Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala by Kevin Lewis O'Neill (review)

Kevin Lewis O'Neill. Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 224 pp.

This is a heart wrenching ethnographic study, expertly written in a compelling style that is hard to put down once you start reading it. Its main topic is presented succinctly in the first sentence:

Hunted is an ethnography of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers in Guatemala City and their practice of bringing (sometimes dragging) users to Christ. The faithful call it hunting. Focused on the chase, this book is a provocation to interpret the world from the perspective of predation. It invites readers to appreciate how forms of sociality can be understood as a series of calculated targets and attempted escapes.

(ix)

The "turbulence" of the dynamic between hunted and hunter "ultimately transformed this book into an experiment in form. Itself organized around the logic of captivity, Hunted proposes predation as a root experience of the contemporary" (ix).

Fieldwork research began in the winter of 2008 and continued with major intervals until the spring of 2018. O'Neill has conducted research in Guatemala since 1999, resulting in the monographs City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (2009) and Securing the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala (2015). Quoting Malinowski (1922:4,9), O'Neill recognizes that the anthropologist is also a hunter: "For over a decade, I tracked and captured knowledge about predatory pastoralism, spreading my nets across Guatemala City and waiting for what fell into them" (xix). He hunted for the captive drug users, and their stories.

The monograph has a simple structure that intentionally mirrors the process of the hunt. It starts with a "Note", followed by a "Preface." Next come five short unnumbered chapters that neatly capture the sequence and circular logic of the hunt, entitled "The Hunt," "Captivity," "Escape," "Return," and "Hunted, a Conclusion." Finally, there is a short epilogue and no less than four pages of acknowledgments. The book has such a compelling narrative precisely because it closely follows a group of 55 (former) users, all men, being held at a Pentecostal drug rehabilitation center in Guatemala City, run by Pastor Pedro. Three men stand out in particular: Alejandro, Tomás, and Santiago. Alejandro said:

"I'm tired of hunting, because when I leave here, the people I've tied up come looking for me." He seemed to grow indignant. "But they don't understand that I have to hunt. It's what I have to do to eat better, to sleep a little longer, so I can get a shower here." Alejandro then connected the dots for me. "Hunting is why the pastor keeps me here. The pastor hunts me because I hunt for him."

(xiii)

O'Neill uses this vignette to introduce the subject matter of the book:

This is a book about humans hunting humans. It is an ethnography of Pentecostals who track down drug users, as if they were animals, to remind them, in classic Christian fashion, that they are human. […] After years of fieldwork I came to understand this hunting as a kind of predatory pastoralism. This is the Christian impulse to seek out, tie up, and drag back those sheep that have wandered from the fold.

(xiii)

O'Neill argues that this is a "disruptive insight" for at least three reasons: it upends our conventional notions of free choice, sin, and a pastoralism that turned coercive after the state withdrew from helping drug users.

The book traces the root origin of the problem to President Nixon's infamous militarization of the War on Drugs in 1971, which shifted US drug use from marijuana to cocaine (xiv). This eventually created a logistical network of powerful drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico, as well as transit drug trafficking through Guatemala where crack and alcohol are cheap.

Yet in Guatemala City, with a homicide rate often twenty times the US average, crack cocaine was not criminalized so much as Pentecostalized. The Pentecostalization of...