Comments on Consciousness, Violence and the Politics of Memory in Guatemala by Charles R. Hale

Consciousness, Violence, and the Politics of Memory in GuatemalaAuthor(s): Charles R. HaleSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 38, No. 5 (December 1997), pp. 817-838Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/204669 .

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Current Anthropology Volume 38, Number 5, December 1997 1997 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/97/3805-0005$2.50

Historians and anthropologists who conduct researchon Guatemala, whether North American or Guatema-lan, cannot avoid confronting the political implicationsCA✩ FORUM ONof this memory work. To write about the period of revo-

ANTHROPOLOGY IN PUBLIC lutionary violence, we must make our way amonghighly charged accounts of what happened, producingversions of our own that are inevitably partial and situ-ated. Alternatively, by choosing not to delve into thatrecent history we run the risk of complicity with pow-Consciousness,erful interests that are well served by official amnesia.Taking this inevitable positioning as a point of depar-Violence, and the ture, I use this essay as an opportunity to ask what we—as historians and as analysts of social memory—mightcontribute to the processes under way. I address thisPolitics of Memoryquestion through a critical examination of three re-cently published books: Massacres in the Jungle, Ixcan,in Guatemala1Guatemala, 1975–1982 (Masacres de la selva), by Ri-cardo Falla (1994), Rural Guatemala, 1760–1940, byDavid McCreery (1994), and Between Two Armies inthe Ixil Towns of Guatemala, by David Stoll (1993). Al-by Charles R. Hale though different in methods, ultimate purpose, and con-clusions, these books have in common an inquiry intohow rural people—mainly but not only Maya—under-stood and responded to violence in a specific period ofthe past. By probing the contents of these three studiesIn discrete and relatively brief moments, societies inI hope to invite reflection on what is at stake when, be-different parts of the world have developed an intensecause the past has become so deeply politicized, merelycollective need to remember their past as a preconditionthrough research and writing on it we enter the fray.for facing the future. Evidence is mounting that Guate-

In Ricardo Falla’s harrowing account of repressionmala has entered such a phase. In December 1996, theand massacre in the remote Ixcan region of northernguerrilla organization and the Guatemalan governmentGuatemala, the reader comes upon a dramatic momentsigned a definitive peace agreement putting an end toof relief, however short-lived and foreboding. The firstan armed conflict that began some 35 years ago, wellsection of the book documents the onset of army-before the majority of Guatemalans were born. Al-directed terror, beginning in 1975 with selectivethough many observers are disappointed in the agree-threats, abductions, and torture and reaching a cre-ment’s specific provisions for bringing the perpetratorsscendo in 1981. Then suddenly, on November 17, 1981,of political crimes to justice, few would deny that thethe army withdrew from the area and for three wholebroader conditions surrounding the peace negotiationsmonths remained completely absent. Ixcan peasants re-have fostered collective efforts to remember. Teams ofsponded with ‘‘a kind of popular insurrection’’ (1994:forensic anthropologists have begun systematically to47). While the guerrilla forces present in the area surelystudy massacre sites,2 the Catholic church will soonpromoted and approved of the antigovernment thrust ofcomplete a nationwide participatory project to docu-this ‘‘insurrection,’’ local consciousness was far too het-ment community-level experiences of violence, and,erogeneous and complex to fit any self-evident categorymost impressive, communities themselves have takenof the ‘‘revolutionary subject.’’4 Though detail is scant,the initiative, proceeding on the premise that publiclya faint image emerges of people who responded to theto remember a terrible, traumatic past is to help heal itssurge of armed violence with generalized defiance—fedwounds.3

up with army repression yet hesitant to cast their lotwith the all-or-nothing logic of guerrilla struggle. Is this

1. Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, image accurate? What were they thinking?Austin, Tex. 78712-1086, U.S.A. I gratefully acknowledge criticalThe terrible weight of the events that follow deniesreadings and suggestions on earlier drafts from Richard N. Adams,

Tani Adams, Jeffrey Gould, Marcie Mersky, Carol A. Smith, and Falla the luxury of any more than a brief pause—a para-Orin Starn. graph or two, not even long enough for the image to2. For an example of the products of this research, see Las masacres crystallize. In the second week of February 1982, the ar-en Rabinal: Estudio historico antropologico de las masacres dePlan de Sanchez, Chichupac y Rıo Negro (Equipo de AntropologıaForense de Guatemala 1995). 4. Among the many axes of diversity running through these re-

cently settled communities, the ones that Falla mentions include3. See, for example, the moving two-part story in the Prensa Libre(‘‘Ceremonia q’eqchi conmemora la muerte de 916,’’ November 9, ethnicity, Maya language group, community of origin, religion

(Catholic/Protestant), ideology, and organizational history. He pro-1995, and ‘‘Q’eqchis celebran el encuentro con sus muertos por laguerra,’’ November 10, 1995), which chronicles a remarkable effort vides suggestive (definitely not systematic) evidence that this di-

versity engendered generalized distaste for the government and aof a group of rural Q’eqchi to confront the history of political vio-lence in their communities. wide range of attitudes toward the guerrillas.

817



818 current anthropology Volume 38, Number 5, December 1997

my’s death machine resumed its course, this time car- allowing a transition to the subsequent phases of ‘‘con-trol’’ and ‘‘development.’’rying out a relentless, methodical ‘‘scorched-earth’’

counterinsurgency plan. A few pages beyond the three- In a brief final chapter, Falla delves deeper, in searchof a cultural-psychological explanation for the army’smonth respite, accounts of the massacres begin, one

after another, reconstructed in meticulous detail based having applied the counterinsurgency doctrine withsuch exaggerated brutality. His reflections center on theon eyewitness accounts, with complete lists of the vic-

tims. The massacre of Cuarto Pueblo, carried out on ‘‘racist . . . nature of ladino society . . . embodied in thestate and army,’’ the prevailing racist stereotypes of ru-March 14–16, 1982, is the largest. The victims—with

age, kin relationships, and community of origin—fill ral Indians, and the ladino officer’s ‘‘hidden insecurity’’about his own identity, feelings of impotence, and angernine pages. One cannot exactly ‘‘read’’ that list, nor can

one in good conscience skip over these 324 names of at insubordination, which bursts forth in an enrageddrive to ‘‘control’’ through extermination (1994:186–men, women, and children. I am driven to search for an-

other verb: to study (I found myself scanning them for 87). Falla insists that these reflections be taken only ashypotheses, to be tested when more can be knowncommunities of origin that I know) or perhaps to reflect,

taking them in by the page, straining against disbelief about the army. When first published in Spanish in1992, however, they represented a courageous, pre-to imagine what happened.

Falla is on the mark when he warns early on that to scient step toward analysis of racism, a topic that hadlong been taboo in Guatemala; they stand today as pro-make sense of this book ‘‘requires faith on the part of

the reader’’ (1994:3). The reference here is not to the vocative contributions to an increasingly public dis-cussion, widely recognized as essential if Guatemalancredibility of the data—a problem that Falla lays to rest

with an unassailable methodological rigor. The issue society is to transcend this legacy of its own violentpast.goes much deeper. The reader needs some resource well

beyond the detached analytical language of social sci- Falla’s study raises another analytical issue—the uni-fying theme for this essay—that returns us to that briefence first to fathom how human beings could be capable

of such brutality and then to imagine how other human respite at the end of 1981: how to weigh what peopleremember when the goal is to analyze their conscious-beings could recover from such crushing violence and

pain rather than internalize and reproduce it. Other- ness at a particular moment in the past. What werethese mainly indigenous peasants thinking during thatwise, one is apt to respond to the book’s contents with

disbelief, crippling cynicism, or denial—and, most three-month period when they were suddenly freedfrom the repressive hand of the state? In one importantlikely, just stop ‘‘reading.’’ In the case of Falla himself—

a Jesuit priest as well as an anthropologist—that re- sense the book’s usefulness in answering this questionis limited. Because Falla’s explicit objective is to docu-source is overtly religious. For those of us not accus-

tomed to using religious values to understand social ment and analyze army atrocities, he provides no sys-tematic data on the guerrillas, either on what they didprocess, Falla’s biblical analogies and theological inter-

pretations are at times jarring, but ultimately the ques- or on what people thought of them. The glimpses thatdo come through point to extensive guerrilla presence,tion is not religious but human. If we do not find that

resource somewhere, we cannot make sense of this acts of violence against selected civilian targets, and in-sufficient strength even to attempt to counter the ar-book. If we do find it, then, as Falla suggests, testimo-

nies of massacres can become affirmations of survival, my’s advance as the massacres began. As for the atti-tudes of community members—both the slaughteredperseverance, and even hope for the future. In this para-

dox lies the book’s most powerful message and its most and the survivors—one infers great heterogeneity: someactive supporters of the guerrillas, some ideologicallyenduring value.

Falla’s study achieves more conventional analytical opposed, and others, probably the majority, for whomthey were mercifully benign compared with the armyand documentary objectives as well. It presents the

most complete, empirically grounded account yet avail- but nonetheless an outside military force with no greatmoral or political authority.able of the army’s counterinsurgency strategy in rural

Guatemala. Falla shows how this strategy in general This inference points to the crux of the matter. Guer-rilla presence probably encouraged local rebelliousnesscorresponded closely to the classic formula developed

during the Vietnam War—security, control, develop- by providing conducive organizational conditions andby encouraging people to think in terms of radical sys-ment—the crucial difference being that the Guatema-

lan army carried the euphemistically defined objective temic change. Yet the consciousness that people ex-pressed during the ‘‘insurrection’’ and the meaningsof the first phase, ‘‘eliminate enemy infrastructure’’

(read noncombatant population), to its beastly logical they assigned to events and actions are far from ex-hausted by standard accounts of the revolutionary pe-extreme. The evidence also sharply refutes, at least for

the case of the Ixcan, the assertion that the state’s coun- riod. Falla does not fully explore these alternativemeanings, but he does help to put the question on theterinsurgency strategy changed substantively when

General Efraın Rıos Montt assumed the presidency on agenda for future research. To take up this task will en-tail active dissent from the standard narratives of con-March 23, 1982. The massacres had an instrumental

purpose. They continued after March 23, according to sciousness and mobilization during the 1970s—one ofthe revolutionary movement and the other of the coun-the same precise logic, until ‘‘security’’ was assured,



hale Consciousness, Violence, and the Politics of Memory in Guatemala 819

terinsurgency state—that form an integral part of the rise of coffee production altiplano ladinos assumed theroles of labor contractors, moneylenders, merchants,conflict.

David McCreery’s encyclopedic, masterful study of and local politicians; their demographic presence,wealth, and, most important, power over the indige-rural Guatemala sifts through and organizes an enor-

mous quantity of historical data with an ultimate pur- nous majority increased sharply. The anthropologicalnotion that ladinos and Indians are Levi-Straussianpose that runs nicely parallel to that of Falla. McCreery

sets out to chronicle and analyze the struggles of rural structural-symbolic opposites—still deeply influentialin much thinking about ethnic/racial relations in Gua-indigenous peoples ‘‘to construct their own history’’ be-

tween 1760 and 1940 under daunting conditions of ex- temala—now has a definitive historical antidote. WithMcCreery’s help, we can confidently trace the mean-ploitation, political domination, and cultural oppres-

sion. Throughout he succeeds in registering structural ings that surround this structural opposition to a partic-ular array of social relations fixed in place with the riseinequity and inordinate elite power without ever sub-

mitting to a formulaic structural determinism. He high- of coffee.McCreery draws a sharp distinction between thelights fissures, contradictions, and unintended conse-

quences that make the story fascinating, insightful, and ‘‘neo-Liberals’’ who carried forward the coffee revolu-tion and the ‘‘Enlightenment Liberals’’ of the 1830s,suggestive of major new interpretations.

McCreery’s analysis of the effects of the ‘‘Coffee Rev- driven out of power by Rafael Carrera in 1837. Whilethe latter espoused classic liberal ideas about the Indi-olution’’ of 1871 on subsistence production and com-

munity land tenure, for example, directly challenges an’s redeemability through ‘‘education and integra-tion,’’ the former looked on Indians as ‘‘probably essen-conventional wisdom. Although laws enacted soon

after 1871 allowed for the expropriation of Indian lands, tially and certainly in the short run unalterablyinferior’’ (1994:175).5 What was the relationship be-the actual process was ‘‘gradual and piecemeal’’ (1994:

263). Many of the best coffee lands were initially either tween this neo-Liberal ideology and the conformationof altiplano ladino identity? McCreery does not answerunclaimed or little valued by Indian communities; over

subsequent decades, ladinos settled in the cabeceras of this question, but he does help us to pose it. I suspectthat the answer will entail a major step toward ex-Indian municipios and gradually took control of Indian

lands through sheer political-economic dominance. In plaining why power holders in Guatemala have failedto generate even a plausible assimilationist (i.e., ‘‘En-comparative terms, the striking feature of this transi-

tion to an intensive single-crop export economy was the lightenment Liberal’’) discourse of national identity,much less one based on the principle of ethnic or racialrelative absence of frontal conflict as it took hold (p.

