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,""
reckoning" promises 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 Menchu, 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
left's fears of a clandestine 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.
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