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CULTURE, TRAUMA, AND WELL-BEING: SOCIAL SUFFERING IN RURAL GUATEMALA

BRIAN PATRICK TYLER

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2017

To the kind and generous people of San Jose El Tesoro and to Kitty & Joe Tyler

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Preparing this dissertation research project – from the development of my research topic, to the preparation of grant proposals, the ethnographic fieldwork, and the years I took to finish the writing of this dissertation – was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. Many people helped me get to the finish line, and far more helped me to find the joy in life.

I must acknowledge the important insights and constructive critiques of faculty members at the University of Florida who helped me along the way, including Drs. Alba

Burns, Peter Collings, Shawn Kneipp, and Alyson Young. My dissertation committee –

Drs. Sharon Abramowitz, Chris McCarty, and Suzanna Smith – helped me to reconsider many of my intellectual positions, and have given me the most important critiques, and the encouragement, that will drive my thinking as I continue writing and researching the topics covered in this dissertation. Most important to me, personally and professionally, has been the encouragement and support of my mentor and dissertation chair – Dr.

Clarence Gravlee – who brought me to Florida and who has been the most influential person in my academic training. I owe any success, now and in my future career, to him and I am eternally grateful for his belief in me.

I also am grateful for financial support I received from the College of Liberal Arts

& Sciences at the University of Florida, the Department of Anthropology, and the

National Science Foundation, all of whom provided research funds that allowed me to develop and complete this research project.

I thank my academic “siblings” at the University of Florida, whose own research was a regular inspiration to me: Yasemin Akdas, Jessica-Jean Casler, June Carrington,

Meredith Marten, Douglas Monroe, and Alan Schultz. Jon Carter, Francois Dengah,

Katy Groves, and Sarah Szurek have remained important colleagues and, more important, friends to me throughout the completion of this work. Thomas Stuart has been an important friend and brother to me, providing both support and a touchstone outside of the academic world to help keep me grounded.

My family, however, has been the most important factor in my life – before, during, and after the completion of this dissertation. The Lambs – Kevin, Kathryn, and

Patrick – are among my favorite people in the entire world, and they continue to provide me so much happiness. Melissa Pewitt and Mark Tyler are actually my favorite people in the whole wide world, and my best friends, and their place in my life has been, on many occasions, legitimately the only thing that kept me from giving up. My parents – Joe and

Kitty Tyler – aside from being the reason I am here on this planet at all – are the main reasons I have developed into who I am and who I might become, and they are the two single most important people in my life. I love them more than I can possibly articulate, and I hope I can do a better job of letting them know that.

Finally, I must thank the people of San Jose El Tesoro. This community was so kind to me – with their time, their homes, their care and friendship – and there is no way

I can possibly begin to thank everyone who made my time there so rewarding. My time in San Jose is one of the best, and most difficult, experiences in my life, and I think about the people there every day. Many people there, as I first thought upon my first visit, may have difficult lives in comparison to the privileged life that I, and most residents of the United States, are lucky to enjoy. But the people there are also filled with a wellspring of positivity and love that is remarkable, and which is lacking in the

United States that I know and understand. They make a beautiful community, and I

hope my future writings about San Jose will reflect just how generous, resilient, and strong its residents are in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and just how much they believe that love and hard work are the foundations of all good things that may come in life. They changed my life – they changed me for the better – and there is no way I can ever repay that debt.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 10

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 11

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 12

ABSTRACT ...... 15

CHAPTER

1 OUTLINING THE DISSERTATION ...... 17

Theoretical Orientation of Dissertation ...... 21 Research Setting ...... 23 Research Design ...... 25 Structure of Dissertation ...... 27

2 A THEORY FRAMEWORK FOR THE STUDY OF POST-CONFLICT SUFFERING ...... 31

Stress, Trauma, and Suffering in the Health Sciences ...... 32 The Biology of the Stress Response ...... 36 The Psychology of the Stress Response ...... 37 The Sociology of the Stress Response ...... 41 Anthropological Social Theory in a Post-Conflict State ...... 46 Reconceptualizing Violence ...... 47 Toward an Anthropology of the State ...... 55 Embodiment ...... 65 Social Suffering ...... 70 Conclusion ...... 73

3 A METHODOLOGY FOR THE STUDY OF POST-CONFLICT SUFFERING .... 75

Studying Culture ...... 76 A Tale of Two Newspapers and Learning (How to Fail at) Fieldnotes ...... 79 Building Rapport and Getting Settled ...... 82 Phase One: Semistructured Interviews and Exploring Narratives ...... 88 Considering Narratives of Health, Suffering, and Society ...... 90 Illness narratives: meditations and models ...... 91 Idioms of distress ...... 98 Phase Two: Structured Interviews and Cultural Models ...... 102 Cognitive Anthropology and the Study of Cultural Models ...... 103

The development of cognitive anthropology...... 105 Cultural models ...... 109 Cultural Consensus ...... 113 Criticisms of Narrative Methods and Cultural Model Approaches ...... 116 Conclusion ...... 121

4 GUATEMALA: A HISTORY OF MARGINALIZATION ...... 125

The Land of Eternal Spring ...... 126 Early Historical Context...... 129 The Colonial Period (1540-1800) ...... 130 Guatemalan Independence: The Early Liberal Period ...... 135 The Carrera Government ...... 139 Liberalism and the Plantation Era ...... 141 Guatemala in the Modern Era ...... 146 The “Guatemalan Revolution” ...... 147 The Development of a National Security State ...... 150 The 1960s: The Rise of a Guerilla Movement ...... 153 The 1970s: Grassroots Populism and Government Repression ...... 155 The 1980s: La Violencia and Genocide ...... 159 The First Steps on the Road To Peace ...... 163 Negotiating Peace Accords ...... 168 Conclusion ...... 179

5 SAINT JOSEPH THE TREASURE ...... 181

Yalpemech and Development in the Northern Transversal ...... 184 The Origins of San Jose El Tesoro ...... 191 House, Home, and Field in San Jose El Tesoro ...... 199 Daily Activities in San Jose ...... 201 Religion and Spirituality in San Jose ...... 205 The Issue of Landholding in San Jose ...... 208 Security in the Post-War Era ...... 211 Whose Family Progresses? ...... 223 Conclusion ...... 234

6 SEMISTRUCTURED INTERVIEWS AND NARRATIVES OF SUFFERING .... 237

Thinking about the Semistructured Interview Protocol ...... 238 Data Collection ...... 241 Sampling ...... 242 Informed Consent ...... 244 Administering the Semistructured Interview ...... 244 Data Analysis ...... 246 Preparing the Data ...... 246 Developing Codes and Identifying Themes ...... 247 Discussion of Narratives ...... 252

Uncertainty about an Unwanted War ...... 253 “Where Was There To Go?”: Land, Displacement, and Repatriation ...... 260 My Pocket Progresses: Criminality, Political Corruption, and Social Justice ...... 261 “Que Dura La Vida”: A Dog's Life at the Margins of the State...... 265 Potential Limitations of Results ...... 274 Conclusion ...... 276

7 STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS AND CULTURAL MODELS OF SUFFERING 278

Domain Analysis and Cultural Consensus ...... 279 Conceptualizing a Domain of Post-Conflict Stress ...... 282 Developing the Ratings Questionnaire ...... 284 Finalizing the Ratings Questionnaire ...... 287 Data Collection ...... 288 Sampling ...... 289 Informed Consent ...... 291 Administering the Interview Questionnaire ...... 291 Data Analysis, Stage One: Measuring Consensus ...... 293 Data Analysis, Stage Two: Intracultural Variation and Residual Agreement .... 299 Analyzing Relationships Between Sub-Domain Items ...... 299 Analyzing Relationships Between Informants ...... 303 Sub-domain analyses: stressors related to the nation-state...... 317 Sub-domain analyses: stressors related to community context ...... 325 Sub-domain analyses: stressors related to the family ...... 331 Sub-domain analyses: stressors related to poverty ...... 337 Potential Limitations of Results ...... 343

8 CONCLUSION ...... 346

Reconsidering the Project Design ...... 347 Reconsidering “Trauma” ...... 349 Reconsidering Post-Conflict Guatemala ...... 352 Conclusion ...... 354

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 356

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 394

LIST OF TABLES

Table page

6-1 Sample distribution for semistructured interviews ...... 243

7-1 Sample distribution for structured interviews ...... 290

7-2 Consensus eigenvalues, full questionnaire ...... 295

7-3 Informant “cultural competency” scores ...... 297

7-4 Cultural consensus answer key, war stressors ...... 309

7-5 Principal components analysis, war stressors ...... 311

7-6 Multiple regression analysis, war stressors ...... 313

7-7 Cultural consensus answer key, national stressors ...... 318

7-8 Principal components analysis, national stressors ...... 319

7-9 Multiple regression analysis, national stressors ...... 321

7-10 Cultural consensus answer key, community stressors ...... 326

7-11 Principal components analysis, community stressors ...... 327

7-12 Multiple regression analysis, community stressors ...... 329

7-13 Cultural consensus answer key, family stressors ...... 332

7-14 Principal components analysis, family stressors...... 333

7-15 Multiple regression analysis, family stressors ...... 334

7-16 Cultural consensus answer key, poverty stressors ...... 338

7-17 Principal components analysis, poverty stressors ...... 339

7-18 Multiple regression analysis, poverty stressors ...... 340

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

7-1 Ladder scale for ratings ...... 292

7-2 Consensus answer key, sorted by sub-domain ...... 298

7-3 Consensus factor loadings, war stressors ...... 314

7-4 Consensus answer key deviations, war stressors ...... 315

7-5 Consensus factor loadings, national stressors ...... 322

7-6 Consensus answer key deviations, national stressors ...... 323

7-7 Consensus factor loadings, community stressors ...... 329

7-8 Consensus answer key deviations, community stressors ...... 330

7-9 Consensus factor loadings, family stressors...... 335

7-10 Consensus answer key deviations, family stressors ...... 336

7-11 Consensus factor loadings, poverty stressors ...... 341

7-12 Consensus answer key deviations, poverty stressors ...... 342

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ASC Asamblea de Sociedad Civil (Assembly of Civil Society)

ASD Acute Stress Disorder

AVANCSO Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales (Association for the Advancement of Social Sciences in Guatemala)

CACIF Comité de Asociaciones Agrícolas, Comerciales, Industriales y Financieras (Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations)