328). Nor did the coffee regime have the immediate, di- equality.Finally, departing once again from conventional wis-sastrous effect on subsistence production that some

have asserted. With the passing of years, many inhabit- dom, McCreery suggests that the height of altiplano‘‘neo-Liberal’’ ladino power occurred not with the dicta-ants of highland communities did find themselves in

desperate straits, unable to survive without earning torship of General Jorge Ubico (1931–44) but rather inthe preceding decade. The impact of Ubico’s rule, in-cash part of the year in long stretches of hard labor on

the coffee plantations. The initial effect, however, was cluding the notorious vagrancy law of 1934, was to cen-tralize state authority and weaken the political and eco-just the opposite: plantation work provided a source of

cash that ‘‘evened out’’ access to food and other con- nomic power of provincial ladinos. Though indigenouspeasants reaped no great benefit from these changes,sumer goods (p. 312) and offered young men an alterna-

tive to patriarchal control (p. 293). These arguments re- they may well have perceived Ubico’s edicts as bringingminimal relief from the most immediate and tangiblevise our understanding of the absence of indigenous

‘‘resistance’’ to the onslaught of coffee production. sources of oppression. Here McCreery begins to unravelthe puzzle of deep indigenous support for a dictatorRather than passivity or victimhood, McCreery inter-

prets this moderation as a reasoned and partly informed whose name is now synonymous with the semifeudalexploitation of Indians.response to a transition whose dire consequences were

yet to be experienced and therefore were largely unfore- On this point and throughout, McCreery is generallycareful to assert the continuity of ladino dominanceseen.

McCreery also provides the basis for revised interpre- while avoiding the commonplace assertion of a contin-uous, uniform indigenous response. The few slips intotations of ladino identity and consciousness, though

with less sustained attention—understandable because essentialized reasoning of this sort—for example, theassertion that ‘‘Indian opposition to elite and state ex-this takes him farther from the book’s central purpose.

Expanding on and substantiating a hypothesis advanced ploitation and oppression in Guatemala from the six-teenth century to the present has taken the form of de-by Carol A. Smith (1990), McCreery traces the funda-

mental connection between the coffee regime and the nying ladino superiority’’ (1994:288)—are more thancompensated for by careful attention to heterogeneity.prevailing meanings of the category ‘‘ladino’’ that per-

sist to this day. Although a handful of ladino towns hadexisted on the altiplano since colonial times and by 5. It may well be that the distinction is overdrawn. For a fascinating1804 many ladinos did live in Indian towns (1994:35), archival-based study that provides an alternative view, see Adams

(1995).in both cases ladino power remained muted. With the




McCreery is at his best, for example, in the sensitive to its dissolution. The conceptual premises underlyingthis hypothesis are not beyond criticism. McCreery of-treatment of serious conflicts between Indians of differ-

ent communities and even within the same community fers a wonderfully fine-grained, multidimensional, andsophisticated account of how the hegemonic ‘‘com-over land and political power (e.g., pp. 145, 151–57).

These conflicts become contributing factors in the ex- pact’’ was established and reproduced but retreats fromthis complexity in conceiving how hegemony can be ex-planation for ladino ascendancy and place the contro-

versial issue of class divisions within Indian communi- pected to break down. He seems to harbor an assump-tion that somewhere deep down lies an insurrectionaryties squarely on (or back on?) the agenda. Most

important, they keep the reader constantly aware of the subject who comes to life once the compact dissolves.This formulation is cause for concern that a latent classdazzling complexity and variability of local conditions.

Heterogeneity of this sort is, however, extremely dif- determinism—refreshingly absent in the historical nar-rative itself—may have been smuggled back into theficult to describe. At times it gets the best of McCreery;

as the story line moves between municipios on opposite concluding reflections. An alternative would be to con-ceive of peasant and indigenous consciousness asedges of the altiplano it is hard to follow what happened

over time either in a given locale or in the region as a shaped by multiple dimensions of social relations with-out any single, essential core, regardless of whether itswhole. Though in part surely an artifact of the varying

quality of archival sources, this problem may also have specific expression is adherence to a colonial compact,outright defiance, or some combination of these two.been exacerbated by McCreery’s choice of narrative

strategy, favoring the bottom-up accumulation of data With this conceptual proviso, McCreery’s studystands as a definitive account of the period ending inand the relatively transparent transcription of historical

events. Without undermining its primary value as good 1940, when the ‘‘colonial compact’’ was purportedlystill in place, and as the indispensable point of departureinductive social history, this piece-by-piece 300-page

account would have benefited from a few more reflec- for the questions that follow: When did the compactcease to function? Under what conditions did people be-tive pauses along the way. As it is, McCreery asks of

the reader supreme patience and perseverance, packing gin perceiving the very existence of exploitation, ratherthan its particular terms, as illegitimate?nearly all the interpretive analysis into a brief 14-page

conclusion. David Stoll’s study of the Ixil region in northernQuiche promises to set us on our way toward answeringWhen the conclusions finally come, however, they

are weighty indeed, culminating with an answer to these questions. His abundantly researched accountcovers the three municipios of the Ixil region with his-what might be considered the book’s central question:

‘‘Why did the Indians accept the increases in levels of torical depth that allows him to consider conditionsprior to and during the years of political violence as wellexploitation resulting from the expansion of coffee?’’

(1994:333). McCreery rejects two commonplace re- as the current process of postwar recovery and recon-struction. Devastated by the violence and purportedly asponses, romanticized mirror images of one another:

that Indians did engage in constant frontal resistance stronghold of the revolutionary movement, the Ixil re-gion provides an important, highly charged setting forand that the coercive state apparatus was simply too

powerful to allow them to raise their heads, much less thinking through the how and why of Guatemala’sfailed revolution. Quite apart from an assessment of itstheir voices. His own answer is grounded in a complex

and nuanced analysis of Indian consciousness focused contents, Stoll’s book stands as a pioneering example ofa new genre of social science research on Guatemala.on the emergence of a ‘‘colonial compact’’ that ‘‘contin-

ued to define and underpin the might and legitimacy of He interviewed people who lived through the violenceyet have enough temporal distance to reflect systemati-elites’’ (p. 334) throughout the period in question. Ac-

cording to this compact, ‘‘exploitation was legitimate,’’ cally on it—people subject to a state that now relies ononly occasional and selective rather than massive re-leaving only the ‘‘degree, extent and form of this exploi-

tation’’ to be negotiated (p. 334). As long as the compact course to physical repression, people who lived with thedrone of low-intensity armed conflict disconcertinglyremained in place and the state ‘‘left space’’ for its nego-

tiation (in effect if not by design), then indigenous peo- nearby but far enough away to allow them to regainsome semblance of normalcy. It belongs to a genre ofple would opt for a peaceful, negotiated survival rather

than violent resistance (p. 334). ‘‘postrevolutionary’’ ethnography in a way that the es-says in Harvest of Violence (Carmack 1988), for exam-Although 35 years separate the closing date of

McCreery’s narrative and the starting date of Falla’s, ple, could not.Though Stoll’s study is situated just to the south ofthis conclusion forms a crucial analytical bridge be-

tween the two. Here we have a historically grounded ex- the Ixcan, where Falla lived and worked, and coversmany of the same or at least parallel events, Stoll’s andplanation for why indigenous people endured so many

years of miserable exploitation with very little recourse Falla’s books are worlds apart. For starters, the two pop-ulations that provided the data for the studies are mirrorto frontal resistance and a hypothesis regarding the con-

ditions that would shatter this tense calm. McCreery opposites of one another. Falla’s analysis is based on tes-timonies gathered in the mid-1980s, mainly from refu-implicitly argues, and affirms in a footnote (1994:418 n.

8), that during the 1970s the state closed the space for gees who lived outside Guatemalan state authority andwhose ideas embodied continuity with a moment in thenegotiation of the colonial compact and this led directly




1970s when many believed that fundamental egalitar- mala would ultimately fail to achieve its central goal.Determined to refute solidarity orthodoxy, Stoll imbuesian transformations of the Guatemalan state and soci-

ety were possible. Stoll’s informants, in contrast, lived his adversary with much-exaggerated strength and una-nimity, which ultimately has the effect of forcing thea sharp, violent rupture between ‘‘then’’ and ‘‘now.’’

Whether willingly, reluctantly, or under direct coer- debate back into the two polarized camps that he hopesto transcend. The result is an odd combination of a clar-cion, these Ixil submitted to army authority sometime

in the mid-1980s. The books are even more divergent in ion call for fresh revisionist analysis and a frustratingstring of missed opportunities to carry out his ownstated purpose and audience. Stoll writes primarily to

contest what he views as party-line left scholarship in agenda. So fervent is Stoll’s opposition to the solidaritynarrative that he remains an unwitting captive of itsthe United States. Falla’s main underlying motivation,

by contrast, is to contribute to the struggle against state limitations.The most glaring missed opportunity is a careful ac-repression and impunity in Guatemala.

Despite this divergence in ultimate purpose, the cen- count of consciousness and local politics during the de-cade of the 1970s. Stoll’s goal is to prove—contrary totral questions that animate Stoll’s study fit nicely with

those posed by both Falla and McCreery. Indeed, Stoll solidarity orthodoxy—that the guerrilla movement pro-voked the brutal army response, and his chronology ofrelies heavily on McCreery’s work to imbue his analysis

with historical depth. While McCreery helps us under- events in the Ixil region follows accordingly. Early guer-rilla presence provoked selective army repression,stand indigenous peasants’ responses to increasing ex-

ploitation with the rise of coffee, Stoll concentrates on which generated the first flow of Ixil recruits to the rev-olution, which provoked even greater army repression,such responses during subsequent periods: How did Ixil

think and act politically when the guerrilla movement and so on, ending with scorched earth and massacre. Toadvance his argument, Stoll paints what I suspect is aarrived on the scene in the mid-1970s? Why did they

join that movement in massive numbers in 1980–81 skewed picture of a society in which everyone thoughtand acted with military conflict as the sole point of ref-and massively defect to live under army control a few

years later? How are they making sense of and making erence. Is that really the way Ixil were thinking be-tween, say, 1975, when the guerrillas first made theirpeace with their traumatic past today? In answering

these questions, Stoll seeks above all to refute prevail- presence known, and late 1981, when the army occu-pied the central town of Nebaj? Were there no organiza-ing ‘‘solidarity’’ analyses of the revolutionary period,

which portray the ‘‘people’’ as uniform insurrectionary tions, initiatives, or even private thoughts that ex-pressed support for alternative paths, renouncing thesubject, the guerrilla movement as the unproblematic

embodiment of the popular will, and the largely mono- violent methods of both?One would expect this last question to be of the ut-lithic configuration of powerful interests (army, bour-

geoisie, local political bosses) as the ‘‘people’s’’ adver- most importance in Stoll’s quest to transcend the twopolarized accounts of the revolutionary period. Instead,sary. Stoll revels in the opportunity to punch holes in

this narrative, identifying intentional occlusions, com- in his rush to discredit the solidarity narrative he rein-forces the idea that the conflict was from the start over-plexities lost, and predetermined story lines.

The book makes some very important contributions whelmingly a military affair, reversing the causal se-quence and the weighing of blame but leaving haplessthat are apt to take on still greater importance as Guate-

malans further assume the task of frankly, collectively civilian Ixil caught in the middle. What were these ci-vilians doing during those crucial seven years beforeconfronting their past. Stoll’s affirmation of massive

army-perpetrated human rights violations, combined they were overwhelmed by the polarization of armedconflict? The bits of evidence he does provide departwith an insistence that guerrilla-perpetrated violations

be acknowledged and analyzed as well, is a sound from if not contradict his broader argument. For exam-ple, he makes reference to traditions of Maya resistancestance. He is right to initiate systematic critical analy-

sis of guerrilla opportunism, manipulation, coercion, outside the ‘‘lineage’’ of revolutionary politics (1993:89), to Catholic activists attacked by the army for ‘‘ex-hierarchical decision making, and other maladies com-

mon to vanguardist political-military organization. On traneous reasons’’ (p. 90), to ‘‘reformist politicians’’ tar-geted by the government for kidnaping (p. 118), tothe question of what people like the Ixil of the Quiche

were thinking when the conflict broke out, Stoll’s basic ‘‘grassroots organizations’’ that the guerrillas ‘‘de-stroyed’’ (p. 127), to a ‘‘good government coalition’’ thatmessage is equally salutary. From the fact that many

people joined the guerrillas it does not necessarily fol- shook up local politics (p. 326 n. 68)—all of which havethe common thread of being civilian initiatives that de-low that they took the revolution’s ideological message

to heart. The very concept of resistance, he rightly as- fied the logic of army-guerrilla polarization. Strangelyenough, Stoll buries these examples in a chronologyserts, often carries preordained answers to the questions

‘‘for what’’ and ‘‘against whom.’’ Consistent with dominated by the back-and-forth of military actions,nowhere even attempting to weave them togetherStoll’s argument, other postrevolutionary ethnogra-

phers are beginning to reopen these questions and listen into a coherent portrayal of civil society or local pol-itics.more attentively as people respond.

It is perplexing, then, that this exciting, promising re- ‘‘Doubtless,’’ Stoll candidly admits, ‘‘there is a his-tory of organizing in Ixil country that has yet to be told’’visionist analysis of the revolutionary period in Guate-




(p. 88). But after all this research, and given its impor- events? How do they remember the killing of the ‘‘Tigerof Ixil,’’ the first guerrilla occupation of Nebaj, the mas-tance to the larger argument, why not at least begin to

tell that story? It is as if the suggestion that Ixil orga- sacre of 15 unarmed civilians in Chajul in 1980, etc.?Stoll must have such accounts, but instead of providingnized themselves independently from the revolutionary

movement got in the way of his central objective of them he relies heavily on reports by outsiders, quotes afew fragments of interviews, and closes the case withpointing the finger at the guerrillas and their solidarity

apologists. But Stoll pushes this logic so far that it is his own pithy distillations of what he says Ixil werethinking. To delve deeper, according to Stoll, would in-bound to become self-defeating. For example, he ulti-

mately discounts army repression against Ixil reform- volve cramming people’s consciousness into preformedcategories. We learn much more, he asserts, by simplyers, church activists, and the like, by asserting that,

though apparently independent, they were really taking what they say at ‘‘face value.’’ Thus ‘‘betweentwo fires’’—which sounds very much like an opening(though often secretly) linked to the guerrillas (e.g., pp.

