interrogating Official History	132
7	Finding Oneself in a Sixteenth-century Chronicle of Conquest	148
8	"Each Mind Is a World": Person, Authority, and Community	163
9	Indigenous Activism across Generations	177
Conclusions: Tracing the "Invisible Thread of Ethnicity"	194
App. 1	Summary of the Accord on Identity and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples	211
App. 2	Questions from the 1989 Maya Workshop Directed to Foreign Linguists	215
Glossary: Acronyms, Organizations, and Cultural Terms	217
Notes	221
Bibliography	251
Index	281

Editorial Reviews

Starting with an analysis of activism in one Mayan community, a Harvard anthropologist examines the role of indigenous intellectual and their influence in pormoting the rights of Guatemala's indigenous majority on local, national, and international levels.

Foreign Affairs - Kenneth Maxwell

Starting with an analysis of activism in one Mayan community, a Harvard anthropologist examines the role of indigenous intellectual and their influence in pormoting the rights of Guatemala's indigenous majority on local, national, and international levels.
— Kenneth Maxwell

Foreign Affairs

While this book focuses on Guatemala and its pan-Mayan movement, the themes that Warren addresses have much wider relevance. This book will be of value to anyone concerned with political transitions, especially following ethnic conflict. The pan-Mayan project poses important questions about the possibilities of a pluricultural state, which extend well beyond the Guatemalan case. In a similar way, scholars concerned with social movements, the culture of terror, and the politics of memory will find this book valuable. These essays contain important insights into all of these issues and many more.
— Latin American Politics & Society

Beverly Nagel

"Starting with an analysis of activism in one Mayan community, a Harvard anthropologist examines the role of indigenous intellectual and their influence in pormoting the rights of Guatemala's indigenous majority on local, national, and international levels."—-Kenneth Maxwell, Foreign Affairs

From the Publisher