CAFTA Central American Free Trade Agreement

CCA Cultural Consensus Analysis

CCT Conditional Cash Transfer

CEAR Comisión Especial para la Atención a Repatriados, Refugiados y Desplazados (Special Commission for Assistance to Repatriates, Refugees, and Displaced)

CES-D Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale

CEH Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (Commission for Historical Clarification)

CICIG Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala)

COPMAGUA La Coordinación de Organizaciones del Pueblo Maya de Guatemala (Coordination of Organizations of the Mayan People of Guatemala)

DALY Disability Adjusted Life Years

DEA United States Drug Enforcement Agency

DESNOS Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified

DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

EMP Estado Mayor Presidencial (Presidential General Staff)

EGP Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (Guerrila Army of the Poor)

FAR Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (Rebel Armed Forces)

FBI United State Federal Bureau of Investigation

FIFA Fédération Intenationale de Football Association (International Federation of Football Association)

FRG Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (Guatemalan Republican Front)

FTN Franja Transversal del Norte (Northern Transversal Strip)

GANA Gran Alianza Nacional (Grand National Alliance)

GDP Gross Domestic Product

HPA Hypotalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal

HTQ Harvard Trauma Questionnaire

INTA Instituto para la Transforación Agraria (National Institute of Agrarian Transformation)

MDD Major Depressive Disorder

MIFAPRO Mi Familia Progresa (My Family Progresses)

MLN Movimiento Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Movement)

NGO Non-Government Organizations

ODHAG La Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala (Office of Human Rights of the Archbishop of Guatemala)

ORPA Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas (Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms)

PAC Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil (Civil Defense Patrols)

PNC Policía Nacional Civil (National Civil Police)

PTSD Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

REMHI Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Project for the Reconstruction of Guatemala's Historical Memory)

SAM Sympathetic-Adrenal-Medullary

SOA School of the Americas

UFC United Fruit Company

UN United Nations

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

URNG La Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity)

ZDA Zona de Desarrollo Agrario (Zone of Agrarian Development)

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

CULTURE, TRAUMA, AND WELL-BEING:

SOCIAL SUFFERING IN RURAL GUATEMALA

Brian Patrick Tyler

December 2017

Chair: Clarence C. Gravlee, IV Major: Anthropology

This dissertation seeks to explain the nature of suffering in a rural Guatemalan village following 36 years of civil war and 15 years of post-conflict recovery.

The principal goal of this project is a focused ethnography about contemporary village life in rural Guatemala, concerned with the experiences of the civil war, the consequences of displacement and dispossession, and the nature of suffering in present-day Guatemalan society. The methods include participant observation, semistructured interviews (N=48), and structured interviews (N=38).

The semistructured and structured interviews were evaluated for the presence of coherent cultural models about the nature of suffering. Narrative analysis of semistructured interviews and cultural domain analysis of structured interviews indicate that poverty and ongoing structural inequalities in Guatemala are appraised by some rural Guatemalans as being more severe and more difficult to live with than are many of the acute traumatic war-time experiences typically evaluated on conventional diagnostic instruments for traumatic disorder in the context of health interventions.

The results of this project do not just reaffirm the assertion that sociocultural concerns and socioeconomic inequalities are described as being more prescient in the lives of people living in post-conflict communities; instead, the results described here provide empirical confirmation that people in post-conflict settings appraise the sources of suffering as arising out of a much larger suite of life experiences than just traumatic exposure to violence and war.

CHAPTER 1 OUTLINING THE DISSERTATION

A century of research on stress and trauma has established clear connections between distressing life experiences and poor health. This association is particularly evident in people exposed to violence, terror, and warfare (Summerfield 2000a). The impact of war and chronic violence on general health and well-being cannot be understated; the large-scale loss of life and societal upheaval associated with war dramatically increases rates of mortality, morbidity, and disability (Ghobarah et al. 2003).

The disruption of daily life, the lack of shelter and access to resources, and the dismantling of local infrastructure exacerbate disease ecologies in these communities

(Ghobarah et al. 2004a; Pedersen 2002), contributing to the outbreak and reemergence of infectious disease, to the emergence of new medical epidemics, to increased malnutrition, and to dramatic rates of mental illness (Desjarlais and Kleinman 1997).

The insults to community health are particularly noteworthy, and prevalent, in refugee communities exposed to the terror and violence of war (Hollifield et al. 2002; Marsella et al. 1994). However, the precise connections between lived experience, individual psychology, and physical health remain elusive.

Biomedical research consistently describes mental and physical responses in post-conflict settings that are highly variable across research settings, which researchers often suggest is evidence that the primary mechanisms underlying psychophysiological responses to distress are mediated by some aspect, or many aspects, of sociocultural context. This is not an unsubstantiated assertion, however.

Though there is little consensus about precisely how traumatic experiences lead to poor health, research across many disciplines provides a wealth of compelling evidence

about the ways in which sociocultural context shapes health and well-being in the context of warfare. Yet health researchers investigating the long-term effects of war- related distress often seem to struggle with how to model variables related to sociocultural context (Breslau 2004; Schnurr and Green 2004). Overcoming this confusion is critically important if we are to better explain individual variation in community health surveys of physical and mental disorder and, ultimately, to address the needs of communities impacted by the collective trauma of conflict.

Anthropologists have contributed to this academic conversation by outlining four broad but related critiques of conventional health research in post-conflict settings. A principal critique often found in anthropological studies of health is that the prevailing mind-body dualism of much health research impedes our understanding (Lock and Lock

1988). While early research on stress and trauma recognized a fundamental connection between experience, mind, and body (Cannon 1932; Erichsen 1866; Freud 1955; Rivers

1920; Selye 1976), contemporary biomedical health research has generally focused on mental health or biological health. Mental health researchers in post-conflict settings typically rely primarily on standardized clinical diagnoses of mental disorder (American

Psychiatric Association 2000); biological health researchers, though, tend to focus on the complex physiological pathways underlying a physiological response to traumatic events (Kelly, Hertzman, and Daniels 1997). Anthropologists argue instead that researchers must acknowledge the inherent links between experience, mind, and body

(Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987).

A second, related anthropological critique is that researchers of health in post- conflict settings, particularly those evaluating mental disorder, too often rely upon

clinical diagnostic categories that were developed with Western populations (Young

1995). Anthropologists argue that there are limits to the effectiveness of these clinical categories in non-Western settings, where epistemological paradigms about one’s place in the world may be quite different than the Western―or, perhaps better stated, post- industrial―construction of the Self upon which many modern clinical categories are based (Bracken 2001; Giddens 1991; Kleinman 1977).

The third critique is that biomedical conceptions of distress tend to universalize the causes and consequences of suffering, so that, for instance, the health consequences of warfare are framed as being the same in all places to all people, when local sociocultural context may mediate the definition and appraisal of that suffering

(Bracken, Giller, and Summerfield 1995; Kirmayer 1989; Summerfield 1997, 1999).

Finally, anthropologists argue that health researchers typically rely on a somewhat narrow view of what constitutes distress, trauma, and suffering (Breslau

2004; Hollified et al. 2002). A primary focus on individually-experienced acute war- related events obscures the impact of both the macro-level societal forces that might constrain one’s ability to maintain good health (Melville and Lykes 1992; Miller, Mulkami, and Kushner 2006; Sapolsky 2005; Silove 1999) and the local sociocultural context within which people engage one another on a daily basis in post-conflict settings (Al-

Krenawi et al. 2007; Miller and Rasmussen 2010), both of which may themselves be the source of ongoing distress, suffering, and poor health (Panter-Brick et al. 2008, 2009;

Sapolsky 2004).

The link connecting these critiques is that meaning matters. In post-conflict settings, researchers should not conceptualize well-being as something that can be

identified simply from a doctor’s evaluation of good health or a lack of mental disorder, nor should suffering be evaluated according to a priori assumptions about what causes people to feel distress. Attending to the concerns of those anthropological critiques requires that researchers must consider individual and collective distress as being the product of more than just the experiences of war-related violence or communal traumas.

Instead, those who are suffering should be given the opportunity to identify their own beliefs and understandings about what causes distress in their world. Researchers must broaden their analytical gaze to incorporate a larger suite of life experiences and conditions that characterize post-war societies rather than focus solely upon the events conventionally associated with the direct violence and resultant trauma of warfare.

However, researchers also should not assume that this broader view of potential stressors actually better reflects the concerns of those who are suffering. The many sources of post-conflict strain identified by academic literature―for instance, political- economic inequalities, sociocultural context, or tenuous ties to an unstable physical environment―may not, in fact, be considered by people to be more difficult than wartime experiences. But if we are to better explain the wide-range of variation in individual health outcomes in post-conflict settings, we must identify the life stressors that impact affected populations the most, and we must test the degree to which those stressors are or are not comparable.

There is little doubt that the violence and upheaval of warfare are bad, but this dissertation takes advantage of developments in culture theory and ethnographic methods to test empirically whether the enduring legacy of political, economic, and sociocultural marginalization is really perceived as being worse still.

Theoretical Orientation of Dissertation

The accumulated evidence from public health research suggests that people who are exposed to a wide range of distress―the acute and the chronic, the traumatic and the seemingly mundane, the physical and the mental―are at a higher risk of manifesting poor health outcomes. Medical anthropologists have added to these findings, but the most important contribution of their cross-cultural ethnographic case studies is that distress is shaped by connections between an individual’s lived experiences, collective moral understandings of the world, and a community’s history and sociocultural context. In the process, many of those anthropologists have questioned conventional biomedical categories and clinical diagnoses of individualized disorder, suggesting that suffering is better understood as a collective and social engagement.

But how does a researcher evaluate the causes and forms of suffering in a community of people who have individually and collectively experienced the violent events that took place over the course of a 36 years long civil war, and who every day arise to endemic poverty, uncertain employment opportunities, minimal access to healthcare or other government assistance, heavy reliance upon tenuous plots of land, and ongoing fears about potential crime and threats of violence?

To answer that question, this project incorporates a range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies from diverse anthropological traditions. Medical anthropology is useful for this project because of its broad focus on the relationship between culture and health. The development of this project has been shaped in particular by two traditions within medical anthropology―critical medical anthropology and biocultural anthropology―that focus on the political-economic and sociocultural

determinants of health. Both of these traditions connect macro-level social determinants to individual well-being and, thus, are important for establishing that a wide variety of seen and unseen forces in society can shape suffering in post-conflict settings.