87–88); by extension, their victimization fits within the phrase, an entree to a discussion that would bring com-plexity, contradiction, and change over time into thearmy’s broader response to guerrilla provocation. Per-

haps Stoll is right. It is, after all, the ethnographer’s picture—becomes the take-home interpretive conclu-sion.business to know such things. But a deadly serious as-

sertion such as this one deserves meticulous proof, The point here is not, of course, that lengthy tran-scriptions of interviews would constitute unmediatedwhich Stoll does not provide. Regardless, a gnawing

contradiction remains. His argument ultimately rein- sources of evidence. There are many defensible ways toconfront the problem of collective memory among peo-forces the impression that, on their own, Ixil acted

solely in response to external impetus. Beginning with ple who have passed through a period of great pain andturmoil. I do not want to prejudge the approach Stollan impassioned call to move beyond such externally

driven reductionism, Stoll ends up reinforcing precisely should have taken. I do criticize his refusal to engage—or, put differently, I encourage him to carry out suchthat.

Convincingly to portray Ixil consciousness between analysis in a future work.6 In any case, to report a sum-mary phrase like ‘‘between two fires,’’ take it at ‘‘face1975 and 1981 as being ‘‘neutral,’’ in-between, inactive

except when coerced or manipulated by one side or the value,’’ and make no effort to reflect on the relationshipbetween memory now and consciousness then is an ut-other, Stoll would have needed to confront rigorously

the problem of collective memory—how to make sense terly unsatisfactory ‘‘resolution.’’A brief example from a different part of Guatemalaof what people remembered in 1990 about what they

had been thinking in 1980. How are their memories but surely not unrepresentative of what happened in theIxil area comes to mind. At the end of a long discussionconditioned by the trauma of the intervening years, by

life under army control, by having a North American of one evening, a friend in his early 20s recounted how,some 15 years ago, armed men entered his house in theunknown affiliations as their questioner? To his credit,

Stoll does make scattered references to the complexity night and dragged out his mother, who was never seenagain. He and his brother, wide awake, stood behind aof this task: that under conditions of violence people

feel ‘‘every which way’’ (p. 118), that ‘‘oppression’’ can closed door and listened. His father, the political activ-ist of the family, survived unharmed. The father re-be ‘‘internalized’’ (p. 57), that local life is full of ‘‘ambi-

guity’’ (p. 259), that people ‘‘remask’’ the truth to avoid sponded by closing down and for the next ten years pro-hibited discussion of the topic within the family. Howconfrontation (p. 302), and, most explicit, that ‘‘sharper

feelings operate below the surface’’ of what people re- are we to interpret the father’s imposition of silence—guilt, fear, confusion, despair? How can we begin to un-member and (presumably) what they at first are willing

to share with him (p. 126). Then, inexplicably, Stoll derstand the effects of that silence on what the familyremembers, on its attempt to recover? Stoll’s answer toconcludes that to process this complexity, to explore

these ‘‘sharper feelings’’ back then, would be to ‘‘pre- such questions would presumably be automatic: takewhat they say (or, in this case, what they don’t say?) atsume that [the Ixil] are willing to go through another

period like they did in the early 1980s’’ (p. 126). For ‘‘face value.’’Elsewhere in the book, Stoll’s analysis is sharp andsome reason, left unexplained to the reader, Stoll feels

that to confront the problem of collective memory sophisticated. In the final four substantive chapters hemarshals an impressive array of contemporary data andwould result in an endorsement of left-wing reduc-

tionism. analysis on questions of ecological crisis, religioustransformation, ladino-Indian relations, and commu-From this conclusion a debilitating flaw of the study

directly follows. Only rarely in more than 300 pages of nity-based reconstruction efforts. Here the book’s cen-tral thesis—neutrality as an effective, at times inge-analysis focused on the question of Ixil consciousness

do we actually hear Ixil voices. If Stoll himself declines nious, survival strategy—is both immediately plausibleand unquestionably well-documented. His argumentsto make sense of people’s memories, he might at least

have provided readers with some material to try theirhand. How is the Ixil’s purported neutrality during this 6. I thank Richard N. Adams for suggesting how this criticism

could be phrased more constructively.crucial period expressed in their own memories of key




on each of these topics offer fresh insights and question problem is that society cannot wait for these ideal con-ditions of historical research to congeal. The time whenconventional wisdom at every turn. Yet this is not re-

ally what the book is about. The guerrillas lost the war. collective memories are beginning to matter intenselyto large numbers of people is now.Whatever aspirations for social change and thoughts

about the revolution Ixil had at previous moments, it Consistent with his stance of dissent from what heviews as knee-jerk political correctness, Stoll calls theis unsurprising and relatively uncontroversial that they

would now feel abandoned, burned, embittered, cynical, entire ‘‘human rights’’ endeavor into question. To re-member and talk about what happened, he asserts, willand exceptionally cautious. From this a strategic neu-

trality logically follows. The real crux of Stoll’s argu- achieve little that is positive; it has ‘‘sharpened villageconflicts’’ (p. 142) and is likely to ‘‘draw a higher levelment and—perhaps unfortunately—what the book will

be remembered for is his reinterpretation of Ixil con- of repression’’ against the victims (p. 311). Instead, hefavors a pact of silence that purportedly allows peoplesciousness during the revolution.

This being the case, why does Stoll abdicate serious to rebuild civil society in the absence of debilitatingconflict and even expresses a minimal collective will toanalysis of his study’s central question? Scattered refer-

ences in the text could be cited to support the case for overcome violence of any purpose or origin. That thisposition neatly complements the current stance of thelooking beneath the surface for an answer. One is

stopped short, for example, by the assertion that ‘‘Rıos Guatemalan army is a troubling coincidence, though itdoes not necessarily invalidate Stoll’s analysis. The po-Montt . . . was unable to prevent security forces from

resuming urban kidnappings’’ (p. 110, italics mine). sition raises deeper questions, however, that Stoll doesnot fully acknowledge, not to mention answer. Is itHow does Stoll know that Rıos Montt really wanted to

but couldn’t? Or, a few pages later: ‘‘In the competition healthy and constructive to suppress the past? Whathappens if the scar tissue thickens when the wound un-between army and guerrilla coercion, the clumsier re-

sponses of the army pushed many civilians into the in- derneath is infected? How do we know that this is not alate-20th-century reincarnation of what McCreery callssurgency’’ (p. 120, italics mine). This euphemistic gloss

for the massive slaughter of civilians would put army the ‘‘colonial compact’’? If other parts of the book werenot so driven by antisolidarity venom, one might feelpropagandists to shame. Or the conclusive assertion

that ‘‘the only reason soldiers destroyed [thousands of more confidence in Stoll’s analysis on this matter. Awell-reasoned, well-substantiated, and ethically sensi-rural homesteads] was to get at the EGP’’ (p. 157, italics

mine). Such reductionist analysis does encourage the tive presentation of the argument that it is better not toremember would be an important contribution to thesearch for ulterior motives.

I am inclined to resist that search, assuming instead current discussion. Unfortunately, Stoll’s salvo againsthuman rights activism is none of the above.that Stoll’s own explanation is sufficient. His overriding

purpose is to ‘‘challenge how the human rights and soli- Falla’s book, which generated great interest and soldout in a matter of weeks in 1992, now stands as an earlydarity movements think about Guatemala’’ (p. xi). He

certainly has achieved this goal. Yet it should not be portent of Guatemalan society’s endeavor to remember.The key principle he puts forth is that memories revealsurprising that, with everything invested in this rather

limited purpose, he overlooks nuances and complexi- something about the past fused in some way with whatmatters most to people in the present. Falla’s infor-ties that might have qualified his challenge. Frustration

over cut corners and missed opportunities fades quickly mants—refugees and members of the Comunidades dePoblacion en Resistencia (CPRs)—are highly atypicalenough; a more lasting regret is that Stoll’s own zeal to

discredit the solidarity straw man has led him to sell Guatemalans in this regard: they spoke from a politicalspace largely outside the authority of the state (with athe Ixil short. Denunciations of the guerrillas and asser-

tions of neutrality are a start, but what if the Ixil later complex, unspecified relationship to the guerrillas), andthis allowed them an unusual freedom to remember.opt to enter a more constructive phase, seeking alterna-

tives, confronting memories in their full complexity, The meaning they assigned to their memories of the vi-olence, Falla concludes, is reflected in the new commu-working to recuperate facets of their history suppressed

by the polarization that followed? To these future ef- nities they are struggling to build. Thus testimonies ofa horrible past can bring ‘‘good news’’ and constituteforts, Stoll’s book has little to offer.

McCreery’s work demonstrates how crucially impor- ‘‘hope for future’’ (p. 189).It would be a serious error to apply this conclusiontant historical analysis can be for people engaged in col-

lective efforts to confront a recent past of intense politi- mechanically to the rest of Guatemalan society. MostGuatemalans do not enjoy anything approaching thatcal violence. It brings the weight of the more distant

past to bear on the period being remembered and re- freedom to speak, and, moreover, experiences and mem-ories of violence cut to the core of most of their neigh-minds us that many of the questions being asked now

have analogues in earlier times. More important, borhoods and communities. The victims and the com-plicitous—often next door, side by side, at times evenMcCreery’s systematic, empirically grounded, and ana-

lytically sophisticated conclusions stand as a promis- in the same family—must find ways to live with oneanother. But Falla’s study can serve as encouragementsory note for what a full-fledged historical account of

the period of violence might one day achieve. The only to ask those same questions more generally: What




meanings do other Guatemalans assign to what hap- tary conflict. However, as a result of the upheaval, evencostumbristas questioned their singularity, reflectedpened? What hopes do their memories hold for the fu-

ture? upon it, lived through a personal crisis, or went abroadto prepare themselves for a future political leadershipAs individual, community, and national-level dia-

logue on these questions proceeds, we might want to role. All these factors led to the reconstitution of aMayan identity that only began to appear in the mid-be especially attentive to images like that three-month

respite in the Ixcan. These are memories that gloss over 1980s, after the worst of the massacres were over andpublic meetings could gradually take place without thelong-standing internal divisions and dismemberment

caused by the violence itself, that instead recover expe- risk of death.The choice of the name ‘‘Maya,’’ criticized as inexactriences of people coming together in struggles of their

own making. In part, this entails the recuperation of a because of its essentializing possibilities by some ladinocommentators, was employed as a political strategy. Ithistory lost, suppressed by events that followed; it

could even contribute to a fundamentally revised un- avoided the racist connotation of the word indio and theambiguously submissive notion of indıgena. Besides, toderstanding of the revolutionary period. In part also,

such moments rise to prominence in collective memo- be Mayan was not only to tap into ethnic foundationalroots which simplified a discourse of origin; it was alsories not to recover history but precisely the opposite, to

create hopeful images that might help people to tran- a political gesture negating the colonial constitution ofthe indio subject resulting from a massive military andscend what history has wrought. Conscientious ana-

lysts of Guatemala, in search of some way to respect the cultural defeat.In the wake of the emergence of the new Mayan iden-balance between these two very different (even incom-

patible) social functions of memory, will return one last tity, a process of institutionalization began to takeplace. Mayan languages were standardized and modern-time to Falla’s study, and to his life work, for guidance.ized. Legislation was approved in Congress to protectthem. The Academy of Mayan Languages was legalizedby a Congressional Act in 1990. By 1992 at least 200organizations had Mayan membership and were work-Commentsing on Mayan issues and being run by Mayans. At least14 magazines, newspapers, and Mayan publicationswere dedicated to furthering knowledge of their culturearturo arias

San Francisco State University, San Francisco, Calif. and languages, as well as dealing with their political, ed-ucational, and health needs (Arriaza 1997). In the 199594182, U.S.A. 6 vi 97elections, the Guatemalan Congress for the first timegained seven Mayan members of Congress, and Guate-I am favorably impressed by Hale’s reflections on an is-

sue very much at the center of current debates in Guate- mala’s second city, Quetzaltenango, elected a Mayanmayor.mala. Before plunging into the problematics of memory,

let me first enumerate some of the outstanding issues The issues raised by Hale in his insightful article haveto be placed in this context. One of the main factors toat the center of the recently concluded civil war.

Prior to it, Mayans were not ‘‘Mayans’’; they were be kept in mind about the debate on Mayan issues isthat historical racism exercised by Western subjects hasusually called indios. When certain individuals wanted

a polite if paternalistic way of referring to them, they combined with the postconquest Mayans’ own inabilityto deploy power as a means of bringing their particularused indıgenas. Mayans often alluded to themselves as

naturales, a euphemism from Spanish colonial times knowledge to bear on the framing of their own issues.This situation has been compounded by contemporarybriefly adopted by the Organizacion del Pueblo en

Armas (ORPA), one of the members of the recently dis- relationships with First World scholars. Nowadays, theissue is no longer one of Spaniards refusing to acknowl-solved Unidad Revolucıonaria Nacional Guatemalteca

(URNG). Prior to the war, Mayan self-identity had been edge Mayan subjectivity; it is one of the First Worldscholar speaking in the name of the subaltern subject.slowly shifting from the municipio to a larger conglom-

erate (Quiche, Cakchiquel) only in cabeceras (regional An example of this is the so-called culture wars of thelate 1980s and early 1990s in the United States. Al-capitals).

