The Chicken and Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Forest by Paul Kockelman (review)

The Chicken and Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala's Cloud Forest, by Paul Kockelman, focuses on different aspects of the author's experience in the small village of Chicacnab from 1997 to 2000. One can almost trace his journey from the offices of the local NGO, Proyecto Eco-Quetzal (PEQ), which had started an "intervention" to save the quetzal bird from extinction through the stimulation of ecotourism, to the village of Chicacnab, where he lived with one of the hosts and even helped the wife to bury a dead baby chicken. Kockelman argues that the PEQ has unwittingly helped to open Chicacnab up to the neoliberal world by commodifying both the quetzal and the labor of the people of Chicacnab. He then flips the coin, examining the way the people of Chicacnab place value on things in their lives, from chickens to labor, arguing that while the intervention has changed inter-village labor relations, these things are still internalized through an "incommensurate ontology." Reading this as a Colonial Mexican historian, I found some of the methodological sections dense, but the examples capture a vivid picture of a moment in a process that has been happening since the Spanish arrived in the New World.

Kockelman's investigation of the gendered world of the Q'eqchi' raises a number of historical questions. As Kockelman points out, James Lockhart found that chickens were so intimately related to the Spaniards who brought them to the New World that some early Nahua dictionaries imagined the word Castilla(n) to mean "land of the chickens" (53). He notes that although Q'eqchi' speakers did not consider their own word kaxlan, meaning both chicken and foreign, to be a loan word, it likely came from the Spaniards' Nahua "assistants." He also finds a relationship between the words xul (wild in relation to animals) and Chool, the name of the people of the area before they were "reduced" in the congregaciones of the Sixteenth Century. One wonders then, how much of the gendered differentiation between forest/men/wild and village/women/tame came out of the Spanish (or Nahua?) reorganization of native lives? Or how much of this "re-organization" fit into a gendered binary? In either case, Kockelman finds that Chickens are so intimately connected to the women raising them that women's daily activities were thought to have repercussions on the bodies of the chicks. For instance, he notes that it is believed that if a woman heats up a griddle without putting maize dough on it, the chicks will not hatch (72). In light of my own work on spiritual ecology, this illustrates a deep connection between the physical and spiritual worlds, where even minor transgressions can create an imbalance in the natural world.

Kockelman's work provides insight into the unintended consequences of seemingly altruistic interventions, and the role of NGOs in the neoliberalization of traditional lifeways around the world. Kockelman points out that while the NGO's mission was the preservation of the cloud forest, the ecotourism they established to limit clearcutting of the forest through income substitution also encouraged villagers of Chicacnab to build new houses for tourists, which meant cutting down more trees. Because these new houses were built according to an external "grading" system, they also encouraged a shift in labor relations from the traditional "replacement" model, where villagers helped one another, to paying a growing number of men with chainsaws to produce beveled edges (147).

Throughout the work we see the author's presence in the life of Chicacnab. One can almost imagine him with his notebook watching men measuring and clearing fields, women and children caring for and occasionally killing or even "sacrificing" chickens, and asking questions that sometimes made "children giggle and adults look uncomfortable" (56). Kockelman participates in "grading" the villagers...