Similarly, this project draws from psychological anthropology to describe how sociocultural context shapes individual beliefs about moral values, the expression of emotions, and conceptions of the self.

In addition, because much of Guatemala’s historical trajectory―before, during, and after the war―has been driven by engagements between the state and the agrarian sector, this project employs anthropological perspectives on political ecology to connect environmental context with processes related to political-economy, state power, and the marginalization of rural communities. Though overlapping somewhat with one another, perspectives from medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, and political ecology all share in common the understanding that individuals are embedded within larger cultural, economic, political, and social contexts that interact to frame an individual’s understanding about the world.

From these various interdisciplinary perspectives, I integrate several topical literatures relevant to the ways that people appraise suffering in post-conflict settings.

Chief among these is research contributing to an anthropology of violence, which broadly argues that conceptions of violence should include the many ways in which some aspect of social institutions or social structures within society limit the ability of people to fulfill their basic needs. Similarly, anthropological literature contributing to an anthropology of the State offers a backdrop of social theory about how connections between global financial interests and the national state marginalize rural communities.

Research in anthropology about embodiment is described in order to discuss how sociocultural context impacts individual understandings of the mind and body. Finally, social suffering perspectives are extended to describe how individual and collective understandings of that sociocultural context, and the suffering that can result from it, are given voice by those who are suffering.

My assertion here is that these broad bodies of anthropological theory present a compelling framework from which to explore the ways in which people talk about, and think about, the problems facing agrarian communities in post-conflict settings. In order to connect cognition, cultural beliefs, and human behavior at my fieldsite community, this dissertation draws upon recent social theory and systematic research methods from cognitive anthropology for the collection and analysis of ethnographic data.

Research Setting

I traveled to Guatemala to live with a community of former refugees, displaced and dispossessed as a result of the civil war, having lived through a wide range of potentially traumatizing events, entrenched in poverty and marginalized by an insecure and failing State. My primary goal was to explore how individual and collective understandings about life in Guatemala shape the ways in which Guatemalans talk about, appraise, and share their beliefs about the nature of post-conflict stress and suffering. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Yalpemech, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, over 15 months (May 2009 - July 2010). This village is illustrative of post-conflict

Guatemala for a number of reasons.

First, the village is typical of other rural communities in the Guatemalan countryside. The village is comprised of approximately 250 families, with an estimated

1,800 people currently residing there. Residents subsist on small agricultural plots that

surround the village center in all directions, from which grow primarily maize, beans, rice, and small amounts of fruit and vegetables. Aside from the money earned through selling crops, most of the residents of the village do not have access to regular income or employment, with many people traveling outside the village for additional work. Thus, villagers are subject to the same kinds of economic insecurity as are most rural

Guatemalans who subsist on agrarian work and rely upon insecure and unstable environmental resources.

Yalpemech also lacks much of the basic infrastructure that is missing in other parts of rural Guatemala. There is only one road that provides access to automobiles―unpaved and arduous to travel even by foot at the time of my fieldwork―and only three vans that regularly traverse it. Though a few residents own scooters or motorbikes, most people travel by foot, horse, or (somehow) bicycle.

Security, in the form of police or military agents, is nonexistent, and thus issues related to criminal justice are handled by the community itself. There is a little used medical clinic provided by a house of Franciscan nuns who live in the village; otherwise, the medical professionals in the village consist of a few community health workers, a couple trained nurses, several untrained midwives, and semi-regular visits by outside health professionals who are primarily concerned with the evaluation of infants, toddlers, and expectant mothers. Residents typically seek healthcare from from folk healers, from the village bodegas that carry a limited range of natural and synthetic medicines, and from pharmacies in the nearest large town, Raxruha. Malaria and dengue, respiratory infections, and diarrheal diseases are commonplace.

A third reason that Yalpemech is a suitable location for this research is because the village population is multicultural. Roughly half of the village’s population is Q’eqchi’, a Maya group found throughout the Guatemalan highlands and in Alta Verapaz, in particular. Most of the remaining village residents refer to themselves as castellanos, or

Spanish speakers. The division between Q’eqchi’ and castellanos reflect the unique history of settlement in Yalpemech, which made it particularly apt for my fieldwork.

Though the area known as Yalpemech has existed as a much larger plantation since before the end of the civil war, the small footprint of the village in which I worked was formally established in 1991 after the government purchased the land where the village now sits, specifically as a community for Guatemalans that were displaced during the war from municipios (municipalities) throughout the country. Though there are some families who have maintained residence in the area since it was a privately-owned plantation, roughly half of the village consists of people who were externally displaced from Guatemala to the El Tesoro refugee camp in Honduras while the other half of the community's population is comprised of Q’eqchi’ Maya who were internally displaced from their communities of origin, primarily in Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz.

Research Design

I follow the lead of previous scholars (Coetzee and Rau 2009; Henry 2006;

Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997; Pavlish 2007) by taking as axiomatic that individual and collective suffering in post-conflict settings should be explored through the experiences, opinions, and voices of those who are actually suffering. Ethnographic data collection for this project was an iterative process, combining qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis, which occurred over the course of three broad phases,

building from traditional methods of participant observation, informal conversations, and unstructured interviews to progressively more structured interviews and questionnaires.

The first broad phase of ethnographic research was focused on participant observation, a staple of traditional anthropological ethnographic fieldwork (DeWalt and

DeWalt 2002). Participant observation, though occurring over the entire course of the project, was the sole focus of research in the first months following my arrival in

Yalpemech. Once settled in the village, I sought to build relationships with a wide range of people, to familiarize myself with and to take part in the daily activities of community life, and, generally, to be seen out and about so that the community might begin to become familiarized with me (DeWalt, DeWalt, and Wayland 1998). In addition to establishing relationships with village residents, this phase of research was important for exploring the relevance of my tentative proposed research questions and for framing later phases of data collection and interview questions in culturally appropriate terms

(Weller 1998, 367).

I used information gained from participant observation and informal conversations to infer culturally meaningful themes related to the experience of post- conflict life in Guatemala and the cultural construction of suffering. These themes were explored in more detail using semistructured interviews (Spradley 1979). The broad aim of this phase of interviews was to elicit narratives from village residents—e.g., life stories, descriptions of their daily lives, opinions about the state of the country—that might suggest shared understandings about the struggles of life in post-war Guatemala.

Based upon anthropological social theory, multidisciplinary empirical research, and previous ethnographic work in Guatemala and other post-conflict settings, I designed an

interview protocol covering topics related to (1) life during the civil war, (2) the refugee experience, including community disruption, displacement, dispossession, and repatriation, (3) life in Guatemala in the post-war era, in the community and in the country at large, and (4) the experience of rural agrarian life.

In a second phase of ethnographic interviews, I constructed a structured interview questionnaire in which informants were asked to rate the severity of 113

“items” that published research and previous ethnographic stages identified as being particularly difficult stressors in post-war contexts. Questionnaire items were organized across five broad categories of stressors: (1) traumatic war-time exposures, (2) State institutions, (3) community life, (4) domestic life, and (5) the experience of poverty. The data generated by this questionnaire is amenable to both qualitative and quantitative methods of data analysis, including exploratory factor analysis, cultural consensus analysis (Romney, Weller, and Batchelder 1987), and multiple regression. Results were then analyzed with both numerical and visual representations of the statistical relationships between informants and between questionnaire items.

Structure of Dissertation

This dissertation is structured into three broad sections. The first section provides a background on the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have driven this research project from its inception. In Chapter 2, I briefly review some background history of biomedical research on the stress process, social theory about the political- economic forces shaping the marginalization of impoverished communities, and the anthropological constructs and philosophical arguments that have influenced my own understandings about the kinds of factors shaping human suffering in post-conflict settings. Taken together, this synthesis establishes a foundation for my argument that

theory from the social sciences, and from anthropology in particular, leads us to view suffering in post-conflict settings from a much larger suite of potential life stressors than just the acute traumatic exposures of warfare commonly investigated by public health research. In Chapter 3, I describe the ethnographic traditions and methodological paradigms from medical anthropology that shape the research design of this project.

The second broad section of the dissertation (Chapters 4 and 5) is devoted to presenting the ethnographic setting for this research project: rural Alta Verapaz,

Guatemala. This section has four primary goals: (1) to illustrate how the history of

Guatemala has shaped the ways in which the State has interacted with impoverished, rural, and indigenous communities; (2) to present the historical development of the village and to give the reader a sense of what life there has been like for its residents in the years following the end of the civil war, (3) to give ethnographic context to the discussion of cultural models of suffering that are described in subsequent chapters, and (4) to establish the argument that many of Guatemala’s post-war problems related to political-economic inequalities, increased rates of crime and violence, political and judicial malfeasance, environmental degradation, malnutrition, and endemic poverty are related to the general failure of the Guatemalan government to enact the legislation mandated by the Peace Accords.

In Chapter 4, I present the historical context of post-colonial Guatemala that gave rise to both the civil war and, I argue, many of its ongoing domestic problems, and conclude with a brief discussion of the 1996 peace agreements that brought an end to the civil war. The content of this chapter is composed primarily of previously published literature on the history of Guatemala, and as such serves as a background literature

review and broad introduction to the larger setting within which my fieldsite is embedded. Chapter 5 builds from this historical background by presenting an ethnographic picture of life in Yalpemech in the years following the peace agreements and during my time living in the community. This chapter is loosely organized in terms of the major individual agreements that comprise the 1996 Peace Accords, incorporating previously published literature about post-war Guatemala, recent news stories and formal reports highlighting the country’s ongoing domestic problems, and ethnographic data generated from informant interviews and my personal impressions as a participant- observer living in the community.

While the second section of the dissertation is primarily informed by my own library research and by my observations of life in the village, the third broad section of this dissertation privileges my informants’ views about the struggles they have experienced during and after the war era. This section presents the data collection and analyses occurring in two distinct phases of ethnographic interviews with residents in my fieldsite community. The first phase of ethnographic interviews, presented in Chapter

6, involves my exploration of informant narratives about life in post-war Guatemala, providing more details about the community's thoughts regarding the civil war, the refugee experience, and contemporary problems related to State institutions, the sociocultural context of the village, and daily life in the context of endemic poverty. The second phase of ethnographic research is presented in Chapter 7, where I describe the development and administration of a structured interview questionnaire used to survey informants' evaluations about the relative severity of different sources of distress faced by members of the community. I also present the basic methods of the cultural

consensus analytic framework, as well as additional supplementary methods of statistical analysis that provide more details about the informants' questionnaire responses.