The civil war impacted the everydayness of Mayan though Rigoberta Menchu’s text was in the eye of thatparticular storm and Dinesh D’Souza dedicated a chap-life, even if we agree that not all Mayans actively partic-

ipated in it and that the URNG’s numbers of actual ter of his Illiberal Education to it (‘‘Travels with Rigo-berta’’), the debate was largely limited to white malesupporters were highly inflated. The war’s aftermath

enabled Mayans to reconstruct their identity after a U.S. scholars, who simply never thought of asking Gua-temalans—ladinos or Mayans—what they thoughtstruggle that had brought destruction to many of the

country’s regions. As I have said elsewhere (Arias 1990), about those issues or what position they took in thatparticular debate.one sector of mostly modernized nontraditional elites

(non-costumbristas), working closely with Catholic Ac- The problem with contemporary U.S. academicscholarship is especially evident in David Stoll’s Be-tion, chose to participate actively in revolutionary orga-

nizations. Others remained on the margins of the mili- tween Two Armies. As Hale points out, Stoll is less con-




cerned with establishing the basis for Guatemala’s war When Mayan subjects speak in the midst of a com-munity occupied by the army, in a space in whichthan with confronting what he perceives as the ‘‘U.S.

academic left’’ within the framework of the U.S. culture armed soldiers roam freely, their discourse is not ‘‘ob-jective.’’ In a different context it would come out differ-wars. Therefore, Guatemalans become simply cannon

fodder for arguments situated far from where the civil ently. As we know from linguistics, the context inwhich communication takes place interacts with thewar actually took place. Precisely the originality of

Hale’s article is to facilitate a dialogue between Guate- symbolic system established by the speakers and ad-dressees. In this case, Mayan informants, a First Worldmalan and U.S. scholars. By reviewing Falla’s book Mas-

sacres in the Jungle alongside McCreery’s Rural Guate- academic without organic links to the community towhich those informants belong, and soldiers all occupymala and Stoll’s aforementioned text, we begin to see

the transformation of subjectivities as depending not so the same symbolic contextual dialogic space. Whetherin the ‘‘communities of peoples in resistance’’ that Fallamuch on where Mayans position themselves as on

where academics position themselves in invoking a chronicles or in the army-occupied villages that Stollvisits, neither of these processes can develop outside asubject of study denominated as ‘‘Maya.’’

As we know, the issue of ‘‘who speaks’’ is central to socialized, symbolic space that could well be marked assubjective. The difference is that Falla recognizes thisany theory of representation and points to the scholar’s

role in the power relations of cultural production. A cer- and does not attempt to invent a new allegedly objec-tive foundational discourse. He limits himself to sys-tain way of representing a subject implies a particular

way of constructing meaning and framing a subjectivity tematizing discursive information to frame a prelimi-nary archive from which memory might proceed toin the context of specific interests. Knowledge thus gen-

erated is empowered for purposes beyond the field of restore a sense of identity to Mayan subjects. Stoll,however, sees no need to recognize any voice other thanstudy itself. Therefore, it is more than ever necessary

that contemporary scholars avoid the trap of speaking his own. In the process, he disregards the Mayans’ mul-tiple voices of self-affirmation. Here is where his effortin the name of the other without problematizing it.

Writing is incapable of objectively rendering the to- is lacking.In fact, the enormous magnitude of the changes expe-tality of the ‘‘other.’’ To attempt to do so is to usurp the

other’s voice. Contemporary scholars can make a con- rienced in Guatemala in recent years—concretely, theend of the guerrilla cycle and the fragile transition totribution by underlining the need to subvert past proce-

dures that is an inevitable by-product of a changed democratic governments—forces us to reexamine theinherent meaning of the space of subjectivity and theworld in which it is no longer possible to preserve fixed

and immutable systems of values modeled on the cen- role of agency. In the end, it is in these areas that sys-tems of thought develop and knowledge that contrib-trality of Western experience. Hale suggests that Falla

succeeds in overcoming this hurdle whereas Stoll falls utes to the renovation or restructuring of meaningemerges. McCreery’s book points in this direction with-flat on his face. By adopting the point of view of the

Guatemalan army as a monological discourse deployed out posing those questions explicitly, thus comple-menting Falla’s. A positive dialogue is establishedto dismantle U.S. solidarity discourse, Stoll fails to ad-

dress the plurality of voices, bodies, populations, and here.The Mayan movement is increasingly using its politi-histories that come from ‘‘elsewhere’’ to disrupt his

very American sense of the anthropologist as a legiti- cal clout to press for particular demands. The Highlandsinsurrection of 1979–82 paved the way for this; thismized voice of authority. In contrast, Falla’s book limits

itself to mapping a preliminary reconstitution of mem- painful process gave the Mayans a voice. The develop-ment of the movement has given them new hopeory. It challenges our understanding of how meaning is

produced by linking its many voices with the concept amidst the horror, new means of political enfranchise-ment, and new pride, and all of this has facilitated theof a fluctuating identity. When people are forced to re-

cast the production of meaning, the concept of identity merging of disparate ethnic groups in a single politicalidentity. However, for a new political coalition to beis transformed. Reality is symbolically codified in a new

way. A newer, more adequate world into which individ- truly effective, the actors themselves have to come toterms with their recent past and understand how theirual subjects can reintegrate themselves is created. Iden-

tity thus appears as a construct subject to continual ad- movement is tied to the bloodshed and the many con-tradictions this violent process unleashed—pitting peo-justment.

For Stoll the Mayan is an essentialized object. May- ple against each other for sometimes unfathomable rea-sons. Only in this way will they understand theans are ‘‘informants,’’ in the traditional mechanistic

sense of conventional anthropology. He never relin- divisions that exist among them.1

The emerging Mayan coalition represents an interest-quishes his voice as the only one authorized to com-ment on and frame the meaning of the raw material that

1. One example of this division would be Mayan attitudes towardinformants provide. He forgets that in speaking peoplereligion. Since religious experience was at the center of the massa-deploy symbolic systems of representations that helpcres, pitting Protestants against Catholics, Mayans nowadays re-them survive within a given environment. The act of fuse to speak about religion for fear of dividing their movement.

naming things within a given political space implies a However, it is impossible for it to grow unless this issue is openedup to debate.particular way of relating to that medium.




ing convergence. Some groups have surfaced as autono- ranging decision could be made among the refugees. Al-though the refugees felt a certain frustration at havingmous nationalist movements divorced from the revolu-

tionary process. Others, in the shadow of the URNG, been deceived with respect to the imminence of theguerrilla victory, this feeling did not alter their loyaltyare accused of being part of its support base. Yet they

all share the platform of seeking a distinct Mayan iden- to their companeros, whom they sustained from the ref-ugee camps with oil, milk, minsa (corn flour), and othertity, a ‘‘new way of being indigenous.’’ Each of them is

working in its own way to expand its political space. foodstuffs. Everyone in the camps knew about thetransports all the way up to the guerrillas and no oneStill, they all need to deepen their understanding that,

despite contradictions and stumbling blocks, a demo- denounced them. (The army later found out about thispractice, having discovered the provisional bunkers incratic path that leads to the constitution of a multina-

tional, multiethnic nation is the only way of pressuring which the food was kept.) The harassment and threatsof the army contributed to the refugees’ unified sympa-from below a racist state apparatus and political class

that will only gradually be dismantled. thy with the guerrillas.Years went by. The mental processes within the refu-To re-create a Mayan coalition on the ruins and frag-

ments of other times, identities, and spaces, it will be gee camps, forcibly removed from the border and laterto Campeche and Quintana Roo not only to preventnecessary to bring the wounds of the recent past to clo-

sure. Therefore, recovering the memory of their own op- them from giving logistic support to the guerrillas butalso to break the social control that the guerrillas exer-pressed history as colonized subjects, not to speak of the

recent war trauma, becomes a strategy for regaining cised, must have been complicated and gradual, gener-ating a relatively broad diversity of opinion. I do nottheir sense of self-worth and reentering Guatemala’s na-

tional historical continuum. The Mayan movement has know all the details of this process. All I saw in 1983was the homogeneity.emerged from the peripheral silence to which racism

and colonization condemned it. Now, Mayans need to Within the CPRs inside of Guatemala there was alsoa process that diversified sympathies, but usually thosego one step farther. They need to reclaim Mayan iden-

tity as a tool for restructuring not only their own soci- who dissented from the option of resisting talked softlyamong themselves and all of a sudden left the country,ety but the nation as a whole. However, this last step

can be taken only if memory is recovered, past events whether by previous arrangement with the civilian au-thorities of the community or by simply disappearing.are clarified, and a certain sense of a collective ‘‘new be-

ginning’’ comes to grip the imagination of most Guate- It is significant, however, that in the CPR of Ixcan(Quiche) nobody ever abandoned the area to hand him-malans. In this way it will be possible to bridge the gap

between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them,’’ breaking ground for a new self or herself over to the army in order to strengthenthe model villages, as happened in the highlandsimagined community that can actually thrive on differ-

ence. (Nebaj), where the border was a difficult alternative notonly because of its distance but also because the areawas surrounded by the military. Thus the CPR of Ixcanremained quite homogeneous in its sympathies, thoughricardo falla

Yoro el Progreso, Honduras ([email protected]) later there would be some exceptions who changedtheir allegiance when the communities came out from11 vi 97the shadow of the jungles in 1994 and some returned totheir original plots in that same area. This change wasWhen I was asked to comment on Hale’s excellent arti-

cle I hesitated, for I am not at present in Guatemala. due to personal resentments against the civilian leadersor against the guerrillas.Nevertheless, I will say a few words about the period

in 1983, right after the 1982 massacres, during which The fact is that nowadays the main body of the CPRhas regrouped on another piece of land away from theI collected the data for Massacres in the Jungle. These

comments may illuminate the problem of the interpre- area it occupied during the war. This group is basicallysympathetic to the project of the new ex-guerrilla politi-tation of facts drawn from the changing memory of wit-

nesses. cal party, while in the previous area, owned by a cooper-ative, a very sharp division has become evident. ThisIn those days, the interpretation of the facts according

to the refugees on the Mexican border, some 15,000, and latter area is inhabited by three sorts of people, all ofwhom were members of that cooperative before theaccording to the Communities of Population in Resis-

tance (CPRs), another few thousand, was quite homoge- war: those who supported the army with civil patrols,the former refugees, either ‘‘repatriated’’ by the govern-nous not only across these two groups but within them.

The common enemy was the army. Voices from the ment or ‘‘returnees’’ on their own initiative, and someformer members of the CPR.remotest corners of Guatemala and Mexico had to be

raised against the army’s atrocities. That is what practi- The majority of this mixture do not want to see anyof the demobilized guerrillas in the area and have evencally everybody felt, and that is why they were so open

in their testimonies. expelled from the cooperative some cooperative mem-bers who demobilized with the guerrillas. The minorityThe guerrillas, who exercised clandestine control,

were seen as the guide without whose opinion no wide- certainly remain sympathetic and perhaps loyal, among




these latter being people who demobilized with the break their secular bondage. Then I followed a perspec-tive different from the one posed at the beginning of thisguerrillas. This is a division that would have been un-

thinkable 15 years ago. commentary. I asked myself, ‘‘What united the peo-ple?’’ and not ‘‘What divided them?’’For members of the first group the guerrillas are

guilty of the massacres because the guerrillas provoked In a few words, the main factors I found then werethe following: (1) the experience of poverty, work on thethem, even if they do not deny that they were commit-

ted by the army. For members of the second group the southern coasts, lack of land, and discrimination beforemigrating to the jungle; (2) a kind of liminal experience,army is the guilty party, although they admit that the

guerrillas made certain errors, such as promising a vic- typical of migration, of being wrenched away from thehighland/coast articulation to begin a new society intory that never came. Whereas elsewhere the peace

treaty (December 1996) is an opportunity to bring the the jungle; (3) the organization of some sort of civil soci-ety (a cooperative) that gave bones and flesh to this newdeeds of the army to light, the new phase opening in

Ixcan is felt as a relaxation of the guerrillas’ control. If experience; (4) the encounter in the jungle with theguerrillas (about whom they had heard fantastic tales),before in the refugee camps there was talk against the

army ad nauseam, now it is time to hang out the guerril- the realization that they were not beasts with tails butrather poor indigenous people who spoke to them oflas’ dirty laundry. As the saying goes, ‘‘Everyone takes

wood from the fallen tree’’—which is what seems to be their country’s situation in a region where the state hadno control, and the promise of those contacted in thehappening now.

The reports that reach me say that these buried re- jungle to support the guerrillas (this step signaled theshift of consciousness Hale asks himself about); (5) thesentments erupt with a completely disproportionate

force and even threaten to end in bloody battle against offensive nature of the guerrillas, who escalated theiractions (declaration of war, armed propaganda, am-the minority who have chosen to demonstrate their loy-

alty to the ex-guerrillas participating in demobilization. bushes, guerrilla war) and thereby showed the peoplethey would win; (6) the character of the army, whichIt is very risky to make judgments from afar, but the

irrationality of the hatred that has broken out among escalated its repression against the people—who felt intheir bones that the army was their enemy. Between thebrothers is so great that it seems explainable only in

terms of a foundation of profound and powerful sensi- fifth and sixth factors there was a dialectic, and bothhad a consciousness-raising and organizing effect. Butbilities. This foundation seems to be an internal un-

hinging provoked by the massacres and the unspeakable the fundamental one of the two was the offensive na-ture of the guerrilla activity. Although one could ar-suffering endured, and it is common to both groups.

