VIOLENCE, MARGINALITY AND MAYAN
IDENTITY: The aftermath of “La Violencia
• “Those who confront violence with resistance—
whether it be cultural or political—do not escape
unscathed from the terror and oppression they rise
up against. The challenge of ethnography then, is to
check the impulse to sanitize, and instead to clarify
the chains of causality that link structural, political,
and symbolic violence that buttresses unequal power
relations and distorts efforts at resistance” (Bourgois
2004).
La Violencia: The violence
“as a historical and political
economic process…” (Green 7).
Focus
• The impact of la violencia on Maya
communities (i.e. women, men and children)
• The internalization of violence in indigenous
communities, such as chronic killing and
death squads) in the context of La violencia.
• Mayan identity transformations in relation to
La violencia
Anthropological questions
• What was the role of la violencia in the
internalization of violence in Mayan
communities?
• How did la violencia affect social relations at
the local level and also at the national level?
• What was the impact of la violencia in the
relationship between the Mayas and the
Guatemalan state?
Anthropologists’ Work
• Carmack (1988) “Harvest of Violence” -Impact of
violence in rural communities
• Stoll (1993) “ Between Two Armies” -Tactical
neutrality
• “ Certainly the guerrillas appealed to Ixil grievances
against Ladinos, but there is no sign that the
grievances would have led to rebellion without the
polarizing effect of guerrilla and army counterblows
(Stoll, 1993: 308).
• Warren (1998) “Indigenous Movements and Their
Critics” --Mayan identity in the Pan-Mayan movement
• Green (1999) “Fear as a Way of Life” --Impact of
violence on Widows
• At the national level her study is an
examination of the complex relation
between the Mayan people and the
Guatemalan state from the perspective of
rural Mayan widows
For Green
• Structural violence is multidimensional and
includes exploitation, marginalization,
powerlessness, cultural imperialism, random acts
of violence, humiliation and fear.
• Structural violence is embedded in national as
well as in local social institutions and cultural
perceptions
:
• Reveals patterns in the killings
• --metaphor of conquest
• -- “it is the same when they killed Tecum
Uman”
Reveals the social character of
intracommunity violence and the social
characteristics of the perpetrators of the
violence
• “ The policy remains the same: to dismantle existing
forms of community organization, to drive a wedge
between people and place; to force families to live
not where they wish but where they are told, in
nucleated centers where movements are
scrutinized…” ( 65).
• Repression
• Words and language “… can also be used to
dehumanise human beings and to “justify” their
suppression and even their extermination” (Bosmajian,
2004: 9).
• As an “vocative act”
• As an “ideological and physical embodiment of
history”
… encompassing all forms of
“controlling processes that
assault basic human freedoms
and individuals and collective
survival” (Scheper-Hughes and
Bourgois 2004: 21)
“…are based on and nourished
by silence and myth… by
means of rumor and fantasy
woven in a dense web of magic
realism”(Taussig 2004)
“scopic regime” “as an ensemble
of practices and discourses that
establish truth claims” (Feldman
2000).
Stuart Hall: “ dominant
regimes of repression” (11).
In considering these following questions pay attention to:
changes in community identity; coping mechanisms of
survivors; cultural ideologies of the military; survivor’s
memory and testimony.
• What happens to communities victimized by state
terror? How are people’s responses to terror shaped by
their cultural history as well as their economic and
political situations?
• How do perpetrators justify their violence?
• What role does gender play in the perpetration of, and
reaction to, state violence?
• What theories and methods anthropologists use in
studying the personal and communal effects of state
violence?