The research described in these two chapters generated data that enable me to contribute ethnographic findings to research on Guatemala and social suffering, in general, but that data also allows me to make important contributions to discussions about ethnographic research methods in anthropology, trauma research in post-conflict settings, and the policy implications for health interventions and other development programs. In the final Chapter 8, I discuss some of the implications deriving from this research project, and I offer potential future directions in post-conflict settings.

CHAPTER 2 A THEORY FRAMEWORK FOR THE STUDY OF POST-CONFLICT SUFFERING

Research from across the health and social sciences now recognizes that the vulnerability of individuals, as well as the resulting suffering of communities ravaged by war and violence, is shaped by the direct violence of war and by the conditions of post- conflict society. Anthropologists contribute to this literature by arguing that culture is an important variable constructing both one’s vulnerability to suffering and the ways in which one responds to that suffering. Thus, anthropologists argue, a primary goal of research in post-conflict settings should be to explore the many sources of distress identified by affected communities as well as the subjective meaning and impact of their suffering. In order to accomplish this goal, anthropologists carry out directed participant- observation, asking people to discuss their lives, their sociocultural contexts, and their feelings about the distress caused by warfare and the ongoing problems faced after the war is over. The questions asked by anthropologists should be informed by a wide range of theoretical perspectives that elaborate how the environment, writ large, from political-economic forces to sociocultural context to the natural environment, shapes both the causes and interpretations of suffering.

This dissertation is about the sources of suffering experienced by people living in post-conflict settings, as well as the ways in which people―individually and collectively―differ in their appraisal of that suffering. In the following two chapters, I present the academic literatures that underlie my project’s theoretical orientation and the theory-driven research design, organizing the discussion according to three specific aims:

 to present a synthesis of the evidence identified by academic literature, from the biomedical and social sciences, about the many types of insults to individual well- being that might be experienced in post-conflict settings;

 to describe the anthropological contributions to social theory about how these various insults shape the etiology, course, and meaning of suffering; and,

 to outline the ethnographic traditions that informed the development of this project’s research design.

My hope is that this project―and the synthesis of anthropological social theory and ethnographic research methods it incorporates―presents a compelling framework that is useful for the study of suffering in other post-conflict settings.

Stress, Trauma, and Suffering in the Health Sciences

The vast majority of literature on human suffering in the context of conflict, war, and violence is found in the health sciences, built upon a long history of research about the psychophysiological consequences of distressing life experiences. John Eric

Erichsen’s (1866) On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System is commonly cited as one of the first major efforts to describe the characteristic symptoms of what people―both doctors and lay people alike―now widely refer to colloquially as stress and trauma. Building from earlier research on surgical shock, Erichsen identified

“railway spine” as a motor function disorder resulting from severe traumas to the spinal cord and vertebral column that are common to victims in railcar crashes. However, he also noted an interesting consequence of bodily trauma that continues to mystify researchers over 100 years later: accident victims often suffered somatic sensations and mental disturbances despite the apparent absence of discernible physical injury

(Keller and Chappell 1996).

Erichsen believed these latter features of railway spine to be organic in nature, as well, yet he was unable to connect the precise links between altered physiological

function, human psychology, and the mechanics of the crash itself (Young 1995,14-16).

However, because many of the somatic and mental disturbances noted in cases of railway spine often emerged weeks or months after the initial accident, critics of

Erichsen’s ideas argued that these aspects of railway spine symptom clusters were primarily psychological in nature rather than the result of organic disorder (Young 1995,

16-17). One such critic―the surgeon Herbert Page (1883)―argued that Erichsen’s findings discounted the role of fright as a variable underlying the manifestation of victims’ symptoms, positing fear to be an experiential event substantial enough to illicit the psychological symptoms characteristic of railway spine (van der Kolk et al. 1996).

Medical professionals increasingly referred to these symptoms as a type of traumatic neurosis, or neurasthenia, akin to the diagnoses ascribed during that time period to hysteria, a disorder whose symptoms similarly featured both physical and psychological components (Keller and Chappell 1996). Jean-Martin Charcot noted that many symptoms of hysteria seemed to mirror symptoms of neurological damage, including motor paralyses, sensory losses, convulsions, and amnesias (Herman 1997,

11). Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud, who were more concerned with the psychological components of hysteria than the sensory symptoms noted by Charcot, interpreted that

“the somatic symptoms of hysteria represented disguised representations of intensely distressing events which had been banished from memory” (Herman 1997, 12). Freud, in particular, attributed the manifestation of hysteric symptoms not to an initial traumatic

event but rather to less distressing events that trigger memories of that first traumatic exposure (Leys 2010).1

These assertions were reinforced during World War I, when physicians and psychologists across Europe noted that soldiers returning from the battlefield displayed mental problems that resembled the symptoms of hysteria (Herman 1997, 20). Initial diagnoses attributed these symptoms to physical causes―the result of close exposure to the concussive effects of exploding shells that characterized trench warfare―and the disorder was medicalized as “shell shock.” However, in the decades that followed, a pair of anthropologists, W. H. R. Rivers and Abram Kardiner, drew from European psychoanalysis to attribute symptoms of shell-shock to psychiatric origins. Rivers, who was also a physician and psychologist, established that (1) mental distress was not caused by exposure to concussive force as much as by witnessing the maiming and death of fellow soldiers and (2) even the most courageous and physically strong soldiers could succumb to this psychological distress (Rivers 1920). Kardiner, also a psychoanalyst, affirmed Rivers’ findings by noting that the acute symptoms of war neuroses―shock, comatose conditions, delirious and maniacal reactions, and sensory disturbances (Kardiner 1941, 7)―resembled the symptoms of hysteria but featured a number of physical components, as well. Kardiner thus called combat trauma a

“physioneurosis”―existing somewhere inbetween mental disturbances and organic disease (Talbott 1997).

1 Freud's (1962) argument was premised on childhood psychosexual traumas, an aspect of his theory that is now largely seen as dubious at best, but his understanding of “deferred action” as a dialectic between two events and the constitution of memory is an important foundation for the last century of theory and research on trauma.

This early research highlighted that extreme distress, whether or not the specific trauma directly inflicts bodily harm, can result in a suite of interconnected psychophysiological and behavioral problems. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, research has often disregarded the fundamental connections between experience, mind, and body. Instead, academic research about traumatic exposures has developed largely along separate, but parallel, lines of inquiry that focus on the outcomes of physical stress or psychological stress. Biological health researchers tend to focus on the complex physiological pathways between the brain and the rest of the body that underlie biological responses to environmental conditions and specific distressing life events (Habib, Gold, and Chrousos 2001; Kelly, Hertzman, and Daniels

1997; Moberg 2000), measuring health outcomes that are related to cardiovascular

(Black and Garbutt 2002; Esch et al. 2002), neuroendocrine (Hellhammer, Wust, and

Kudielka 2009; Meewisse et al. 2007), and immunological alterations (McDade 2005;

McDade and Worthman 1999).

By contrast, mental health researchers typically explore the etiology of stress- related psychology (American Psychiatric Association 2000), focusing primarily on extreme life experiences and generally relying upon standardized clinical measures of depression and anxiety (Beuke, Fischer, and McDowall 2003; Kessler 1997), posttraumatic stress (Andrews et al. 2007; Brewin, Andrews, and Valentine 2000; Kroll

2003), and somatization disorders (Crofford 2007; North 2002). These two lines of biomedical inquiry, though addressing different kinds of health outcomes and different sources of psychophysiological alteration, have resulted in a broad and diverse body of

literature that serves as an important starting point for trauma-related research in post- conflict settings.

The Biology of the Stress Response

The American physiologist Walter Cannon (1915) described an early theory of stress-induced disease following a series of laboratory-based animal experiments, identifying “many highly specific mechanisms for protection against hunger, thirst, hemorrhage, or agents tending to disturb normal body temperature, blood pH, or plasma levels of sugar, protein, fat, and calcium” (Selye 1993, 8). He discovered that environmental stimuli―hunger, pain, and other bodily emergencies faced as a consequence of existing in the natural world―can trigger the sympathetic nervous system and adrenal hormone activity to marshall energy resources to counter bodily threats. He called this process the body’s “fight or flight” response (Cannon 1915).2

Hans Selye’s classic animal experiments extended Cannon’s research about environmental threats, additionally describing a range of “nocuous agents” that include toxins, noise, extreme temperatures, bodily injury, weight, and microbial colonies (Selye

1936). Selye identified “stress” as a non-specific physiological reaction universal to all mammals, including humans, as a means of response to these noxious agents (Viner

1999).

Subsequent research established that the brain initiates physiological responses to environmental threats when information from the senses is filtered through the thalamus and processed by the amygdala (Christopher 2004). The brain then prepares

2Cannon (1932) later described the now widely used term “homeostasis” to refer to an interactive balance between environmental stress and physiological function.

the body to react by modulating activation of both the peripheral sympathetic-adrenal- medullary (SAM) system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system (Gunnar and Quevado 2007). The first response is to inhibit the production of hormones related to digestion, growth, tissue repair, and sexual production (Sapolsky 2004, 395). The

SAM and HPA systems then work in conjunction to release a variety of hormones, which serve (1) to make energy stores immediately available through the body, (2) to mobilize and redistribute that energy, (3) to increase oxygen and sugar content in the blood, and

(4) to divert blood flow to skeletal muscles and the brain (Brown 1981, 77;

Schneiderman, Ironson, and Siegel 2005, 612).

In the short-term, the cessation of “normal” biological functioning allows energy stores to be devoted immediately and specifically to the protection of the body against environmental threats. In the long-term, however, the chronic disruption of these normal bodily processes prevents healthy physical development over the life-course and can contribute both to neurobiological problems and to illnesses associated with altered cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune function (Bremner and Vermetten 2001;

Charmandari, Tsigos, and Chrousos 2005).

The Psychology of the Stress Response

Research about the psychological components underlying the human stress response has focused primarily on the early findings that some people can be diagnosed with severe emotional disruptions and clinical mental disorders without actually having suffered a discernible physical injury. However, conventional medical opinion about the mental health consequences of traumatic exposures did not advance significantly beyond the work of Rivers and Kardiner until the large-scale return of U.S. soldiers from the Vietnam Conflict. Spurred by political pressure to account for the wide

range of behavioral, social, and psychiatric problems exhibited by many returned veterans,3 the American Psychiatric Association (1980) formulated Posttraumatic Stress

Disorder (PTSD) as a distinct category of mental disorder to be included within the

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). Stressors are described as being traumatic when they include “experiencing, witnessing, or confronting events that involve actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others” (American Psychiatric Association 1994, 427).