This black-and-white phenomenon is not new in the range the facts in such a way as to suggest that the guer-rillas were trying to unleash repression in order toindigenous communities. We saw it in the ’60s and ’70s

in the highlands, then expressed religiously against a mobilize the people, one does not get this impressionfrom the best-articulated Guatemalan documents: ‘‘Ourbackground of political structures. The confrontation

now is defined either in the ’80s terms (guerrillas war is a constant offensive’’; ‘‘If our war is thought ofin defensive terms it will stagnate, and we will not beagainst the army) or in latest terms of the divisions

among leftist groups or, more precisely and complexly, able to communicate to the people and to the FAR theenduring spirit of the offensive’’ (Ramırez 1970: 137–in a mixture of both. All this has to do with memory,

showing us that memory is tremendously selective and 38). (The FAR—Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias—was the mother guerrilla group of all, and Ricardo Ramı-that memories cannot be accepted by the anthropolo-

gist without taking into account the power structures rez was one of its leaders.)We touch here on one of the problems that led to theof peoples, sectors, social classes, ethnic groups, lin-

eages, and extended kin groups at a given moment. failure of the movement at the terrible cost of so muchblood. It is a problem that has to do with consciousness.In 1997 the anthropologists have the advantage of

knowing where to look for the imperceptible cracks in The revolutionaries so emphasized an offensive ap-proach (or, in less high-sounding words, the assurancethe past on the basis of the patent contradictions in the

present. They are, however, at risk of distorting the past that they would win) that the people lost all prudenceand rushed into actions that would have made sensewith the perspective of the present, the more so if the

present influences them ideologically—if they have only if victory had been at hand. This was a politicalmillenarianism. People thought that ‘‘weapons wouldpersonal or professional resentments that are struggling

to express themselves or if they seek to defend causes be as plentiful as corn,’’ as they used to say. But thatwas not the way it was.by fitting the data to certain molds.

In an unpublished manuscript I wrote in 1985 I On the contrary, it is my impression that the guerril-las not only believed that their popular support waslooked at the past (before 1983) from the point of view

of the then-present (1983) in order to find out what was much greater than it was but also thought that sheernumbers of people could give them the same power thatthe motivation that made possible the rise of so strong

and quasi-insurrectional a movement. Some ideas taken weapons supply. The guerrillas transmitted the mille-narian dream to the people and the people strengthenedfrom this work may illuminate Hale’s question about

the moment when the indigenous people decide to the same dream of the guerrillas, creating a relationship




of growing mutual causality. Millenarianism generated those for which there is no hope because they are self-destructive from those that are profoundly strong andan extremely serious error in political analysis, which,

of course, had many other aspects that I cannot begin authentic, because in the darkness of death we are safefrom delusions of victory.to enumerate here. Nor can I analyze the religious mil-

lenarianism (the charismatic revival) that at times con-trasted with political millenarianism in those years inwhich people believed they were to witness radical jorge ramon gonzalez ponciano

Department of Anthropology, Stanford University,changes in their lives.Political triumphalism and religious fervor impede Stanford, Calif. 94305, U.S.A. 6 vi 97

cool and objective analysis. Now I want to say a wordon the relationship between religion and interpretation. The end of armed conflict opened the possibility of for-

mulating a critical revision of the contemporary historyFor Hale my use of religious values in interpreting so-cial processes is at times ‘‘jarring,’’ but it seems to him of Guatemala, especially the history of the painful expe-

riences that have marked the daily lives of its citizensthat the paradox of finding good news in the midst ofthe massacres is the most enduring value and the most during the past 36 years. The country has entered a new

phase in its historical development in which, as Halepowerful message of my book.I know what he is talking about. I deliberately took asserts, remembering the past is a precondition for fac-

ing the future. In this effort to recover collective mem-the biblical references out of the text and left them infootnotes, but I did not omit them, because the original ory, Hale makes use of the works of McCreery, Falla,

and Stoll to identify some key problems that historicalaudience for the book was principally a believing publicin Guatemala with which I wanted to share my experi- and anthropological research can help resolve with re-

spect to postwar Guatemala.ence. Moreover, I recall that a professor of anthropologyat the University of Texas, who was not a believer, al- McCreery has demonstrated, among other things,

that the coffee economy did not have immediate andways encouraged us to make explicit our assumptionsto be honest. That is what I tried to do. disastrous effects on subsistence production as some

studies have argued, that supplying labor for the planta-But it seems to me that all this is not so much aboutreligious values, at least in my book, as about the struc- tions was more important than the demand for land,

and that the growing need for cash to buy food and othertures of faith (albeit value-laden) according to whichone is used to interpreting life in general. The funda- basic items meant that the relation between the agroex-

port economy and indigenous communities was charac-mental structure which I am referring to is that whichlooks at life and death, life as dominating death and be- terized by a tense calm that was shattered in the 1970s.

Hale, in his reading of McCreery, points out the ne-ing born of death. This way of looking at things is a per-sonal experience that sheds light on social processes. I cessity of explaining why Guatemalan liberals have not

developed a discourse on national identity based on ra-believe that one need not be an explicit Christian to dis-cover that true death, not the false one, constructs one- cial and ethnic equality. In its place, the educated elite

reformulated concepts of white supremacy derived fromself and gives life. Don Juan the Yaqui is a great exampleof what I am saying. Europe and the United States in order to justify the use

of the indigenous labor force and to guarantee the exer-Therefore, when one is confronted with a social phe-nomenon that is dark, deeply discouraging, full of divi- cise of dictatorship as a form of government. This hege-

monic mentality was internalized to such an extent bysions, great sadness, and death, one has the right to lookwithin that darkness to locate its blackest and thickest the population at large that even today, and in spite of

the armed conflict, many members of the criollo elitepoint, because it is there that one may find the purestray of light, a light completely free of ideology. And if and of ladino society continue to believe in the racial

and cultural inferiority of indigenous people. The per-one supposes that this fundamental structure has uni-versal value at a social and personal level, then one has sistence of servile relations and of pigmentocracy as an

instrument of social mobility have precluded any dis-the right to seek in the darkest and most discouragingsocial processes the seeds of life and consolation. Hale cussion of the relations between the history of the

agroexport economy, racism, and the vilification of in-says this is not religion but humanism.What is important to emphasize, so as not to be mis- digenous roots. Guatemala is a country that is still

afraid to stand before the mirror and recognize its owninterpreted, is that this way of looking at the world isneither sadism nor self-destructiveness. Sadism rein- face, disfigured by so many decades of humiliation, ex-

ploitation, and death.forces false death and thus is self-destructive. What I amtalking about here is a method of interpretation: seek- Hale suggests that we examine the reasons indige-

nous communities so long preferred negotiated survivaling in suffering and true death, both personal and social,the source of happiness and of life that no one can take to violent resistance so as to understand better the tran-

scendence of the brief popular insurrection of 1981,away from us. If we do social science like this, the disci-pline becomes life and has a very important function in which in many respects signaled a break in the legiti-

macy of the agroexporters’ control over the conscious-the modern world, which is to give reasonable (not falseor millenarian) hope to social processes, distinguishing ness of the indigenous people. In analyzing these pro-




cesses, Hale asks us to go beyond the narratives spread of the Cuban Revolution, who dragged the indigenouspeople into a military venture that ended in genocide.by both the insurrection and the army and try to orga-

nize a panorama of the history of the armed conflict as The vociferous officials of the ex-insurgency reiteratethat armed conflict was the most appropriate means bydiverse and consistent as the one that McCreery pre-

sents in his Rural Guatemala. which to achieve still desired social justice. At the otherextreme, it is said that it would have been preferable toSince the last century the conception of the republic

as a plantation has naturalized servile and authoritarian have let things be, given that the only thing accom-plished by the guerrilla activities was to unleash theforms of social relations that have stunted the develop-

ment of civil institutions, strangled the market, and rage of the army and help it consolidate its position inthe interior.blocked the formation of citizenship. The lack of toler-

ance of political dissidence precluded even those posi- Many of us who were born under the conditions im-posed by the conflict have heard since we were verytions situated in the center of the political spectrum.

The vox populi says that in Guatemala there are only young stories about the dictatorships of Estrada Cabrera(1898–1920) and Jorge Ubico (1931–44) and about the‘‘Ubiquistas’’ of the right and the left, meaning that au-

thoritarianism has characterized the political culture of way in which the communists tried to seize power inGuatemala during the government of Jacobo Arbenzthe elite, the middle classes, and the popular sectors of

both ladino-criollo and indigenous society. Neverthe- (1950–54). Those stories are part of the forbidden his-tory that is still absent from the textbooks approved byless, for the purposes of reconstructing contemporary

history, it would be worth our while to submit to in- the Ministry of Public Education. In secondary schoolwe began to ask ourselves whether life in communisttense scrutiny the stereotypes that until recently have

been used to study of the interactions among indigenes, countries could possibly be worse than the situation weourselves were in and whether in reality the coups, cur-ladinos, criollos, and foreigners.

A social history of the war would have to include the fews, and states of siege and the many kidnappings andmurders were going to keep communism from destroy-different ways in which the indigenous peasantry per-

ceives and has lived the history of the agroexport econ- ing the freedoms that we had in any case never enjoyedor even known. In college each one of us woke up to theomy—not only the story of its attitude toward the

armed insurgency or the most brutal episodes of the experience of living in a country at war, always havingto carry identification papers and being warned of thecounterinsurgent pacification. It might include, further-

more, a detailed explanation of why the United States, consequences of getting stupid, that is, of falling in withthe insurgents. Some of our companions decided to be-after the end of the World War II, decided to support

agrarian reform and modernization of the state in come thieves, others took off to become guerrillas, andmany others we never saw again. Given that the law ofSoutheast Asia and even in Bolivia but chose exactly

the opposite route in the case of Guatemala. the state was designed to institutionalize terror andsubjugation, breaking the law became a necessary re-Guatemala was one of the first pilot studies to show

how communist penetration in the Third World could course for daily survival. Paranoia, always keeping one’svoice down, insomnia, gastritis, alcoholism, drug addic-be impeded. Nevertheless, official indigenism and plans

to improve the quality of life of the population without tion, and nervous fatigue, the results of long years of im-punity and lack of civil guarantees, crossed boundariestouching the interests of the agroexporters had failed

even before the Cuban Revolution. Anticommunist of gender, ethnicity, and even social class and becameemblems of national identity. The triumph of the San-paranoia aided by internal divisions within the Guate-

malan army gave rise to a war in which the great major- dinista revolution seemed to confirm the rightness ofarmed struggle. The scorched-earth campaigns and theity were assassinated or disappeared not for being mem-

bers of guerrilla organizations but for having publicly military escalation under Ronald Reagan in CentralAmerica later dissipated the triumphalism of the insur-expressed their yearning for democracy. It is therefore

difficult to situate the critiques of international solidar- gency. Although valid in some cases, the image of thepopulation as poised between two fires that Stoll em-ity in the struggle for human rights in Guatemala when

not even the condemnation of the United Nations could ploys in describing his experiences in the Ixil triangledecontextualizes and obscures the conjunction of na-stop the massacres and the extermination of popular or-

ganizations. The dissuasive power of the terror effec- tional and international facts and contradictions thatled Guatemalan society into a bloodbath.tively accomplished the aim of curbing the growth of

guerrilla movements and of the popular movement. In The insurgency in Guatemala is a final consequenceof regressive modernization and armed conservatism asthis war the indigenous people and the poorest ladinos

faced off amongst themselves and were in the end the forms of political domination and negotiation. Thearmed and confessional conservatism of the ex-only losers. For these reasons it is simplistic in the ex-

treme to reduce the recent history of Guatemala to a insurgency and the dominant elite is a product of thecold war and still does not allow the social energy accu-confrontation between the right and the left. In aca-

demic circles in Europe and the United States the idea mulated to be directed more vigorously toward the con-struction of a national project. The recovery of memoryhas gained popularity that the Guatemalan insurgency

was the project of an isolated group of ladinos, admirers can be a contribution in that direction, dismantling po-




litical clientelism based on acts of faith and obedience. that are already open but resolving the complicities thathinder the construction of a multicultural democracy inThe monopoly on speech in a country at war for many

years allowed the conservative press and conservative Guatemala.politicians and academics to put forth their version ofthe facts as the indisputable truth. Now the debatesabout history must become more intense and contro- david mc creery

Latin American Studies, Georgia State University,versial. Civil society will be the first beneficiary of thisendeavor. University Plaza, Atlanta, Ga. 30303-3083, U.S.A.

13 v 97The recovery of memory can serve as a window forobserving the intense processes of identity reformula-tion that are taking place within the great Mesoameri- I appreciate Hale’s kind comments—‘‘masterful’’ has

nice ring to it—and largely accept his criticisms, withcan diaspora, the result of political violence and highunemployment. But we must take into account that a one minor disagreement. I do not believe that I left all

reflection for the last 14 pages. Rather, I put many ofsignificant portion of collective memory is composed ofcreations in the plastic, literary, or musical arts pro- my evaluations and interpretations into the narrative it-

self, in the context of specific situations, rather thanduced by the educated elite or by the marginalized ma-jority that remain unpublished and in many cases of adopting the ‘‘Now we stop the story to have a theoreti-

cal discussion’’ approach. Certainly I struggled withanonymous authorship. These cultural expressions giveform to the subterranean region of the social imaginary these two ways of accommodating theory to empirical

evidence and consciously adopted the piecemeal strat-and have much to offer in the way of a palliative for na-tional traumas. egy as best-suited to a work of history.

