Anthropology and the Politics of Representation

2. Strategic Essentialism, Scholarly Inflation, and Political Litmus Tests: The Moral Economy of Hyping the Contemporary Mayas

2 Strategic Essentialism, Scholarly Inflation, and Political Litmus Tests The Moral Economy of Hyping the Contemporary Mayas David Stoll Our subject is the collision between deconstructive anthropology and indigenous activism. James Clifford (1988) spotted it in the 1976 Mashpee trial—cultural anthropologists no longer believed in the reified definition of tribe and culture,which the Mashpees needed to prove their existence as a legally recognizable entity.Jean Jackson fine-­ tuned the question in 1989:How can we talk about the making of culture without making enemies? Jackson and Kay Warren (2002) have articulated the problem more recently: to defend land rights and other claims based on indigenous rights,indigenous leaders must define boundary and authenticity in ways that anthropologists have the knowledge to refute. My own work illustrates the problem.In 1998 I published an investigation of the his­ tori­ cal background of I, Rigoberta Menchú (Burgos-­ Debray 1984; Stoll 2008), the 1982 life story of the 1992 Nobel peace laureate. Like other Mayan youth orphaned by the counterinsurgency campaigns of the Guatemalan army,Rigoberta Menchú fled into the arms of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP).A year after she joined the EGP as a po­ liti­ cal cadre,the or­ ga­ ni­ za­ tion sent her to Europe with a daunting assignment: to tell the story of her people.And she did, more eloquently than anyone had expected. But the way she made a splash was by turning her family and village into representative Indians who suffer every conceivable form of oppression. It was quite a story—but not the same as her family’s and village’s. They had their own rather different stories, which I thought should also be heard. So was I deconstructing an indigenous representation? Well, I deconstructed a particular one with a large and loyal audience. Many activists and 34 / Stoll academics presumed that Menchú’s story represented Guatemala’s indigenous population. In its most elemental form, as a story of persecution, exile, and eventual triumph, it was indeed one with which many Guatemalans identified . But I did not deconstruct Menchú’s story at this level;I corroborated it, and a decade later it is alive and well.What I deconstructed was her account of her family’s situation before the war and how po­ liti­ cal violence started locally, because this is where her story diverged from that of neighbors and relatives. Some Mayas were upset with me, in­ clud­ ing Menchú herself. Others were not. Some congratulated me for “telling the truth”—that is, publishing their side of the story.So I wasn’t deconstructing their representations—I was contextualizing a version that grew out of a particular person’s exile to Mexico, her affiliation with a guerrilla or­ ga­ ni­ za­ tion, and her appeal to international audiences. Reducing the conflict to an anthropologist versus native people dodges the question:Which native people? Like any human population, native people are not monolithic. They have diverging experiences, they have diverging interests, and they make contradictory claims. To assume that it is anti-­ Indian to question Menchú’s version of events, or Zapatistas’ claims to represent the people of Chiapas, or campaigns for Bureau of Indian Affairs recognition,or sovereignty/autonomy doctrine is to overestimate the representativity of your preferred bunch of indigenous people and ignore or discount others. There is a simple reason to avoid idealizing indigenous people.When they don’t live up to the imagery, the gap becomes yet another rationale for discounting them.The problem is not confined to tourists looking for barefoot philosophers in communion with nature.Yawning chasms between expectation and outcome are also generated by trendy imagery about native people defending their culture (Friedlander 1975; Feinberg 2003), gardening the Ama­ zon rainforest (Conklin and Graham 1995), and defying globalization (Pitarch 2004).In the case of the Mayas with whom I work,the Ixils of Guatemala ,they have been drafted into an array of roles,in­ clud­ ing men of maize rooted to their land, victory-­ or-­ death revolutionaries, victims of genocide, and accomplices to genocide because, on repeated occasions, a majority have voted for the former army dictator who committed genocide against them. Even the idea that Ixils are Mayas is fairly new to them—until reached by state education and Mayan activism,they thought Mayas were an earlier race who lived in caves and had six digits on each limb. None of the roles that Ixils have played for outsiders is completely divorced...