The disorder, in turn, is diagnosed if each of the following categories of experience is met: (1) the re-experiencing of the traumatic event, in the form of intrusive memories and dreams, feelings that the trauma(s) will continue, and distress in response to cues that recall the initial event(s); (2) symptoms of hyperarousal, including insomnia, angry outbursts, exaggerated startle response, and difficulty concentrating; and (3) symptoms of withdrawal, avoidance from stimuli associated with the trauma(s), and numbing of overall responsiveness (Breslau 2004, 115; Pervanidou 2008, 632).

In the short-term, the identification of PTSD as a clinical disorder gave legitimacy to the problems faced by a large segment of the military veteran population. However, since its official designation, the epidemiology of PTSD has been a contentious issue, with most criticisms questioning the defining diagnostic criteria, the construct’s validity, and the clinical utility of the disorder as a category of mental illness (Breslau and

3Advocacy groups lobbied on the premise that wartime experiences represent a distinct class of human experience that was not adequately recognized by the clinical standards of that time, arguing that veterans were consistently misdiagnosed as not suffering from mental disability and thus were not given the opportunity to pursue treatment through federal veterans’ affairs agencies and health centers (Young 1995).

Kessler 2001; Spitzer, First and Wakefield 2007; Young 2004).4 Though initially developed to account for the experiences of military veterans, the nomenclature’s boundaries for trauma have expanded beyond combat to include a much broader range of distressing life experiences, including domestic abuse (Evans, Davies, and DiLillo

2008; Griffing et al. 2006; Jones, Hughes, and Unterstaller 2001), sexual violence

(Bennice et al. 2003; Campbell et al. 2008; Lang et al. 2003), natural disasters (Adams and Boscarino 2006; Basoglu, Salcioglu, and Livianou 2002; North et al. 2004), and automobile, workplace, and industrial accidents (Clohessy and Ehlers 1999; Hickling and Blanchard 1992; MacDonald et al. 2003).

These studies confirm that many kinds of life events can create situations of extreme distress that place one at greater risk for manifesting symptoms of PTSD, but there is substantial evidence that other mental disorders―most notably, depression and anxiety―also have high prevalence rates in these contexts (Brady et al. 2000; Momartin et al. 2004). Furthermore, diagnoses of PTSD and depressive symptoms are commonly associated with a range of somatic symptoms (e.g., headaches, dizziness, fatigue) that are not currently identified within clinical definitions of traumatic mental disorder (Hoge et al. 2007; Shalev, Bleich, and Ursano 1990; Van Ommeren et al. 2002). The high rates of comorbidity between PTSD and Major Depression Disorder (MDD),5 as well as high

4Though the diagnostic criteria for PTSD were revised slightly in the DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association 2000), there has been a larger debate in the development of the DSM-V in regard to stress-related disorders (Flanagan, Keeley, and Blashfield 2008) and to PTSD in particular (Elhai et al. 2008; Ford and Courtois 2009; Pynoos et al. 2009).

5MDD is frequently identified in trauma-related mental health research, which is unsurprising because depressive symptoms are the most common form of psychological distress and because MDD is the most prevalent psychiatric disorder identified in population-based health research (Kessler 1994; Kessler et al. 2003; Turner and Lloyd 1999, 375).

rates of somatization, in the context of traumatic exposure has inspired questions about whether these are “empirically differentiable disorders or manifestations of a single continuum of posttraumatic stress” (Marshall et al. 2005, 577).6 Nevertheless, PTSD has become the most common indicator of psychological stress in post-conflict settings

(Breslau and Davis 1987).

Ascertaining the precise number of deaths due directly to the violence of warfare can be difficult, but we know that war remains the fourth most common cause of injury- death in the world, following only unintended injuries, suicides, and homicides (Garfield

2008, 23). Harder still is accounting for the number of deaths due indirectly to the long- term psychological consequences of traumatic exposures or to the vulnerability created by disrupted societal resources. However, a substantial body of public health research now provides evidence that people who survive the traumatic experiences of violence and warfare are often faced with decreased life expectancy and high prevalence rates of psychophysiological disorder (Levy and Sidel 2009; Weinberg and Simmonds 1995).

Health surveys of combat veterans from wars across the globe have found elevated rates of both mental disorder and a wide range of symptoms that represent altered physiological function and social behavior (Benyamini and Soloman 2005;

Hobfoll, Figley, and Sandler 1991; Kazis et al. 1998; Levy and Sidel 2008). These health outcomes are even more dramatic in non-combat populations who have been exposed

6The elaboration of alternative diagnoses―for instance, Disorders of Extreme Distress Not Otherwise Specified (DESNOS) (de Jong et al. 2005; van der Kolk et al. 2005) or Acute Stress Disorder (ASD) (Harvey and Bryant 2002)―and the evaluation of different indices of suffering, like Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY) (Barker and Green 1996; World Bank 1993), are attempts to explore these considerations.

to warfare (Ghobarah, Huth, and Russett 2004a; Krippner and McIntyre 2003;

Summerfield 1996), and research outlines how women (Amowitz et al. 2002; Schmidt,

Kravic, and Ehlert 2008; Watts and Zimmerman 2002), children (Fazel and Stein 2002;

Jordans et al. 2009; Thabet and Vostanis 2000), and refugee populations (Bracken,

Giller, and Summerfield 1997; Fazel, Wheeler, and Danesh 2005; Hollifield et al. 2002;

Porter 2007) are particularly vulnerable.

While poor health is clearly associated with exposure to conflict and violence, community health surveys in post-conflict settings raise significant questions about why so many people who are exposed to the same traumas, even within the same communities, do not exhibit the same kinds of health problems (Adler and Matthews

1994; Boscarino 2004; Lloyd and Turner 2003; Summerfield 2008). Sociological perspectives on stress and health suggest that the variation found in these studies is likely due to an individual's immediate social context.

The Sociology of the Stress Response

A consideration of evidence from social studies of health can do much to bridge the gap between the sometimes disconnected models of stress found in biological and psychological health research, and medical anthropologists working in war-torn communities are wise to incorporate empirical data that adds more weight to their substantive points about the nature of distress in post-conflict settings. By conceptualizing stressors to include life experiences that are primarily social in nature, empirical research from social studies of health reinforces anthropological critiques that conventional measures of stress-related health are based upon a limited range of potential insults to individual well-being. Indeed, the broad theory and empirical findings from social studies of health provide evidence that a person’s place within structures of

social order, and the personal life changes, both extreme and minor, that may occur as a result of existing within those structures, can expose a person to a range of stressors that leave one vulnerable to poor health (Kessler, Price, and Wortman 1985; Lin and

Ensel 1989).

Contemporary studies about the social context of health often draw from the early work of Hans Selye, whose animal experiments introduced two important findings that suggested a cognitive component to the manifestation of stress-related symptomology. First, he showed that the physiological stress response can be stimulated by the organism’s anticipation of physical stressors; that is, the expectation of environmental threats, whether or not the threat actually occurs, can elicit the characteristic effects of the biological stress response. Second, but more important,

Selye’s research also suggested that difficult social interactions can initiate the same cascading physiological responses. In his early work, Selye (1936) noted that the presence of other animals can create negative “social” environments that activate the physiological stress response; in his later work on the stress of human social life, Selye

(1976) argued that the social environment can be just as noxious as the physical environment.

The intellectual development of social studies of health have built from these two findings, coalescing into four broad hypotheses about how the social environment mediates individual well-being and contributes to psychophysiological impairment

(Wheaton 1999). Research exploring the trait hypothesis, most notably in the work of

Dohrenwend and Dohrenwend (1974) and Thoits (1983), examines the dimensions of different distressing life events and how people identify those events as stressful

according to their own unique appraisals. Studies exploring the differential vulnerability hypothesis (Kessler 1979) are concerned with the ways in which social class creates both differential exposures to stressors and differential access to social resources that might buffer against (or exacerbate) those stressors. The context hypothesis, as described in the work of Brown (1974), focuses on how previous life experiences shape an individual’s perceptions of what constitutes a stressful experience. Finally, research using the stress domain hypothesis (Thoits 1995) introduced an important focus on disentangling the wide variety of stressors impacting individual responses, noting the ambiguous distinctions between traumatic and minor life experiences and between acute and chronic stressors, which ultimately are dependent entirely upon the individual’s appraisal of stressors and perceptions of severity.

Pearlin et al. (1981) synthesized these four broad perspectives by identifying “the stress process” as the complicated relationship between environmental stressors, social context, and psychobiological well-being. Pearlin notes three assumptions inherent to this framework. First, “the diverse factors that converge on people’s well-being are interrelated” (Pearlin 1999, 396). Individuals coexist in a social environment; therefore, research must consider how the social environment, and particularly an individual’s social status, might impact (1) the nature and number of one’s stressful exposures, (2) the resources that an individual can call upon as a response to those stressors, and (3) the consequences of poor psychophysiological health. Second, the study of stress is not necessarily about unusual people dealing with unusual circumstances; instead, social stress is “concerned with thoroughly socialized people engaged in the ordinary pursuits of life and driven by widely shared values and commitments” (Pearlin 1999, 396). Third,

sociological perspectives are more concerned with the “naturalistic origins of stress” rather than what happens to people after the onset of stress (Pearlin 1999, 397). These considerations have driven subsequent research on social stress, which have important implications for the study of post-conflict suffering.

First, the same psychophysiological health problems associated with traumatic exposures in the context of warfare have also been identified by surveys in communities that have not experienced the violence of war―or, at least, not in the sense of conventional definitions of “war” (Breslau et al. 1998; Freudenberg 2001; Mitchell and

Maracle 2005; Resnick et al. 1993). In particular, a number of indicators related to low socioeconomic status, to sociodemographic marginalization, to lack of social support, and to upsetting social interactions have been shown to negatively impact long-term health outcomes (Charuvastra and Cloitre 200; Norris 1992; Thoits 2006).