Studying contemporary history means discussing oldmethodological, theoretical, and epistemological prob-lems that have to do with authorship, the rules of politi- david stoll

Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vt. 05753, U.S.A.cal and cultural representation, the criteria for truth,and the uses of the knowledge generated. The Guatema- ([email protected]). 25 vii 97lan case is full of examples of discussions that seldomgo beyond the narrow circle of specialists, for the most In a review of three books, Hale spells out the chal-

lenges facing historians and anthropologists as Guate-part foreigners who almost never publish the results oftheir work in Spanish. Therefore it is important to take malans come to terms with a civil war that took count-

less lives. His approach seems evenhanded until heinto account the contradictions between what peopleremember, what they are prepared to share with the in- arrives at my own work, Between Two Armies in the

Ixil Towns of Guatemala. Since we had the same ad-vestigator, and what the investigator will later do withthe results of the research. Doing so will make it possi- viser at Stanford, I have long been aware that Hale dis-

approves of my findings, and in this he is not alone. Likeble to identify more clearly the differences between thecollective memory of a population and the impressions Ayacucho in Peru and Morazan in El Salvador, the Ixil

Maya country of Guatemala appeared in the early 1980sgathered by an anthropologist visiting the area. It wouldbe useful as part of this whole effort to the study the to be a bastion of peasant insurgency. Urban-led guerril-

las were welcomed as liberators, but only briefly, untilway in which discourses on population growth and eco-logical deterioration in postwar Guatemala reproduce the Guatemalan army slaughtered thousands of un-

armed men, women, and children. Five years after thethe commonplaces of the hegemonic mentality and ofconservative thought. Very little is known, moreover, height of the killing, when I began fieldwork in 1987,

most survivors were under strict control by the armyabout the antioligarchic nationalism of the army, theoligarchy of the left, or the way in which the democra- and told me that they were fed up with both sides. But

why would Ixil peasants, who appear to be very conser-tizing possibilities of Protestantism that Stoll considersfavor the individualization of social relations and the vative, have welcomed guerrillas in the first place? Was

it because plantation owners and labor contractorsexpansion of the market.Memory is a threshold on which heaven and hell treated Ixils so badly that they had no other choice? So

argued the revolutionary movement—that the insur-sometimes meet. There is no possibility of visualizingthe future if not from the perspective of memory. The gency had deep roots in the prewar Ixil experience. Or

was it the mere arrival of guerrillas and a dictatorship’ssocial history of the war, which as Hale says is for thesake of the present, should make it possible for all seg- indiscriminate reprisals that left Ixils no choice but to

join the insurgency in an unsuccessful attempt to de-ments of the population to offer their testimony as partof a national therapy that alleviates the traumatic expe- fend themselves?

Based on what Ixils told me in the late 1980s, the lat-riences of the past. Without this the credibility of thegroups involved in the conflict will continue inter- ter was my argument in Between Two Armies. Gener-

ously, Hale credits the book with refuting portrayals ofdicted, and it will be all the more difficult to reverse theabstentionism that for the past several decades has been ‘‘the people’’ as a uniform revolutionary subject and the

guerrilla movement as the unproblematic embodimentthe real winner in the elections. Dissolving the pact ofsilence that Hale critiques means not opening wounds of the popular will. Then he loses his composure. Con-




sider two examples: ‘‘Only rarely . . . do we actually A second difference with Hale is that I do not expectto uncover or establish a ‘‘collective memory.’’ Wouldhear Ixil voices,’’ he states, with ‘‘a few fragments of in-

terviews.’’ I count 132 direct quotations of Ixil, one of that Guatemalans had the ‘‘intense, collective need toremember their past’’ that Hale posits—our job wouldwhich runs to almost two pages,1 along with many

more indirect quotations. Hale also claims that I paint be easier. As far as I can tell, the Guatemalan constitu-ency for ‘‘memory work’’ is very significant but also‘‘a skewed picture of a society in which everyone

thought and acted with military conflict as the sole limited in ways that we should heed. For obvious rea-sons, most soldiers, civil patrollers, and guerrillas whopoint of reference.’’ ‘‘Were there no organizations, ini-

tiatives, or even private thoughts that expressed support killed noncombatants are not interested in digging uptheir graves. There is also much hesitation from Guate-for alternative paths, renouncing the violent methods of

both?’’ he asks. Well, yes, there were—as I described malans who fear that broadcasting heretofore guardedmemories could revive lethal, tangled vendettas. As forunder chapter heads like ‘‘Reform without Revolu-

tion?’’ My portrait of Ixils breaking away from the tradi- the collectivity of memory, certainly there are refrains,such as ‘‘We were caught between two fires,’’ whichtional ritual system, regaining control of the town hall,

and subverting army orders hardly depicts them as may be voiced by enough people to be called collective.There are also groups making collective decisions to‘‘ ‘neutral,’ . . . inactive except when coerced or manipu-

lated by one side or the other.’’ name the perpetrators of massacres that deserve inter-national support. But if we expect more than limited,It is true that I do not dwell on peasant consciousness

before the violence. While this is a central issue for contested expressions of collectivity, I worry that whatHale calls ‘‘the task of frankly, collectively confrontingHale—in particular, ‘‘how to weigh what people re-

member when the goal is to analyze their consciousness their own past’’ will become another recipe for cram-ming the considerable disagreement among Guatema-at a particular moment in the past’’—it was not quite

so central for me. First, there was already an abundant lans into moral dualisms serving the needs of for-eigners.literature on what Mayan peasants were thinking and

doing before the war by anthropologists in a better posi- A third issue is my critique of ‘‘solidarity’’ thinking.For the uninitiated, I should explain that solidarity oftion to address the subject (e.g., Warren 1978, Brintnall

1979, Falla 1980, Watanabe 1992). Second, as I finished this kind originated as moral support for the revolution-ary movements of Central America. Since then solidar-Between Two Armies five years ago, the problem upper-

most in my mind was not memory but a civil war enter- ity acquired a more complex meaning, and I agree thatmuch more could be said about its impact on scholar-ing its fourth decade and showing no sign of ending.

Even though most Ixils seemed to have turned against ship. During the Contra war in Nicaragua, Hale himselfhelped the Sandinista government change its policiesthe insurgency (or so they said), the guerrillas continued

to fight on from the hills. Many foreign activists and at toward the ethnic minorities of the Atlantic Coast. Hiswork illustrates not just the scholarly contributionsleast some scholars still presumed that the guerrillas

represented the peasantry, that when peasants said they that solidarity activists can make but the possibility ofcombining activism and critical thinking.were ‘‘between two fires’’ and wanted the war to end

these were not their true feelings because the army was Among scholars, solidarity rarely manifests itself interms of a ‘‘party line’’ of explicit propositions (this isforcing them to mouth its propaganda, and that an an-

thropologist stressing peasant disillusionment with the Hale’s phrase, not mine). Instead, it is a climate of opin-ion or sensibility (a counterhegemony, if you will) thatguerrillas was serving the interests of the Guatemalan

army. My call for interpreting Ixil war-weariness at makes it very difficult to ask certain questions and re-port certain findings. For scholars who avoided becom-‘‘face value’’ was therefore not a metaphysical state-

ment about memory, as Hale seems to believe. Instead, ing embroiled in Central America, for example, my ar-gument in Between Two Armies may seem so obviousI was asking foreign political activists to stop support-

ing an armed struggle in which most Ixils (and Guate- as to be unnecessary. Yet among Central Americanistsit was considered controversial. Scholars may bemalans, for that matter) said they did not believe.sceptical of solidarity thinking yet still feel inhibited byit—they may want to avoid antagonizing colleagues

1. Number of times Ixil or other Mayan individuals are quoted di- they admire or fear. Aside from intolerance, solidarityrectly in Between Two Armies, not counting indirect quotations,thinking also has the potential for sudden disillusion-glosses on proverbial expressions, and quotation of local ladinos:

preface, 1 (p. xiv); chap. 1, 5 (pp. 7, 10, 14, 20, 21); chap. 2, 10 (pp. ment. When the Nicaraguans unexpectedly voted the27, 28, 33, 46, 52 3 2, 53, 54, 56 3 2); chap. 3, 10 (pp. 65 3 2, 68, Sandinistas out of office in 1990, their foreign support-69, 74, 75, 78 3 2, 82, 88); chap. 4, 20 (pp. 93 3 2, 94 3 3, 100– ers, the internacionalistas, left the country en masse.102, 103 3 2, 104, 105 3 2, 111 3 3, 120, 121–22, 125 3 2, 126,

One of the new destinations was Guatemala, where I127); chap. 5, 21 (pp. 131, 133, 134 3 2, 135, 136, 139, 143 3 2, 144worry that the moral reductionism of many solidarity3 3, 145 3 2, 148, 149 3 3, 150 3 3); chap. 6, 15 (pp. 167, 174 3

2, 177 3 5, 179 3 2, 182, 184, 185, 188 3 2); chap. 7, 11 (pp. 205 activists could lead to the same kind of disillusionment3 5, 206, 212, 216–17, 218 3 2, 219); chap. 8, 6 (pp. 241, 243 3 2, as they learn that they have enlisted in a more ambigu-244, 251, 253); chap. 9, 29 (pp. 263 3 2, 264, 266 3 2, 267, 271, 272 ous endeavor than the struggle of good against evil.3 2, 274, 275 3 2, 277, 280 3 2, 281, 287 3 3, 288, 289, 292 3 2,

Given the many services that solidarity activists per-293, 294, 295 3 2, 296, 297); chap. 10, 1 (p. 305); notes, 3 (pp. 330,344, 347) 5 132. form, such as accompanying targets of death threats and




helping exhume massacre victims, this would be a kept small, ecological, and run by their members? Orwould the mission open the door to as many peasantsshame.

From Hale’s reference to my ‘‘antisolidarity venom’’ who wanted to come, managing the resulting conflictswith a strong hand? Partisans of the second approach,readers might assume that I have published personal at-

tacks on solidarity scholars to which he is only replying led by Father Bill Woods, prevailed, but not before oneof his Maryknoll colleagues, James Morrissey, reportedin kind. Yet this is not to be found in my work. Cer-

tainly, he has the right to prefer a different narrative the results in his doctoral dissertation for the StanfordDepartment of Anthropology. Even before the Woods-strategy. In his own book on the Contra war (Hale 1994)

he provides lengthier interview extracts than I usu- directed settlements were turned into a war zone byguerrillas and soldiers, they were torn by bitter conflictally do, from tape recordings, which he may have felt

freer to make than I did because, unlike me, he was a between first- and second-generation settlers. Morrisseywas going to tell us about the Ixcan settlements in agovernment-sponsored researcher. Yet his tone is so

prosecutorial that he clearly considers me guilty of be- contribution to the widely praised Harvest of Violencecollection (Carmack 1988). Unfortunately, one of ourtrayal. ‘‘Such reductionist analysis,’’ he concludes from

reductionist quotations of his own, ‘‘does encourage the colleagues (not Hale) demanded that Morrissey’s articlebe dropped because of his unflattering portrayal of Billsearch for ulterior motives. I am inclined to resist this

search.’’ This is very generous of my old cohort. How- Woods. By this time Woods had died in a plane crash(many believe he was shot down by the army) and be-ever, since he feels compelled to mention the possibil-

ity that I could have ulterior motives, what might these come one of the martyr figures around which the Gua-temalan solidarity movement organizes itself (oldbe? According to Hale, one of my statements (yanked

out of context) ‘‘would put army propagandists to friends are working for canonization). Morrissey with-drew his article, and his valuable portrait of the prewarshame.’’ On whether to confront the army over the

massacres of the early 1980s (many Ixils had doubts), Ixcan continues to be ignored to this day.Now that the Ixcan settlements are being rebuilt,my ‘‘position neatly complements the current stance of

the Guatemalan army,’’ which Hale finds a ‘‘troubling they are again torn by agrarian conflict, including con-flicts between peasants organized by the left (Infopresscoincidence.’’

In other words, if I reported that many massacre sur- Centroamericana 1997). The many foreign activists onthe scene would have been better prepared to head offvivors were leery of confronting the army as the Guate-

malan left wanted them to, for fear that this would draw the latest assaults and death threats if Morrissey’s workhad not been proscribed a decade ago. Worse, fear offurther reprisals, then (1) my observation is a ‘‘troubling

coincidence’’ with the cover-up politics of the Guate- transgressing solidarity limits continues to discouragefrank reporting. A few years ago I met two graduate stu-malan army, which (2) suggests I have an ‘‘ulterior mo-

tive,’’ (3) which could be serving the needs of army pro- dents, working in or near the Ixcan, who did not wish toreport the growing conflicts within the area’s ‘‘popularpagandists. ‘‘Looking beneath the surface,’’ as Hale puts

it, is he implying that I work for the Guatemalan army? organizations’’ for fear that they would be subject to thekind of animosity displayed by Hale in his review. EvenI hope I am not alone in being amazed to see this kind

of reasoning in current anthropology. That Hale Ricardo Falla seems to be affected. One limitation ofMassacres in the Jungle is that it tells us almost nothingfeels free comfortable pursuing it in a professional jour-

nal suggests that, while solidarity thinking may not be about the relation between peasants and guerrillas. In1993 Falla mentioned the existence of a second book,a party line, it can indeed depress the intellectual level

of debate. Although he wishes to encourage his col- about peasant organization in the Ixcan prior to the vio-lence, which he said that he might never publish in hisleagues to become involved in the problem of memory

and violence, I cannot think of a better way of discour- lifetime. Since then he has published a memoir of hisyears as an underground priest, and I hope that his bookaging them. If ‘‘committed’’ scholars like himself are

not satisfied with your findings, you will be suspected about the prewar Ixcan will soon follow.of working for the enemy. This is ‘‘memory work’’whose most likely result is defensive amnesia.

