Reckoning

by Nelson, Diane M.

• ISBN13: 9780822343240
• ISBN10: 082234324X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-02-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

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,"reckoningpromises accounting and accountability. Yet as Diane M. Nelson shows, the means by which the war was 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 activism, Mayan identity struggles, coerced participation in massacres, and popular entertainment-including traditional dances, horror films, and carnivals-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 Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchuacute;, and she explores how duplicity may in turn function as a survival strategy for some. Nelson examines suspicions that state power is also two-faced, from the leftrs"s fears of a clandestine para-state behind the democratic faccedil;ade, to the rightrs"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.Reckoningis 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.

Author Biography

Diane M. Nelson is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

Table of Contents

Pre/face. Little Did I Know	p. xiii
Acknowledgements	p. xxxiii
Under the Sign of the Virgen de Tránsito	p. 1
Those Who Are Transformed	p. 31
The Postwar Milieu: Means, Ends, and Identi-ties	p. 39
Co-memoration and Co-laboration: Screening and Screaming	p. 73
Horror's Special Effects	p. 86
Confidence Games	p. 115
Indian Giver or Nobel Savage?: Rigoberta Menchú Tum's Stoll/en Past	p. 126
Welcome to Bamboozled! A Modern-Day Minstrel Show	p. 156
Anthropologist Discovers Legendary Two-Faced Indian	p. 164
Look Out! Step Right Up! Paranoia and Other Entertainments	p. 197
Hidden Powers, Duplicitous State/s	p. 208
Counterscience in Colonial Laboratories	p. 242
Life during Wartime	p. 252
How Do You Get Someone to Give You Her Purse?	p. 280
Accounting for the Postwar, Balancing the Book/s	p. 290
The Ends	p. 322
Notes	p. 327
Works Cited	p. 361
Index	p. 387
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