A finger in the wound : body politics in quincentennial Guatemala

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nelson, Diane M., Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mayas--Ethnic identity--Guatemala.

Mayas.

Violence.

Mayas--Civil rights--Guatemala.

Mayas--Politics and government--Guatemala.

Human body--Political aspects--Guatemala.

Human body.

Human body--Symbolic aspects--Guatemala.

Ladino (Latin American people)--Social conditions--Guatemala.

Ladino (Latin American people).

Mestizaje--Social conditions--Guatemala.

Mestizaje.

Popular culture.

Sex role.

Guatemala--Ethnic relations.

Guatemala.

Guatemala--Politics and government.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (448 p.) : 21 black-and-white illustrations and 2 maps

Place of Publication:

[Place of publication not identified] University of California Press 1999

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Many Guatemalans speak of Mayan indigenous organizing as "a finger in the wound." Diane Nelson explores the implications of this painfully graphic metaphor in her far-reaching study of the civil war and its aftermath. Why use a body metaphor? What body is wounded, and how does it react to apparent further torture? If this is the condition of the body politic, how do human bodies relate to it-those literally wounded in thirty-five years of war and those locked in the equivocal embrace of sexual conquest, domestic labor, mestizaje, and social change movements?Supported by three and a half years of fieldwork since 1985, Nelson addresses these questions-along with the jokes, ambivalences, and structures of desire that surround them-in both concrete and theoretical terms. She explores the relations among Mayan cultural rights activists, ladino (nonindigenous) Guatemalans, the state as a site of struggle, and transnational forces including Nobel Peace Prizes, UN Conventions, neo-liberal economics, global TV, and gringo anthropologists. Along with indigenous claims and their effect on current attempts at reconstituting civilian authority after decades of military rule, Nelson investigates the notion of Quincentennial Guatemala, which has given focus to the overarching question of Mayan-and Guatemalan-identity. Her work draws from political economy, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, and has special relevance to ongoing discussions of power, hegemony, and the production of subject positions, as well as gender issues and histories of violence as they relate to postcolonial nation-state formation.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

1. Introduction: Body Politics and Quincentennial Guatemala

2. Gringa Positioning, Vulnerable Bodies, and Fluidarity: A Partial Relation

3. State Fetishism and the Pinata Effect: Catastrophe and the Magic of Culture

4. Hostile Markings Taken for Identity: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority in a Graveyard inside Guatemala, October 1992

5. Gendering the Ethnic-National Question: Rigoberta Menchu Jokes and the Out-Skirts of Fashioning Identity

6. Bodies That Splatter: Gender, Race, and the Discourses of Mestizaje

7. Maya-Hackers and the Cyberspatialized Nation-State: Modernity, Ethnostalgia, and a Lizard Queen in Guatemala

8. A Transnational Frame-Up: ILO Convention 169, Identity, Territory, and the Law

9. Global Biopolitical Economy: Prosthetics and Blood Politics

Appendix. Selected Rigoberta Menchu Jokes

Glossary

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

ISBN:

0-520-92060-0

0-585-32677-0

OCLC:

1408681315