Guatemalanists are all too familiar with the policing richard wilsonAFRAS, University of Sussex, Falmer BN1 9QN,of scholarship, and always with the best of intentions.

The peasant settlements described in Ricardo Falla’s United Kingdom ([email protected]). 27 v 97Massacres in the Jungle are another example. Hale iscorrect that much is missing from our understanding of Hale makes an eloquent and persuasive appeal to an-

thropologists to document and analyze issues of socialthe Ixcan settlements, but this is not just due to a lackof research. It is also due to political inhibitions about memory, truth, and justice in societies emerging from

decades of civil war and state repression. In his perusalpublishing what is already known. The Ixcan tragedybegan in the 1960s, when U.S. Maryknoll priests en- of three paradigms of research, he prefers the historian

David McCreery’s nuanced portrayal of ethnic relationscouraged their land-hungry Mayan parishioners to set-tle a pristine rain forest. A bitter debate broke out and economic change. This book comes closest of the

three texts under consideration to his ideal of a historywithin the mission. Were the new settlements to be




infused with the variegated consciousness of those who investigating over 30 years of human rights violationswithin one year. In the final report, Guatemalans areexperienced and now re-create the violent past through

acts of collective remembering. In his conclusions, likely to be presented with little analysis and still morelists of victims’ names, produced by an empiricisthowever, Hale surprisingly asserts that McCreery’s

method is problematic in that its sophisticated style of methodology which, at least formally, emulates that ofFalla. Perhaps more important, the Commission’s re-historical analysis requires a temporal distance that at

present is not available. Anthropologists either have to port will not reveal the names of the perpetrators, un-like the Rıo Negro monument, which records that ‘‘thewait for ‘‘these ideal conditions of historical research to

congeal’’ or opt for another method, and the final para- intellectual and material authors were the civil patrol-lers of Xococ of Rabinal.’’ The June 1994 accord estab-graphs incline towards Ricardo Falla’s empiricist style

of documentation. Yet there seems to be an overrigid lishing the UN-administered Clarification Commissionstipulates that the information produced ‘‘will not indi-distinction operating here between what anthropolo-

gists and what historians do. There is no more ‘‘ideal’’ vidualize responsibility, nor have any legal implica-tions.’’ The distinction between official and moretime than now to write the social history of an armed

conflict by combining archival and oral sources in a way community-based conceptions of truth and justice ismost clearly demonstrated in the naming, or otherwise,which would not be feasible in 50 years’ time—the pe-

riod which has elapsed between the end point of of perpetrators. This omission of violators’ names per-petuates an unbreachable official silence upheld by mil-McCreery’s opus and the present. Hale seems to urge

the reader to make unnecessary choices between the an- itary regimes of the past and civilian governments ofthe present. The Clarification Commission has to bealytical distance of McCreery, the conscientious and de-

tailed documentation of Falla, and the iconoclastic seen as one skirmish in the long war over collectivememory, and the first battles will be, as ever, over whochallenging of accepted conventions of Stoll. The three

approaches towards researching violent truths are not is named.Yet there comes a time when the piling of fact uponmutually exclusive. All are necessary and desirable, and

all have their own specific limitations, which Hale fact, the producing of one list of victims after another,becomes blinding and prompts a yearning for explana-mostly captures well.

In thinking about how anthropologists can comple- tions of the patterned nature of violence. The limita-tions of legal-forensic forms of empirical documenta-ment and interrogate ongoing processes of remember-

ing, we could gain greater clarity by examining recent tion could perhaps have been considered more in Hale’spiece. He certainly alludes to them when remarking onefforts by Guatemalans to document their own past. So

far, the first denunciations of historical abuses almost how difficult it is to ‘‘read’’ Falla’s lists of those mur-dered at Cuarto Pueblo. Lists are hard to read becausealways give preeminence to empirical documentation,

as in Falla’s Masacres de la selva. Naming the victims they almost defy meaning, yet they are also difficult notto read, since one is morally compelled not to turnseems to be the first act of both remembering and rup-

turing the silence around violations. Faithfully record- away. The problem seems to be that lists of victim’snames are incomprehensible except from two perspec-ing the names of the victims is an attempt to tell the

‘‘public secrets’’ of a community in order to initiate a tives—that of community members who knew the vic-tims, were bonded to them through face-to-face ties,break with an official regime of denial. The first state-

ment on the past by Guatemalan society must be a cred- and link the names with known social persons, and theperpetrators’ twisted counterinsurgency logic, whichible and defensible account of what exactly happened

when and to whom, without which other discussions justified slaughter on the grounds that the guerrillas’potential ‘‘infrastructure’’ had to be ‘‘eliminated.’’ Nei-(such as what agents were thinking at the time) cannot

begin. Of the three books, that of Falla comes closest to ther perspective is easily contemplated for long by theoutside observer in the absence of other types of infor-the popular idiom wherein lists of names are combined

with rituals which symbolically mark a sense of loss mation.Where, then, can we look for the constituent mean-and recognize the building of a new, fragile commu-

nitas. Mnemonic and aesthetic are fused in local monu- ings of raw data on the past? The forensic genre of truthcommissions, human rights reports, and Falla’s textments where victims’ names are inscribed in stone,

such as the cross at Nimlaha’kok in Alta Verapaz and claims to capture a single undeniable Truth, but thereader suspects that something is missing, namely, thethe monument to the massacres at Rıo Negro outside

Rabinal. heterogeneity of variegated experiences and interpreta-tions of lived events. The unanswered question of con-Now we are entering a new, acute phase of the politi-

cization of the past, as official human rights bodies, no- sciousness motivates Hale to keep asking, ‘‘What werethey thinking?’’ It is now over ten years since thetably the Commission for the Historical Clarification of

the Violations of Human Rights and Acts of Violence scorched-earth policy of the Guatemalan militaryended, and the time has come for expanding the limitsWhich Have Caused Suffering to the Guatemalan Popu-

lation (or Clarification Commission), also begin to doc- of representation by exploring the social truths of civilwar. This calls for pausing and reflecting upon the so-ument the violence. The Clarification Commission is

underfunded and faced with the impossible mandate of cial processes related to the conflict in a way which




Falla could not undertake because of his understandably human rights doctrine has taken on new meanings asit implants itself in highland indigenous communities.urgent desire to document.

Having recognized the initial importance of docu- Initially the idea of human rights was a way of distanc-ing the populace from the government to create a spacementation, it is becoming clearer that ‘‘first-line-of-

denunciation’’ narratives can decontextualize by con- outside of the immediate control of the ubiquitousarmy, but later it was invoked with intentions far fromsidering an event in isolation from what went before or

after and excluding social processes not apparently re- the original one.Human rights are reworked for markedly differentlated to the military encounter (e.g., kinship relations,

environmental strategies). As I have argued earlier (Wil- aims, such as a ‘‘human rights protest’’ against the guer-rillas by some Nebajenos. Stoll asserts that this anti-son 1997) and as Hale begins to suggest, basic forms of

documentation can strip events of the subjectivities of guerrilla reading of human rights is not just orches-trated by the military but results from a strategy ofvictims who may have practiced resistance, neutralism,

collaboration, or a tactical mixture of all available strat- ‘‘active neutrality’’ adopted by a population which hasbeen traumatized by decades of war. Thus some Ixil in-egies. The consciousness of perpetrators (e.g., soldiers)

or victim-perpetrators (some civil patrollers) is no less corporate human rights into their political language inorder to oppose the military, whereas others deploy itvital to research, but all but a very few anthropologists

have shied away from this area for fear of being seen to distance themselves from popular organizations.Both tactics are mirror-image responses to political in-as sanctioning the views they are representing (cf.

Schirmer n.d.). stability and a history of violence taking place on theterrain of human rights. In this context, human rightsThe omission of certain actors’ (the guerrillas’, the

soldiers’) consciousness from Falla’s study forces him to become a discursive claim to autonomy, including im-munity from arbitrary attack by either the guerrillas orspeculate about ladinos’ insecurities without any quali-

tative evidence and to end up blaming a uniformly rac- the army.The complexities involved in the articulation ofist ladino society. Apart from ignoring the fact that a

significant number of material perpetrators were indige- global and local versions of human rights and justicewere brought home to me at an event I attended in Rabi-nous, this elides both ladinos’ multiple strategies in the

conflict and what soldiers thought they were doing. It nal, Baja Verapaz, in August 1996. The event was ameeting of lawyers from a Guatemala-based humandoes not bring us any closer to understanding perhaps

the most perplexing question of all—how it was that rights nongovernmental organization and the commu-nity of Plan de Sanchez at which two European lawyersthe Guatemalan military was able to establish local vig-

ilante patrols and to create a civilian standing army out explained to the community the nature of their submis-sion to the Inter-American Commission of Humanof the population itself when this strategy largely came

unstuck in other contexts such as Peru, South Africa, Rights in Washington, D.C. The village of about 30 fam-ilies of smallholders, the majority bilingual Maya-and the Philippines. Without any plausible evidence

about the consciousness of the perpetrators, we cannot Achi’- and Castilian-speakers, was preparing a caseagainst the Guatemalan government and some 60 sol-judge the degree to which the violence was an expres-

sion of indigenous or ladino identity, if at all, or instead diers and local vigilantes who had entered the village atmidday on market day on July 18, 1982, and massacredemerged more from other salient identities at the time,

including those related to community, class, and mas- 268 people. In the 14 years since the event, no one hadbeen charged in connection with the massacre despiteculinity.

Anthropological histories, in my view, will inevitably the available ballistic and forensic evidence. The sub-mission charged the alleged perpetrators with over aclash with as well as enrich universalistic and global-

ized narratives on the violence. As anthropologists are dozen human rights violations, including violations ofthe right to life, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treat-able to enter communities and areas which were previ-

ously under strict military control, it is becoming ment, and genocide.During the day’s meeting, it became apparent that al-clearer that human rights discourses do not always

match up with local interpretations and that local con- though they were involved in writing the same humanrights document, lawyers and villagers drew upon di-flicts can become homogenized, transformed, and re-

represented by them. Of the three books in Hale’s re- verging conceptions of justice, which could be charac-terized as restorative and retributive, respectively. Atview essay, David Stoll’s book is most attuned to this

articulation between the local and global, since it as- one point, the villagers were divided into small work-shop groups, and each had to formulate what it actuallysesses the impact of a newly arrived human rights pres-

ence in the Ixil towns. expected from the commission. After about 20 minutes,each group representative stood up in turn and withAs Hale points out, Stoll is too eager to discover stark

oppositions between local versions and those of human great emotion unanimously demanded the death pen-alty for the perpetrators. Their primary targets for puni-rights and leftist solidarity organizations. He is largely

unreflective on how local perceptions of the guerrillas tive justice were not government officials (as they werefor the lawyers) but local agents of repression, especiallymight have changed in a militarized context. Yet Be-

tween Two Armies provides a useful case study of how members of the neighboring communities of Pichec,




Concul, and Xesiguan. The lawyers then had to explain guage of human rights. For a number of years, the armyhas been working on its own submission to the Clarifi-to a dismayed audience that the death penalty was not

within the powers of the commission and, in any case, cation Commission, which places much of the blamefor genocidal levels of killing on the armed opposition,as human rights lawyers they opposed it on principle.

As the lawyers moved on to detail the contents of the the URNG. In 1996 Col. Noack proudly displayed itsprecursor document ‘‘Something of the Truth in 33legal submission, it became clear that the events of

1982 were being recounted within the selective con- Years of the Violation of Human Rights of the Peopleof Guatemala on the Part of the URNG.’’ In such a con-fines of human rights discourse. In a vital section of the

submission, the lawyers explicitly discounted a histori- text of extreme politicization of the past, anthropolo-gists will need all of the methodological rigor and ana-cal dispute over land as a significant cause of the massa-

cre, since this would have weakened their assertion that lytical insights of Falla and McCreery to ensure thatrevisionist accounts do not hold sway and the atten-it was part of a national counterinsurgency campaign.

