Secrecy and Insurgency: Socialities and Knowledge Practices in Guatemala

Conclusion

Conclusion In this book I set out to explore histories of violence and cultures of secrecy in Petén, north­ ern Guatemala, in the aftermath of the 1996 Peace Accords signed by the Guatemalan government and guerrilla insurgents. Informed by ethnographic research among displaced constituencies with experiences of militancy in the guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR), I aimed to trace the contours of dispersed and intermittent guerrilla social relations; histories of governmentality in Petén, and their relation to state-­sponsored violence, insurgency, and repression. I also dealt with the incitement and replication of ambivalence in social relations; the production of socialities and subjectivities marked by secrecy; guerrilla ethics and aesthetics of sociality established through generation and circulation of substance and multiple modes of relatedness; and phenomenologies of guerrilla prosthetic embodiment and subjectivity. In short, I set out to accomplish what Fardon (1990) deemed the ambitious and crisis-­ inducing program of writing ethnography. Noting his­ tori­ cal contextualizations of Guatemala provided through a range of interventions and perspectives, I pointed to instances of out-­ contextualization in the ana­ lyti­ cal and representational practices of social and cultural analy­ sis. I argued that in the context(s) of Guatemala, social and cultural analy­ sis, and its reliance on alignments of tropes of indigeneity , settlement, and place, produced normative and essentialist accounts of complex social realities and dynamics. They engendered habits of thought and approaches to the conceptualization of the research object that seemed to be ill-­ suited to an analy­ sis of the subjects, processes, and dynamics that I encountered in the field and that are the focus of this work. In this review , I aimed to highlight processes through which ethnographic subjects out-­contextualized the modes of accounting of social and cultural analy­sis 202 / Conclusion during my fieldwork, at once exposing ana­ lyti­ cal presuppositions, bringing into stark relief the labor of fabrication that coincides with the ethnographic endeavor, and the ways in which social and cultural analy­ sis may be consumed, reinterpreted, displaced—and indeed out-­ contextualized— by ethnographic subjects. The emphasis on processes of out-­contextualization seemed particularly relevant as I aimed to bring into view what I argued had been deemed “out of context” by multiple discourses—social scientific but also governmentally informed narratives—namely the region of Petén and related violent histories of displacement. Through the artifice of shifts in perspective and scale, I tried to reveal the (deferred) centrality of Petén to an understanding of histories of violence and conflict, experiences of insurgency and counterinsurgency , and related cultures of secrecy. With these devices, I furtively brought violence and conflict within the realm of perception, mimicking the partial, fragmentary, and secretive modes of disclosure and foreclosure that marked the revelation of experiences of the conflicto armado (armed conflict) during my fieldwork. The partiality and splintering of the research object through movements between contextualization and out-­ contextualization are also powerfully felt in the way the Guatemalan conflict is framed in academic analy­ sis and popu­ lar discourse. Such processes are most apparent when one reflects on the multiplication of names that are given to the Guatemalan conflict and the sheer variety of expressions used. These different ways of naming the conflict reference a plurality of understandings of what the violence that engulfed Guatemala actually was, the his­ tori­ cal dynamics that led to it, and what the violence meant: la lucha, La Violencia, el conflicto armado, the variation el conflicto armado interno—with a differential emphasis on internal dynamics, rather than larger geopo­ liti­ cal process—war, la guerra, counterinsurgency war, genocidal war, ch'a'oj, k'ayowal, época de la guer­ rilla, años de la represión, insurgencia. The different names clearly also reflect different positions vis-­ à-­ vis the conflict and related politics of location , whether one is speaking in English or Spanish, from Guatemala, the United States, Europe, or elsewhere, from the position of communities that bore the brunt of state violence and repression, or from those whose lives were marked by a commitment to the revolutionary struggle. They refer to a range of processes of “reckoning,” as Diane Nelson (2009) has poignantly argued. The book has approached the analy­sis under the sign of insurgency, to specifically connect histories of violence and conflict with the experiences of the combatants of FAR and directly reference their po­ liti­ cal figurations and investments. From all these perspectives, the plurality of names for [3.129.247.196] Project MUSE (2024-04-16...