Suchergebnisse

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

Under the sign of the Virgen de Tránsito -- Intertext 1. Those who are transformed -- The postwar milieu : means, ends, and identities -- 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

Under the sign of the Virgen de Tránsito -- Intertext 1. Those who are transformed -- The postwar milieu : means, ends, and identities -- 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.

This essay is written in the wake of Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war, grounded in the Cold War–Doctrine of National Security which understood Indigenous people as "internal enemy." People who joined social movements were also seeking security: bodily integrity, land, a living wage. For Indigenous people, it was security to be who they are: speaking their languages, practicing their spirituality and lifeways. Before, during, and after the war, hydroelectric projects have been identified with security, given their promises of light and progress. I explore how "scripts" like Race, The State, Citizenship, and The Plantation are inscribed into such objects and how obdurate such prescriptions are. Yet Akrich says that users may define quite different roles of their own. If this happens the objects remain a chimera (p. 208). Through several moments over the last seventy years in Guatemala, I show how various forms of "security"—bodily, communal, productive, national, and financial—are at stake and how hydroelectrics are always under contestation, always chimera.

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Anne McClintock. New York: Routledge, 1995. 449 pp.Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Ann Laura Stoler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. 238 pp.Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. Robert J. C. Young. London: Routledge, 1995.236 pp.