Yet for the community the land dispute was and still tiveness to local concerns of Stoll to ensure that humanrights accounts are truer to the complex nature of theiris a significant catalyst to political violence. It rages on

unresolved between the Jeronimo Sanchez family of sources.Plan de Sanchez and the Orrego family of a neighboringvillage. It is claimed that three of the Orregos were judi-ciales, paramilitary operatives who worked for militaryintelligence, at the time and that shortly before the Replymassacre one of the Orregos had denounced the San-chez family as active guerrillas and threatened to sendthe army to kill them. Thus political violence and no- charles r. hale

Austin, Tex., U.S.A. 1 viii 97tions of truth and justice are perceived primarilythrough the prism of local politics. Conflicts are ex-pressly driven more by historic family disputes and I am gratified that my essay generated such thoughtful,

at times moving comments. As Arias points out, in thecompetition over resources such as land than by thegrand global political ideologies and transnational past U.S.-based academic dialogue on issues critical to

Guatemala has often been restricted to North Ameri-moral values which motivate human rights lawyers.Anthropologists must remain attuned to the conver- cans, leaving the results analytically impoverished. Al-

though the topic of social memory might be expectedgences and slippages between local and globalized nar-ratives on violence in order to provide a counterpoint to focus our attention on variation through time, it is

striking that spatiality plays such a central role in theand complement to the versions produced by the Clari-fication Commission, the Catholic church’s own social commentary. One might begin with the observation

that all three Guatemalan respondents are importantmemory project REMHI, the national criminal justicesystem, international human rights commissions, and voices in the Guatemalan intellectual scene even

though they write primarily from somewhere outsidecourts, and more community-based initiatives. Thereare implications for our own discipline as well in this, the physical space of the Guatemalan nation. Other ex-

amples are Wilson’s emphasis on the play of global andand a rethinking is due for certain long-held assump-tions within legal anthropology, for instance, the idea local meanings of human rights and Arias’s argument

that the meaning of the term ‘‘Maya’’ depends on howthat there is no distinction between legal norms andother types of social norms, either functionally or con- the analyst is positioned. A somewhat different concern

with spatiality frames the comments of Gonzalez andceptually (cf. Comaroff and Roberts 1981).In terms of the ethical implications of our writing his- Falla: they explain how direct, personal experience with

the violence shaped their outlooks as intellectuals andtories, it is vital to recognize the heterogeneous compo-sition and centripetal force of local versions without their stances as political actors, which in turn influ-

enced the thrust of their analyses.collapsing into a soggy and paralyzing perspectivism.Through mechanisms such as the Clarification Com- This last concern connects most directly with the

broader question that I hoped my essay would raise.mission and the Law of National Reconciliation, whichprovide for amnesty for perpetrators of human rights vi- What is the relationship between social scientists’ ana-

lytical goals and their location within a political processolations, elite sectors of government, army, and societyplan to avoid all responsibility for past crimes. Antonio that is also the subject of analysis? There are many fac-

ile answers to this question, and anthropologists haveArenales Forno, a former government negotiator in thepeace talks who is seen as a close ally of the army, told been well-trained to distrust and deconstruct them, but

there are relatively few convincing affirmative state-me in 1996, ‘‘We will have a truth commission with anamnesty, and now the army had better learn how to ments. Recent work on the politics of memory in

Guatemala offers a good opportunity to move us to-manage the truth.’’Truth management is already in the hands of soldiers ward greater clarity. The conditions of Falla’s research

are illustrative: he set out to document a series oflike Col. Otto Noack, the head of the army’s Depart-ment of Information, who has adeptly co-opted the lan- government-instigated massacres while at the same




time working with the witnesses to help them heal re-presented as bad analysis, and the interplay betweenthe two dimensions gets lost. In the face of such abuse,from the trauma and move forward. How is the interac-

tion of these two dimensions of his work reflected in intellectual ‘‘iconoclasm’’ appears fresh, insightful, andvital. Yet iconoclasm can also be what Donna Harawaythe scholarship that resulted?

At first glance, Wilson’s comments appear to bring calls a ‘‘God trick’’: a profession of fierce independence,of accountability to no one and nothing but the ‘‘truth,’’clarity to this matter. He extends my analysis of the

three books by positing that they represent distinct that ignores or actively obscures its own subjectivity. Ican think of no better way to distinguish between thesegenres of human rights reporting, each of which has its

place, and that ideally the three would be deployed in two types of iconoclasm than to press hard questionsabout the analyst’s location.combination. The argument resonates with his own ex-

cellent recent work on human rights reporting, which Even when the importance of the analyst’s locationis affirmed, these questions about the politics of anthro-challenges orthodoxies fixed in place by the horrible

contents and high stakes of the subject of study. Yet a pological research have no easy answers. One mightagree that research on social memory is inherently posi-closer reading leaves me concerned that Wilson’s clarity

comes at the sacrifice of complexity. Although spatial- tioned and incorporate an awareness of that political po-sitioning into one’s work while at the same time at-ity is central to his emphasis on global-local articula-

tions, location—where analysts stand, how they engage tempting to limit its extent and effects. Anotherapproach is to embrace the political dimension of suchwith the politics of that place, to whom they are ac-

countable—is much less so. He risks leaving the im- research, striking a balance between analytical rigor andpolitical engagement and finding ways to make the twopression that intellectuals operate in a space apart,

where Stoll’s ‘‘iconoclasm’’ and Falla’s ‘‘empiricism’’ mutually enriching. This is what I take Falla to meanwhen he describes his own efforts to develop social sci-exist as discrete, analogous options, either mutually ex-

clusive (my alleged mistake) or as complements to one ence methodologies that have the function of providingreasoned support for sociopolitical processes withanother (Wilson’s corrective).

Missing from this solution, in my view, is a system- which he is aligned—to which he feels accountable. Itprobably is best to present these two approaches as al-atic consideration of how the analyst’s location partly

sets the conditions for what genres are available for use, ternatives, chosen according to the analyst’s prefer-ences and to the particular conditions of the research.what combinations are possible and sensible, and what

the analytical thrust of a specific genre turns out be. This makes it easier to prefer the latter as more excit-ing, meaningful, and productive without fear of beingWilson reiterates the insight that has become axiomatic

in work on the politics of memory—that how people interpreted as doctrinaire. At same time, the commentsof all three Guatemalans serve as a forceful reminderremember the past is predicated on simultaneous dis-

cussions of political alternatives for the future. But he that this choice of approaches, like the unconstrainedchoice among genres of human rights reporting, is oftenneglects the corollary—that analysts themselves are

part of these discussions in ways that deeply influence impossible. When intellectuals themselves are the tar-gets of political violence or, as Gonzalez graphically as-the content of the knowledge they produce. Atten-

tiveness to this corollary does not contradict Wilson’s serts, the effects of this violence come to form part of apeople’s collective identity, the options change. Undercall for the greater interpretive context that human

rights reporting so often lacks—a call that I heartily en- these conditions, intellectual work that rejects politicalengagement or replaces accountability with iconoclasmdorse. However, it does pose a series of questions that

amount to another axis of variation: are the analysts can appear disingenuous or at least out of place. There isno need for uncritical endorsement of analysis producedMayans or Ladinos, Guatemalans or foreigners? How

have they experienced and been affected by the violence from this location—only an acknowledgment of its dis-tinctive contribution to our understanding of what hap-that is also the subject of study? How are they aligned

in relation to the multifaceted array of political forces pened, why, and especially, how to move forward fromhere.and alternatives present in the current scene? To whom

are they accountable? Stoll’s comment helps to identify common ground.My first fundamental criticism was that his book doesOver the past two decades the place of such questions

within anthropology has shifted dramatically; once con- not confront the problem of how to discern what Ixilpeople were thinking in 1978 on the basis of interviewssidered irrelevant or subversive, they now run the risk

of becoming a litmus test that preempts further analy- in 1990. Stoll essentially grants this critique, notingthat ‘‘peasant consciousness before the violence’’ issis. Perhaps these pendulum swings have cleared a

space for a more constructive stance; knowing the ana- ‘‘not so central’’ a focus of his analysis. This being thecase, however, it is striking that he begins his com-lyst’s location matters deeply not because it dictates

conclusions but because it engenders an enriched, more ment, as he does his book, with a provocative string ofhistorical questions, the first of which is ‘‘Why wouldcritical reading of the analysis that results. This stance

is vulnerable to abuse. It can easily be seized upon by Ixil peasants . . . have welcomed guerrillas in the firstplace [i.e., in 1978]?’’ It is beyond me how Stoll can pur-anyone interested in promoting a specific political

agenda and used as a rationale for stifling debate and im- port to answer these questions, conducting field re-search in an army-controlled town in 1990, without en-posing uniformity. Unwanted political challenges are




gaging in ‘‘memory work.’’ Let us agree, then, that he thesis was becoming a consensus position among NorthAmerican academics without some hard questions’needs to make such analysis more central and that until

he does the ‘‘between two fires’’ thesis should be taken having been asked and answered. In any case, the lastthing that Stoll or anyone else has to worry about in theas a reasonable summary of how Ixil peasants are think-

ing ‘‘now’’ (i.e., at the time of his fieldwork) and a neoliberal mid-’90s is the hegemony of solidarity ortho-doxy. The more present danger, it seems to me, is ahighly incomplete account of what they were thinking

‘‘then.’’ stance that substitutes the deconstruction of orthodox-ies (whether of the left or the right) for more sustainedMy second critique of Stoll’s book focused on a corol-

lary of, as he puts it, his urging ‘‘foreign political activ- and substantive forms of political engagement. On thisStoll seems to be genuinely ambivalent, at times stak-ists to stop supporting an armed struggle in which most

Ixils . . . said they did not believe’’—namely, that it is ing out important political/analytical arguments withwhich we all need to come to terms and at other timessafer and healthier not to remember the traumatic pe-

riod of mobilization, conflict, and violence that (we content with unpositioned iconoclasm. Once the staticcaused by defensive posturing has been eliminated, Ihope) has come to a close. Reasonable people will dis-

agree about this assertion, and, as I stated in the essay, hope that this forum can be read as an effort to encour-age debate within the first realm; challenging one an-a well-considered argument along these lines could be

a useful addition to the debate. Stoll’s contribution, I other to produce analysis that is politically positionedand accountable without subordinating analytical rigorargued, does not fit that description. To evaluate the is-

sues at stake here, the reader must first set aside the to conclusions driven by a preestablished politicalagenda.paragraph in which I am portrayed as being on a witch

hunt. I chose the three quotations from his book be-cause they show that his argument, to use his aptphrase, creates a ‘‘climate of opinion or sensibility’’ thatdemands scrutiny. Whether the quotations are out ofcontext the reader must decide (though Stoll’s objection References Citedwould have been more convincing had he given an ex-ample). But the conclusion that I have accused him of adams, r. n. 1995. Etnicidad en el ejercito de la Guatemalabeing an army informer is bizarre and completely un- Liberal (1870–1915). Guatemala City: Facultad Latinoameri-

cana de Ciencias Sociales.warranted.arias, arturo. 1990. ‘‘Changing Indian identity: Guatemala’sOnce this air is cleared, another area of common

violent transition to modernity,’’ in Guatemalan Indians andground comes to the fore. I fully endorse Stoll’s por- the state, 1540 to 1988. Edited by Carol A. Smith. Austin: Uni-trayal of my own approach to anthropology as an at- versity of Texas Press. [aa]

arriaza, gilberto. 1997. Mayas, una mayorıa crıtica. Santempt to combine ‘‘activism and critical thinking.’’ ButJose Mercury-News, Spanish supplement, March 30. [aa]Stoll’s work also fits that description, for example,

brintnall, douglas e. 1979. Revolt against the dead: Thewhen he pursues the objectives of urging people to stopmodernization of a Mayan community in the highlands of

defending a failed revolution or to stop doing human Guatemala. New York: Gordon and Breach. [ds]rights work focused on the revolutionary period in com- carmack, robert. Editor. 1988. Harvest of violence. Nor-

man: University of Oklahoma Press.bination with critical analysis of the issues at stake.comaroff, j., and s. roberts. 1981. Rules and processes:This being the case, however, Stoll must be prepared to

The cultural logic of dispute in an African context. Chicago:have his work debated with regard to the political University of Chicago Press. [rw]stance he defends, the critical analysis he puts forth, equipo de antropolog ia forense de guatemala.

1995. Las masacres en Rabinal: Estudio historico antropo-and the interplay between the two. My specific critiquelogico de las masacres de Plan de Sanchez, Chicupac y Rıois that Stoll has neglected to place the better-not-to-Negro. Guatemala City.remember argument in the context of powerful social

falla, r icardo. 1980. Quiche rebelde: Estudio de un movi-processes—from individual internalization to institu- miento de conversion religioso, rebelde a las creencias tradicio-tional coercion—that reinforce that position. By taking nales, en San Antonio Ilotenango, Quiche (1948–70). Guate-

mala City: Editorial Universitaria de Guatemala. [ds]this critique as a personal political attack, Stoll misses———. 1992. Massacres in the jungle: Ixcan, Guatemala (1975–the point and the opportunity to advance an important

1982). Boulder: Westview Press.debate. hale, charles r. 1994. Resistance and contradiction: Mis-Finally, I am mystified that my essay would be por- kitu Indians and the Nicaraguan state. Stanford: Stanford Uni-

versity Press.trayed as ‘‘policing’’ and likened to an apparent case ofinfopress centroamericana. 1997. Guatemala: De la(self-?) censorship about which I know nothing. My es-

guerra militar a la guerra polıtica. May 2, pp. 3–4.say amply reviews Stoll’s book, offering both praise andmc creery, david. 1994. Rural Guatemala, 1760–1940. Stan-

critique; upon submitting it I explicitly asked that he ford: Stanford University Press.comment on it. Knowing this, the reader might well morrissey, james arthur. 1978. A missionary-directed re-

settlement project among the Highland Maya of Western Gua-join me in wondering whether Stoll needs to worktemala. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. [ds]harder to distinguish between ‘‘policing’’ and criticism

ram irez, r icardo. 1970. ‘‘La situation du mouvement gua-that has found its mark. temalteque et ces perspectives,’’ in Lettres du front guatemal-Times change. Ironically, I formulated my critique of teque, pp. 107–60. Paris: Maspero.

schirmer, jennifer. n.d. A violence called democracy: TheStoll in part out of concern that his ‘‘between two fires’’




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smith, carol a. 1990. ‘‘Origins of the national question in watanabe, john m. 1992. Maya saints and souls in a chang-ing world. Austin: University of Texas Press.Guatemala: A hypothesis,’’ in Guatemalan Indians and the

state, 1540–1988. Austin: University of Texas Press. wilson, r ichard a. 1997. Human rights, culture, and con-text: Anthropological perspectives. London and Chicago: Plutostoll, david. 1993. Between two armies in the Ixil towns of

Guatemala. New York: Columbia University Press. Press. [rw]warren, kay b. 1978. The symbolism of subordination: In-



Comments on Consciousness, Violence and the Politics of Memory in Guatemala by Charles R. Hale

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