Second, biomedical research on stress and, especially, post-conflict health may not adequately consider the relationships between these social sources of stress. If, as

Pearlin implies, health, stress, and suffering should be understood as a process rather than an outcome, researchers must think beyond the identification of specific health- related symptoms and specific proximate causes of suffering. As Yen and Syme (1999,

288) note, a person’s physical and social environments do not exist independently of one another and so a study of distressing life experiences and individual well-being must focus instead on “the continuing interaction between natural and man-made components, social processes, and the relationships between individuals and groups.”

This sentiment is mirrored in the ecological research model proposed in the first

World Report on Violence and Health, the World Health Organization’s (Krug et al.

2002) exploration of the health consequences of violence across the globe. The report evaluates violence across four distinct categories of vulnerability to violence: (1) biological and behavioral factors, including demographic characteristics, socioeconomic status, mental health, and individual histories; (2) interpersonal relationships, particularly those between family members and friends; (3) community context, and the ways in which risk is delineated by community institutions—e.g., schools, churches, neighborhood boundaries—and the social networks created within and between those institutions; and (4) societal factors that both encourage violence and inhibit individual and communal responses to that violence (Krug et al. 2002, 1085).

This is an important step in the right direction for future health research in post- conflict settings. If research about distress and suffering is to take seriously the evidence that biological, mental, and behavioral dysfunction results not just from severe physical or emotional traumas but also from the otherwise seemingly mundane aspects of an individual's everyday social environment, researchers must incorporate a more synthetic perspective that considers both the empirical findings of biological and psychological studies of stress in conjunction with theory and empirical evidence about how social context shapes individual and collective vulnerability.

However, anthropological research argues that there is yet another piece of the puzzle necessary to explain why health outcomes vary so much in post-conflict settings: cultural context. Research from across disciplinary lines has established already three broad but related anthropological criticisms of conventional biomedical health research:

(1) the prevailing focus on individual welfare and trauma-event relationships ignores the impact of community-wide sociocultural factors that interact with the course of long-term

health outcomes (Kirmayer 1996; Summerfield 1999); (2) the predominant mind-body dualism of conventional biomedical health research impedes our understanding of the dynamic social origins and psychophysiological processes underlying those health outcomes (Bracken 2001); and (3) conventional clinical diagnostic measures of health and well-being are based on Western populations and Western modes of thought and are, therefore, less applicable in non-Western contexts (Bracken, Giller, and

Summerfield 1995; Breslau 2004).

In order to attend to these critiques, anthropological theory has reoriented the study of stress, trauma, and suffering in post-war conflicts away from a focus on specific acts of direct violence or on individual health outcomes to focus instead on how sociocultural context shapes both the kinds of distress that lead to suffering and the ways in which individuals and communities understand the impact of that distress.

Anthropological Social Theory in a Post-Conflict State

Although social studies of health provide evidence that both acute and chronic, or major and minor, distress can negatively impact individual health outcomes, research in zones of conflict has focused typically on life events that can be categorized by clinical diagnostic instruments as extreme or traumatic. Though many of these checklists note as traumatic the disruption of community practices and the destruction of local social networks, conventional trauma questionnaires more often address specific acts of direct violence against individuals. Anthropologists, however, argue that violence―particularly in the context of war―does not occur against individuals alone but is experienced collectively. Suarez-Orozco and Robben (2000, 1) identify four qualities of war-related violence that are fundamental considerations for researchers working in post-conflict communities: (1) violence takes place in complex over-determined sociocultural

contexts in which psychic, social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions interact and intertwine; (2) collective violence targets the body, psyche, and sociocultural order, and so cannot be reduced to a single level of analysis; (3) traumatic experience cannot be relegated to the individual alone, for it entails highly relevant social and cultural processes that exist apart from the individual; and (4) the consequences of massive trauma afflict individuals, social groups, and cultural formations.

These points highlight that the immediate and long-term impacts of direct violence are experienced within the context of a larger sociocultural environment that shapes the historical origins, distribution, and victims of violence. However, these points also highlight that psychophysiological pain and suffering occur from more than just the application of brute force and acts of direct violence against the corporeal body.

Suffering in vulnerable communities also occurs as a consequence of the marginalizing institutions and policies of the state, the distressing social interactions of everyday life, a person’s inability to achieve or maintain culturally-valued social positions, and the strictures of endemic poverty. In anthropological research, these aspects of social life are often described as types of brutality that are not always understood to be violent but are nevertheless framed in the academic literature as forms of violence.

Reconceptualizing Violence

One of the abstract constructions of violence that is most commonly identified in anthropological research is structural violence. The concept is usually cited as originating in the work of Johan Galtung, a peace scholar whose work is framed in the language and ideology of Liberation theology. Galtung (1969, 168) broadly defined violence as occurring “when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations.” Violence,

Galtung proposed, could be categorized into two types: (1) direct, or personal, violence, in which a specific actor commits a specific act, and (2) indirect, or structural, violence when the consequences of violence cannot be traced back to the acts of a specific person (Galtung 1969, 170-171).

Building from Stokely Carmichael’s discussions about institutional racism,

Galtung argued that those who benefit from power differentials in any given society are reliant upon socioeconomic inequalities and specifically upon the unequal distribution of, and hence access to, resources that characterize the plight of marginalized classes of that society. Indirect violence, thus, “is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” (Galtung 1969, 171). Galtung and his colleagues sought to operationalize (Galtung and Hoivik 1971), to measure (Hoivik

1977; Kohler and Alcock 1976), and to quantify structural violence (Alcock and Kohler

1979), but the lasting impact of this research is the notion that people who are low on power, low on income, low on education, and low on health are all victims of a type of unseen violence inflicted by societal inequalities.

However, not until Paul Farmer (1996) adopted and popularized the concept did anthropologists and other social sciences widely embrace the concept of structural violence to describe the damaging effects of structural inequalities.7 Farmer (2004, 307) defines structural violence as any form of violence “exerted systematically―that is,

7“Structural violence” is certainly not the only concept in recent academic literature to present widespread macro-level political-ecnonomic forces as a form of indirect violence. Another interesting example is Fullilove et al.’s (1998, 927) concept of urban anomie, in which informants “pointed out that the cumulative effects of poverty, racism, and other forms of social injustice are not only potential causes of violence but forms of violence in and of themselves.”

indirectly―by everyone who belongs to a certain social order,” which includes “social structures characterized by poverty and steep grades of social inequality, including racism and gender inequality.” This perspective on structural violence thus reorients the analytical focus away from purely political-economic inequalities to view distressing life events, including direct acts of violence, to be the product of a wider range of entrenched structural inequalities that organize individuals and groups of people within society. Though ethnographic research in zones of conflict does not always address the concept by name, the structural factors underlying this perspective on violence are useful to health research on post-conflict suffering for three reasons.

First, the concept of structural violence allows researchers to consider the wartime exposures characterizing biomedical understandings of trauma while also giving equal analytical weight to the structural inequalities within which traumatic violence is enacted. For instance, the case of the Guatemalan civil war is just one example among many around the world in which governmental programs of political- economic development and national legislative policies meant to diminish the power of wide swaths of civil society occurred in tandem with the application of violence as tools of state control.

Second, this broader view of violence enables researchers to think about the health consequences of conflict in a larger temporal frame of reference than the formal boundaries of warfare's beginning and end. Even after the cessation of war, communities in recovery frequently remain victimized by a wide range of national policies and country-wide structural inequalities that may be the sources of strain and distress in daily life, constraining one’s ability to come to terms with past experiences of

violence, to cope with the stresses of life in recovering communities, and to overcome new problems that result from post-war society's political, economic, or sociocultural changes that are themselves the direct result of war.

Finally, an explicit consideration of structural violence allows researchers to better contextualize the environment, writ large, within which traumatic acts of violence are used as tools of political-economic and social repression. One of the reasons that

Farmer's work is so admired, by medical anthropologists and the lay public, is because his writing draws attention to the ways in which nation-state policies have repercussions at a community level that ripple into the lives of individuals, reinforcing boundaries that constrain people within bureaucratic, cultural, and physical spaces of marginalization.

Over the course of the last twenty years, these theoretical spaces of marginalization have been given more attention by anthropologists, who have built upon the strengths of structural violence as a heuristic concept to elaborate similar abstract forms of violence at increasingly smaller levels of analysis.

In a recent special edition of the journal Ethnography, a series of articles extends thinking about structural violence by outlining the concept of infrastructural violence.

The collected authors argue that infrastructure―including the buildings and roadways of a landscape as well as the wires and pipes that line them―shapes how flows of information, goods, and services travel between institutions of the state, private sectors of society, and the marginalized areas and groups of people with whom those institutions are engaged (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012). Literally, infrastructure delineates the physical landscape; in the abstract, though, infrastructure shapes the form and content of relationships between people as well as their engagements with state,

regional, and local forms of governance and resource support. Consequently, infrastructure can also delineate theoretical spaces of vulnerability “insofar as the material organization and form of a landscape not only reflect but also reinforce social orders, thereby becoming a contributing factor to reoccurring forms of harm” (Rogers and O’Neill 2012, 404).

These spaces of vulnerability also can be shaped by social boundaries that are not as visible as those on the physical landscape. Anthropological theorists have asserted that the relationships between people, institutions, and communities are also shaped by social hierarchies of ethnic, racial, or class-based differences that can be internalized by groups of people as natural boundaries of superiority and inferiority.

Bourdieu (2001; see also Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) refers to this internalization as symbolic violence, in which dominant categories of social differentiation become naturalized in the status quo; he notes that “objective relations of power tend to reproduce themselves in relations of symbolic power” (Bourdieu 1989, 21), such that social categories, as well as the moral qualities understood by society to characterize those categories, are defined by historical struggles for material and social capital.

Building on this idea, Bourgois (2009, 19) writes that “[t]he socially dominated come to believe that the insults directed against them, as well as the hierarchies of status and legitimation that curtail their life chances, are accurate representations of who they are, what they deserve, and how the world has to be.”

The theory underlying the concepts of infrastructural violence and symbolic violence coalesce in the concerns of political ecology. In Blaikie and Brookfield’s (1987) classic text conceptualizing the aims and scope of political ecology, the authors argue

that environmental resources and social resources are mutually causal: The marginalization of rural communities―primarily via the delineation of physical spaces in the natural environment but also via the distribution of resources―is driven by external macro-level structures that force people into land-use practices that, in turn, amplify and reinforce their marginalization.

In his study of famine in West Africa, Watts (1983) refers to this dynamic as silent violence, arguing that poverty-induced famine is driven by land degradation that is itself the consequence of State and global political-economic policies meant to amplify the social marginalization of communities who are most reliant upon the land.

