Reckoning : the ends of war in Guatemala / Diane M. Nelson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nelson, Diane M., 1963-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History.

Peace.

Guatemala--History--Civil War, 1960-1996--Peace.

Guatemala.

Guatemala--History--1985-.

Guatemala--Politics and government--1985-.

Politics and government.

Physical Description:

xxxvii, 403 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2009.

Summary:

Following The 1996 treaty ending decades of civil war, how are Guatemalans reckoning with genocide, especially since almost everyone contributed in some way to the violence? Meaning "to count, figure up" and "to settle rewards and punishments," the term reckoning promises accounting and accountability. Yet as Diane M. Nelson shows, the means by which the war waged, especially as they related to race and gender, unsettled the very premises of knowing and being. Symptomatic are the stories of duplicity pervasive in postwar Guatemala, as the left, the Mayan people, and the state were each said to have "two faces." Drawing on more than twenty years of research in Guatemala, Nelson explores how postwar struggles to reckon with traumatic experience illuminate the assumptions of identity more generally.

Nelson brings together stories of human rights sactivism, Mayan identity struggles, coerced participation in massacres, and popular entertainment-including traditional dances, horror films, and carnicals-with analyses of mass-grave exhumations, official apologies, and reparations. She discusses the stereotype of the Two-Faced Indian as colonial discourse revivified by anti-guerrilla counterinsurgency and by the claims of duplicity leveled against the Nobal laureate Rigoberta Menchú, and she explors how duplicity may in turn function as a survival strategy for some. Nelson examines suspicions that state power is also two-faced, from the left's fears of a clandesting para-state behind the democratic facade, to the right's conviction that NGOs threaten Guatemalan sovereignty. Her comparison of antimalaria and antisubversive campaigns suggests biopolitical ways that the state is two-faced, simultaneously giving and taking life. Reckoning is a view from the ground up of how Guatemalans are finding creative ways forward, turning ledger books, technoscience, and even gory horror movies into tools for making sense of violence, loss, and the future.

Contents:

Under the sign of the Virgen de Tránsito

Intertext 1. Those who are transformed

The postwar milieu : means, ends, and identi-ties

Intertext 2. Co-memoration and co-laboration : screening and screaming

Horror's special effects

Intertext 3. Confidence games

Indian giver or nobel savage? : Rigoberta Menchú Tum's stoll/en past

Intertext 4. Welcome to bamboozled! : a modern-day minstrel show

Anthropologist discovers legendary two-faced Indian

Intertext 5. Look out! Step right up! : paranoia and other entertainmeants

Hidden powers, duplicitous state/s

Intertext 6. Counterscience in colonial laboratories

Life during wartime

Intertext 7. How do you get someone to give you her purse?

Accounting for the postwar, balancing the book/s

The ends.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [361]-386) and index.

ISBN:

9780822343417

082234341X

9780822343240

082234324X

OCLC:

291908104