A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (review)

A straight-forward summary of Diane Nelson's book would describe it as being about Maya and Maya cultural rights activism, bodies and body politics, la mujer maya, a gringa anthropologist, and discourses of ethnicity, race, gender, and nation in Quincentennial Guatemala. All this would be at least a partially accurate representation of what Nelson calls her "'partial' ethnography" and what could also be described as life (and love—sexuality and erotics are also [un]covered) in the time of cólera, this last term used in the sense of an intense emotional response to a hurt, such as a finger in a wound. However, since her early days of solidarity work in Guatemala, Nelson has come to understand the fluid nature of issues, labels, borders, and bodies and thus writes of

a methodology of fluidarity: a practice and analytics that combine solidarity—being partial to, as in on the side of, the people I work with—with an acknowledgement of how partial, how incomplete, my knowledge and politics have to be (p. 31).

What this means is that a mere list of "topics covered" hardly scratches the surface of what Nelson accomplishes in this serious and playful, wide-ranging and masterfully argued body of work. Rather, Nelson states that "all identity is formed through articulation" (p. 41) and points to Maya activists' notion of "formación, with the sense of being made by practices of articulation" (p. 349). Her own articulation of the issues helps form her subjects in new, sophisticated ways and inform her audience in the process.

No matter how much it might seem like a "closed corporate community," the state is hardly a traditional anthropological fieldsite. However, Nelson's years of experience working in a variety of locales and with a wide range of people have enabled her to make contact with many of the natives. As a recent college graduate in 1985 she engaged in solidarity work that introduced her to government elites and other professionals in the capital, refugees of the violence in Mexico, and people whose power and positions were in between those extremes. She went on to conduct research in the Development Poles, translate for Rigoberta Menchú, and otherwise expand her circle of contacts, all of which has provided her with a multitude of candid voices speaking articulately and complexly on subjects that are often painful even when they are funny. Within the frame of her work on Maya in/and the state, she devotes significant attention to four topical complexes: gender (including Rigoberta Menchú jokes, with their sick/funny humor, and la mujer maya—the Maya woman—understood as prosthetic for Maya/Guatemalan culture); state-level institutions (for example, the Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Guatemalan Mayan Language Academy, with their politics of culture); the nexus of the Maya/local, the nation-state/national, and the world-system/international (for example, the struggle for ratification of the United Nation's ILO Convention 169 and technotraditional Maya-hackers); and the body (whether the wounded body of the gringa suspected of baby snatching, the unwound body of the Rigoberta Menchú in jokes, or the bodywork that goes into mestizaje). These themes are interpenetrated and interwoven with theoretical considerations (and in effect do not exist without their theoretical frames) having to do with the construction of power and identities, the nature of labels and attitudes, the inter-relatedness of productivity and repression, and the struggle to make sense of it all. This semiotic struggle lies at the heart of Nelson's project and is the site where her theoretical/ethnographic concerns are most powerfully pronounced with her writing. Nelson's fluidary analysis pushes beyond the solid, certain takes on the world and the binary oppositions so breezily offered up as descriptions of social reality into a territory where contradictions necessarily coexist and understanding is always partial because it is endlessly coming-into-being. With this in mind, Nelson argues that the defining space between "Indian" and "ladino...