Contemporary political ecology perspectives (e.g., Escobar 1999, Gezon 2006, Paulson and Gezon 2005) have built upon this literature to suggest that patterns of land use, and the resource degradation that may occur as a consequence, are not shaped as much by the limitations of environmental space as they are by socioeconomic processes that result from, yet also reinforce, historical patterns of political-economic disparity and sociocultural marginalization.

These constructs delineate a space of vulnerability that calls to mind what

Taussig (1984, 471) notably referred to as a “space of death” wherein exists a “culture of terror”: “[b]ehind the search for profits, the need to control labor, the need to assuage frustration, and so on, lie intricately construed long-standing cultural logics of meaning―structures of feeling―whose basis lies in a symbolic world and not in one of rationalism.”

These structures may not be rational, but they are nevertheless constricting forces precisely because they carry the weight of meaning in the lives of the vulnerable.

As exemplified in Nancy Scheper-Hughes's 1993 ethnography, Death Without Weeping:

The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, the human vulnerability carved into society by bureaucratic boundaries of institutional neglect reinforces feelings of desperation and hopelessness that, in turn, normalize sickness and death in marginalized communities.

Scheper-Hughes (1996, 890) describes how this vulnerability constitutes a form of everyday violence, accumulating in “small wars and invisible genocides,” shaping individual and collective understandings of human suffering, “as if they were the most normal and expected behaviors.”

Boundaries of political-economic and sociocultural marginalization do not just delineate spaces of vulnerability, as they may also give rise to alternative avenues for the acquisition of lacking resources. Carolyn Nordstrom's recent work has focused on this latter point, providing compelling ethnographic insights about how individuals cope when their communities are drawn into global power inequities. She refers to these inequities as global fractures (Nordstrom 2008) and fault lines (Nordstrom 2009), which create political-economic boundaries of marginalization but also produce pathways through which move unrecorded flows of “goods, services, monies, and people that precipitate unstable inequalities, uneven access to power, and unevenly distributed resources” (2009, 63-64). Though these pathways may offer opportunities for people to cope, Nordstrom (2004) argues that the unfortunate need for marginalized groups to access resources from within these unrecorded and frequently illicit flows represents a kind of invisible violence: violent, because these flows place individuals at further risk of victimization to both literal and figurative forms of violence, and invisible because they exist in the shadows created and often supported by institutional powers.

All of these concepts recognize that political-economy structures not just politics and economy in their formal sense but also the distributions and classifications of people, resources, and knowledge that underlie one’s vulnerability to violence as well as the appraisal of the suffering that results. In the opening lines of the article, “On

Suffering and Structural Violence: A View From Below,” Paul Farmer (1996, 261) writes,

“Everyone knows that suffering exists. The question is how to define it.” The broader perspectives on violence described in this chapter face a similar problem; anthropological research on conflict and violence rarely defines or operationalizes these theoretical constructs, and violence is often presented simultaneously as a cause of suffering, as a process of suffering, and as the outcome of suffering. Though these concepts are useful heuristic devices for shedding light on the diverse types of problems that people face in post-conflict communities, their usefulness as analytical tools is limited by their broad-ranging and somewhat ambiguously defined scope.

Wacquant (2004, 322) asserts that, despite their theoretical significance, a reliance on constructs like structural violence as a research focus “is far outweighed by the analytical peril it entails.” Wacquant’s point alludes to the reality that the structural conditions conferring power and its limits―the large-scale forces of domination, repression, and subordination that underlie the sources of so much suffering in the world―exist whether or not individuals are actually cognizant of those structures or their impacts. These forces of domination have in recent decades been the focus of a related and often overlapping body of anthropological social theory that addresses how global, national, and local political-economic processes can influence individual and collective perceptions of well-being.

Toward an Anthropology of the State

In a broad review about the evolution of violence as a subject of anthropological inquiry, Nagengast (1994, 111) notes that “[g]oing beyond the mere presence or absence of violence challenges us to locate it within a set of practices, discourses, and ideologies, to examine it as a way to deploy power within differential social and political relations, or as a means that states use to buttress themselves and to maintain power.”

This is not a simple proposition, though, and answering Nagengast’s call presents researchers with another analytical quandary. The specific acts of direct violence used in warfare can be evaluated objectively with the use of conventional survey instruments; however, the identification of political-economic and sociocultural forms of violence―what Margold (1999, 83) calls “repertories of repression”―is not so easy.

Similarly, the identification of warfare’s perpetrators and victims is a complicated but relatively straight-forward task; accounting for the abstract forces of economic, political, and social marginalization, less so. As Rodgers and O’Neill (2012, 402) note,

“not all policy outcomes are planned, and nor are their consequences necessarily attributable to a single actor or group of actors.” Consequently, research about state violence and the suffering created in its wake might do better to deemphasize the nation-state as an affective agent and instead problematize the state as existing “within

(and not automatically distinct from) other institutional forms through which social relations are lived, such as the family, civil society, and the economy” (Sharma and

Gupta 2006, 9). My own thinking on this point can be summed up in Trouillot’s (2001,

126) discussion about how to problematize the state:

Exploratory though it may be, this exercise requires a conceptual baseline. First we need to determine at what level(s) best to conceptualize the state. Is the state a ‘concrete-concrete,’ something ‘out there’? Or is it a concept

necessary to understand something out there? Or, again, is it an ideology that helps to mask something else out there, a symbolic shield, as it were?

With regard to the Guatemalan civil war, the state might be any one, or all, of these. The violence of the civil war, now documented thoroughly, was primarily the product of a nation-wide government strategy of repression, applied by the army, whose top command officers constituted the upper echelons of government power; the police, the intelligence services, and the shadowy death squads who also carried out that violence were all instruments of the President’s power. Social repression was enacted as well through legislative policies and a militarization of everyday life that marginalized the indigenous population, effectively allowing the minority to maintain control over the majority, even without the minority's immediate physical presence on the ground. The spectre of the state loomed so large that most people were afraid even to express an opinion that might be misconstrued, somehow, by someone, as subverting the status quo. The point of Trouillot's rhetorical questions, though, is useful for framing how to study the application and directional nature of power, a principal focus in anthropological descriptions of the state.

Much of anthropology's contemporary social theory about political-economy and power developed out of the broad ideas of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Emile

Durkheim, and Max Weber, each of whom are influential for outlining the ways in which individual beliefs and forms of social action are shaped by political-economic forces in industrializing capitalist societies. In contemporary academic theories about the state, the ideas of these scholars are frequently reframed in terms of the work of Antonio

Gramsci and Michel Foucault. While modern scholars will debate about the degree to which the individual ideas of these scholars are irreconcilable, their overlapping

concerns about how political-economy and social institutions shape spaces of vulnerability commonly appear in anthropological research on suffering. At the risk of caricaturing both the complexities of their ideas and the importance of an intellectual debate about those ideas, I find many of their broader arguments to be mutually beneficial for understanding theoretically the convergence of political-economic practices, institutions of the state, and everyday struggles of the population against marginalization.

The influence of Marx and Engels in contemporary theories about political economy and “the state” lies largely in their broad concern with how the means of material production in society foreground economic and political subordination. Marx and Engels viewed society as being composed of two parts: (1) the material bases of society, the economic structure that includes the tools and resources of production, the social classes (and, specifically, the laboring classes), and the relationships between those classes, and (2) the superstructure, made up of the cultural and political institutions of society, like religion, politics, and family. In the modern capitalist system, argue Marx and Engels, society is divided against itself so that political-economic interests of the ruling elite compete against the interests of any one individual in the larger social collective.

In this context, the state can be viewed as an abstraction, which Marx and

Engels present in terms of a tension between instrumental and structural characteristics

(Hay 1999, 158; Jessop 1977). In instrumentalist terms, Marx and Engels conceptualize the state as a tool of ruling elites used to consolidate and maintain power over society's resources, “nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeoisie

necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests” (Marx and Engels 1995, 80). However, a structuralist aspect is also implied when Marx and Engels note that the state exists apart from any given class in society, despite its concurrent role in protecting society’s economically and politically advantaged classes (Marx and Engels 1995).

The structural aspects of political economy and the state are given much greater attention in the writings of Emile Durkheim. Where Marx and Engels viewed the political institutions of the superstructure as largely responsible for the maintenance of social order in society via the coercive economic oppression of the working classes, Durkheim

(1997) viewed social order as arising out of collectively shared representations―which he called “social solidarity”―about the moral underpinnings of structural relationships in society. Durkheim advocated the examination of social phenomena through the empirical analysis of their forms, in which the units of analysis are social facts: the rules governing social behavior (Durkheim 1951). Durkheim believed that social facts, whether material in form or simply mental abstractions, exist apart from the individual and are imbued with symbolic meaning(s) that can only be engendered by a social collective.

From this perspective, Durkheim (1995) considered the social structure of society to be external to individuals but also internalized by them; that is, people categorize themselves in part according to their understanding about relationships within society.

Through a thorough examination of any one social fact, and the expression of its associated symbolic representations, Durkheim believed one might begin to know the basic structural foundations of social order and the underpinnings of society itself. The

coercive force of social facts cannot be understood on the grounds of biology or psychology alone; instead, we must examine how societal institutions―for instance, religious institutions, family structure, and the legal system―indirectly regulate order by inculcating individuals with the normative rules of collective society.

Though Max Weber incorporated different methodological and theoretical perspectives than did Marx and Durkheim, many of Weber’s theories about the state overlap with their ideas. Like Marx, Weber was similarly interested in relationships of domination, and he defines the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber

1919, xx). However, like Durkheim, Weber’s theories developed out of a concern with the purpose and meaning that people attach to their actions. Weber believed that people are mostly aware of the motives underlying their behavior and, further, that these motives are rooted in a subjective rationality that is tied to historically-derived cultural values that only have meaning in their relation to other values. Weber viewed domination to be an important determinant influencing every sphere of social action but he viewed the formal organization of bureaucratic institutions―the State’s primary instrument for administering power in society―to be the most important factor shaping the rationality, and hence motivations, of individuals.

