Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History

1. Consumption, Custom, and Control: Aguardiente in Nineteenth-Century Maya Guatemala

1 Consumption, Custom, and Control Aguardiente in Nineteenth-Century Maya Guatemala Stacey Schwartzkopf In this chapter, I consider struggles over the meaning and practice of alcohol consumption by an indigenous group, specifically, the use of aguardiente among Q’anjob’alan Maya peoples in the Huehuetenango region of Guatemala during the nineteenth century. After a brief discussion of previous approaches to alcohol use among indigenous peoples in Latin America, I argue for an approach to Maya alcohol use in Guatemala that places the cultural construction of consumption at the center of the analysis of alcohol use among historic indigenous populations. This approach integrates often-divergent cultural and political economic perspectives on alcohol use within a single framework. I then draw on both anthropological and historical evidence to reconstruct key shifts in patterns of alcohol use among Q’anjob’alan communities in Guatemala over time, with a particular focus on the nineteenth century. Specifically, I argue that struggles over aguardiente consumption played a major role both in community ritual and in political relations between Maya communities and state projects promoted by colonial, conservative, and liberal governments in Huehuetenango during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, I argue that attention to such struggles reveals the larger historiographic significance of aguardiente in Guatemala over this time, namely, its fundamental role in state financing, private capital accumulation, and labor recruitment for coffee production. Finally, I suggest the relevance of this approach for the study of alcohol use among indigenous peoples elsewhere in Latin America. 18 · Stacey Schwartzkopf Approaches to Indigenous Drinking in Latin America Historical and anthropological studies of indigenous alcohol use in Latin America have largely tended to follow one of two major approaches. The first, which can be characterized as a sociocultural approach,1 has been employed most often in ethnographic work among twentieth- and twenty-first-century indigenous communities.2 This approach focuses on documenting the social and cultural context of alcohol use, as well as its biological, psychological, and social effects. A key emphasis of this research has been in culturally contextualizing alcohol use, including that regarded as pathological according to a biomedical standard of evaluation (that is, alcoholism), by relating drinking patterns to social and ritual practices found within particular indigenous communities. This emphasis has allowed anthropologists and others employing this approach to challenge lingering stereotypes of innate drunkenness among indigenous peoples, although it has left them open to charges of “deflating” alcohol problems among the groups they have studied.3 A more serious flaw in this approach is its lack of systematic attention to the larger political and economic contexts that often shape patterns of alcohol use,4 although the occasional study has explored this topic in greater depth.5 In contrast, the second approach, most often found in historical or documentary-based studies of indigenous alcohol use, can be characterized as a political economy approach precisely because of the attention it gives to the role of alcohol production and consumption in relation to issues such as state control over alcohol sales, prohibition, monopolization , taxation, crime (or criminalization), and rebellion.6 Research using this approach has demonstrated the large and often overlooked part that (frequently illicit) alcohol production, sale, and consumption have played in rural and urban livelihoods, as well as the sometimes highly visible role of alcohol in political divisions ranging from debates over prohibition to outright rebellion. Although studies employing this approach are often sensitive to the social characteristics—in terms of class, race/ethnicity, and gender—of those engaged in political and economic struggles over alcohol, they rarely address the cultural meaning of alcohol consumption as it relates to specific groups.7 As a consequence, research using this approach tends to take the question of the demand for alcohol as a given, rather than a subject for investigation in its own right. Consumption, Custom, and Control: Aguardiente in Nineteenth-Century Maya Guatemala · 19 A third approach, which avoids some of these limitations, is one that has been productively applied to the study of ingested commodities, including sugar, spices, tea, and alcohol, in historical settings in the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean,8 but it has rarely been employed in Latin America. This approach, which can be characterized as a cultural commodities perspective,9 effectively combines the concerns of the above approaches in emphasizing the construction of the demand for alcohol as a shifting social and cultural practice with profound political and economic implications. By...