Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala (review)

Indigenous Movements and their Critics: Pan-Mayan Activism in Guatemala. By Kay B. Warren. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Photographs. Illustration. Maps. Table. Figure. Appendixes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xxii, 228 pp. Cloth, $55.00. Paper, $16.95.

Kay B. Warren's inspiring book is both a personal confession and a public revelation. From its overture, the author admits that it is not possible anymore to write about social movements, ethnic politics, and indigenous people struggle for autonomy without becoming totally submerged in the movement. Such an option would put the researcher at risk of losing some of the alleged "scientific objectivity" and thus weakening the scholarly credibility of anthropology which, for more than a century, has been based on its obstinate refusal to become politically involved with the causes of the people it studied. "I knew this would not be a restudy in any classical sense because ethnic politics, Guatemala, 'Indian' communities, cultural anthropology and Kay Warren had changed so dramatically . . . Self-proclaimed pan-community Maya groups were springing up throughout the country. Maya academics and activists confronted Western scholars with pointed critiques of politics, research practices, and published findings on Mayan culture. One could hardly use the old rationale . . . that anthropology meant speaking out for those who had no voice" (p. ix)

This ingenuous disclosure would surprise Latin American Indians and Mayan intellectuals, and some of her Latin American counterparts since for both parties there is no way of doing social science except committing oneself to the liberation struggle and popular causes which are inevitably true. "The truth is always revolutionary," one would argue in Gramscian terms with any indigenous intellectual and most of the Latin American anthropologists. Why then bother with any other kind of anthropological postmodern solipsism which seeks neither truth nor revolution? Kay Warren's confession concludes with the pivotal question about Western (Euro-American) anthropologists' positioning in relation to the emergence of multiple indigenous anthropologies which may "undercut the legitimacy of [Eurocentric social science as generator of] objective knowledge for its own sake and for practical development needs" (p. 207).

It is around such a central and basic anthropological disquisition (although marginal, for the Mayan and indigenous intellectuals) and the contradictory tension between Euroamerican dominant social science and the indigenous politics and practice of knowledge that this book becomes a revelation of the long-silenced voices of the Pan-Mayan ethnopolitical movement. In nine chapters overflowing with descriptive, analytical, and graphic information, Kay Warren guides the reader through one of the most violent and politically complicated ethnic and class conflicts of the Americas. It is a journey through destruction and reconstruction, cruelty and compassion, desperation and hope, cultural creativity and political imagination. A journey seen through the eyes and felt through the skin of Maya intellectuals, academics, activists, and community practitioners in local, regional, national, and international environments. And in this thick itinerary of indigenous history, anthropologist Kay Warren-White, a North American woman, is the sacrificial interlocutor who has to constantly perform the dialectical balancing act of explaining, condemning, justifying, theorizing the politics of Euroamerican academia which are perceived by many Mayan intellectuals as expressions and renewed attempts of neocolonial intrusion. Out of this tense dialogue between the indigenous intellectual sovereignty and the implicit arrogance of Western science, Kay Warren's sensitivity extricates some enlightening lessons for contemporary anthropologists committed to ethical research, social justice, and cultural democracy.

It would be erroneous, however, to think that this book is just a study of the new relation between anthropology and the "new historical subject," indigenous people, who now think, imagine, speak and practice with autonomy, inventing a collective future that is de-linked from the social and cultural paradigm. This is actually the inverted chronicle of the Maya, of this part of the Indies, one of the few contemporary chronicles of the historia verdadera of the Maya people as it is written today by its innumerable...