The ideas of Antonio Gramsci reinforce this latter point. An important development in Gramsci’s work is his elaboration of hegemony as a concept to describe how ideas and ideologies are used by the elite classes to maintain control over the rest of society. Gramsci’s conception of modern society is characterized by a separation of two sectors: (1) “political society,” which includes public institutions like government, the

courts, and the police and army, and (2) “civil society,” which includes institutions like schools, political parties, and churches (Gramsci 1971). Gramsci argued that every person is constituted according to their respective social relationships with, and within, these two sectors; however, in a departure from Marx, Gramsci believed that the elite classes of “political society” cannot maintain control solely by advancing their own economic interests or through the use of coercive force, but must rely instead upon the widespread proliferation and acceptance of their narrow worldview. When intellectual elites are able to convince civil society that this worldview is paramount, even if going against the needs and desires of the majority of civil society, then hegemony is said to exist; only when that consent is not given freely, when hegemony does not exist, do elites turn to the power wielded by political society in order to achieve their goals.

Gramsci’s view of the state thus centers upon an abstract dialogue between the political and the civil, between force and consent, and between authority and submission: the domination of an ideology girded by coercion.

This idea is echoed in Michel Foucault’s descriptions of power as forms of dispersed social practices and bodies of knowledge that manifest as the governing rules of everyday life. Foucault (1979) famously wrote about the need “to cut off the king’s head,” arguing that theorists need to move away from a focus on how political-economy drives repression, human rights, and the juridical legitimation of rule to focus instead on power as effect rather than as property. In Foucault’s view, power is more than just an objective thing―for example, the laws of a national government that are instituted from the top down―but is instead a kind of discourse that becomes internalized by individuals as a result of their relationships with societal institutions. Sovereign power,

Foucault asserts, is exerted through the public display of control, where legal codes and edicts emanate from a single state center, whether that center is monarchal, dictatorial, or popularly-elected.

In modern times, though, power has become increasingly decentralized into rules of behavior normalized by societal institutions—including clinics and hospitals, prisons, and education systems—whose primary functions are to examine, surveil, and rank the population. Foucault referred to this decentralized control as disciplinary power, arguing that these institutions have become so commonplace in modern society, and the ways in which they organize people have become so normalized, that citizens are essentially trained to regulate their own actions in accordance with the dictates of the state. These two forms of power―sovereign and disciplinary―are intrinsically linked to the construction of individual identity, as a single person is at once a power-subject, beholden to the juridical edicts of society, as well as a subject of power-knowledge, in which the rules about what constitutes appropriate behavior are internalized and partly direct future social actions.

In his later theoretical work, Foucault extended these ideas with the concept of biopower―or, the “technologies” of power―to describe how the institutional management of births, illnesses, and deaths serves the interest of the State. Inherently political, biopower is a way for state centers to establish regulatory mechanisms over the whole of society without explicitly ascribing to governments an increasingly larger role in the maintenance of the entire population. However, Foucault argued that one cannot hope to understand the impact of biopower in society without also attempting to

analyze the rational underpinnings of the political motives that technologies of power are meant to serve.

In developing biopower as a theoretical construct, Foucault increasingly shifted his attention to the ways in which administrative technologies of power reinforce the capacity of individuals to self-control. Foucault’s elaborated the concept of governmentality to reorient the study of government away from state centers toward a focus on the ways in which individual and collective conduct is self-governed.

“Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word, is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself” (Foucault 1993, 203-204). Power, and particularly the means by which people are subordinated and marginalized, may be applied primarily through the systematization of administrative regulations, but the state of domination that results does not exist without the majority population’s acceptance that these regulations are, indeed, rational and necessary.

For medical anthropologists working in post-conflict settings, an important point of convergence between anthropological theories of violence and the state can be found in each of these scholar's critiques about how the ills of modernity lead to human suffering. Marx and Engels describe how economic inequalities alienate the working classes, a marginalization that has a direct impact on individual health to the detriment of society; the poor working conditions, food and housing insecurity, and non-existent healthcare that characterize the laboring classes actually work against the economic and political interests of the elites by contributing to dire rates of worker morbidity and

mortality that ultimately limit production. Durkheim proposed that these economic inequalities, particularly in the wake of rapid social changes following political and economic crises, promote widespread social disintegration that in turn contributes to individual psychopathology (Berkman et al. 2000, 844).8

These early theories make the critical point―mirrored in contemporary public health research―that structural inequalities contribute to suffering and poor health. But this social theory also goes a step further to assert that the maintenance of structural inequalities in society represents a deliberate strategy of oppression used to control large sections of society. Weber proposes that suffering is an inherent component of the human condition, but that the marginalized sectors of modern capitalist societies attribute their suffering to political economic processes that place constraints on the ability of people to overcome their marginalization. Foucault’s late-career work on governance frames this opposition―between structural assemblages of state institutions and the rest of civil society―as a contingent symbol of both political- economic structural hierarchies and the infrastructure that demarcates the spaces within which civil society engages with that hierarchy. One of the lasting legacies of Foucault’s work is the understanding that individual suffering can be promoted, and is often reinforced, by the very same policies and institutions of the State that are meant to alleviate that suffering. For Gramsci, the establishment of hegemony throughout society requires not only that elites present their worldview as beneficial to all but also that

8For example, in his influential book Suicide, Durkheim (1951) outlines five types of anomic suicide that correspond to suffering from different social forces, including the loss of wealth and property, the loss or lack of social support, and the perceived loss of the ability to satisfy individual needs with traditional social institutions.

marginalized groups accept that worldview and thereby consent to its dominating structuring of society. Suffering, however, occurs when those same marginalized groups resist that worldview, which has led contemporary Gramscian perspectives to describe pluralized hegemonies in order to account for the fact that many aspects of an individual’s identity―for instance, age, sex, gender, ethnicity, in addition to class―might shape one person’s differential access to societal resources.

These theories of the state all focus on how power is constructed by, and enacted through, the aggregation of diverse social networks and their institutions. They therefore offer a useful starting point for exploring how marginalizing institutions of the state, the inability of individuals to achieve their desired social status, distress in everyday social interactions, and the everyday strictures of poverty interact to shape human suffering. However, though power may confer differential resources and, in turn, reinforce social inequities, researchers must also investigate how people identify and appraise for themselves the sources, causes, and appropriate responses to the suffering that may emerge as a result of those inequities. Thus, researchers must work to incorporate an analytical framework that connects individuals, the political-economic and sociocultural networks within which people every day engage with one another, and the perceptions that people have about these networks, about the types of problems that they encounter, and about how to overcome those problems.

This kind of framework requires three important considerations. First, researchers must explore relationships between individual agency and the structure of society, in order to identify how people are limited by and respond to the problems they face in life, whether or not those problems are acute or chronic, traumatic or mundane.

Second, researchers must account for the reality that, at any given time in history, individuals and large groups of people collectively will have different understandings about how the world works. Finally, the degree to which people share beliefs about what is most needed to live, how to obtain what is needed, and how to respond when one is unable to obtain what is needed is an inherently social process. This dissertation draws from practice theory and theory about embodiment, a core theoretical and methodological paradigm in recent medical anthropology, in order to attend to these three considerations during the development of a research framework.

Embodiment

Much of medical anthropology’s development as an academic discipline has been shaped by attempts to undermine a philosophy of “being in the world” that has defined most of modern intellectual history: the Cartesian binary of body and mind, in which the material/body exists in the natural world and the mental/mind exists in the non-material world. Embodiment perspectives explicitly deny theoretical separations between the mind, the body, and society (Csordas 1990, 1994; Garro 2000b, 276), focusing instead on how human experience is shaped by both individual and collective representations of meaning (Garro 2000a; Lock 1993; Shore 1996). Though a number of social theorists have presented ideas that bridge the classic Cartesian duality, much of the contemporary anthropological research about suffering―particularly in regard to the ways in which the rules and structures of society contribute to individual understandings of sickness and suffering―owe an intellectual debt to the ideas of

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu.

Merleau-Ponty disputed both Marx’s materialism and Durkheim’s structuralism as essentialist explanations for how and why people think, act, and live as they do.

Instead, he viewed consciousness as an always-developing product of the corporeal body’s existence within a social world, in which the physiological parts of any one body are always in sensory interaction with people, things, places, and time.9 As such, the corporeal body is the “conscious subject of experience” and the lived body, which he refers to as the body-subject, is an ever-emergent subjective conversation with the material world, limited by the confines of the innate sensory capacities of the corporeal body (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 1964a). Though Merleau-Ponty did not consider well the body-subject in cultural terms (Krois et al. 2007, xiv), he does refer to the skills, or

“habits,” that develop as a result of also being a social creature, where thought, sensation, and meaning occur as both a mental and a bodily activity, and always in relation to the objects that are being perceived.

Though minimally a phenomenologist in the vein of Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu drew from these ideas about culturally-informed “habits,” as well as from Durkheim’s ideas about the symbolic nature of social structures, to discuss what he saw as an artificial opposition of subject and object. Bourdieu sought to draw a distinction between structure and agency, arguing that social structures, though existing apart from any one individual, are grounded both in the daily practices of the individual and in the functional

9 In his essay “The Eye and the Mind”, Merleau-Ponty (1964b, 3-4) writes: “[H]umanity is not produced as the effect of our articulations or by the way our eyes are implanted in us (still less by the existence of mirrors, though they alone can make our entire bodies visible to us). These contingencies and others like them, without which mankind would not exist, do not by simple summation bring it about that there is a single man. The body’s animation is not the assemblage or juxtaposition of its parts. Nor is it a question of a mind or spirit coming down from somewhere else into an automation―which would still imply that the body itself is without an inside and without a “self.” A human body is present when, between the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when the fire start to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls the body, undoing what no accident would have sufficed to do.”

meanings that the social collective attaches to those practices, whether or not that one individual has a perceptual awareness of their logic. That logic, argues Bourdieu, is governed by the habitus: a historically-produced “system of dispositions” that is at once both self-generating and dependent upon one person’s subjective actions in order to be made functional (Bourdieu 1977). To Bourdieu, human perception, and reality itself, is shaped by rules that exist as a product of social life―subjectively understood by the individual yet existing apart from the individual’s conscious knowledge of those rules―that are only given functional meaning through practical activity. It is in social practice that we can understand one’s relationship with a world that is engendered with symbolic meaning.

This idea of the socially-informed body of practice has since become a theoretical starting point for much contemporary health research in non-Western contexts, where researchers seek to explain how culture shapes the ways individuals internalize thoughts about health and externalize these thoughts in their own behaviors according to individual and collective understandings about how the local world shapes well-being (Coker 2004; Gronseth 2001; Oths 1999). Embodiment perspectives have been used most effectively to examine the cultural construction of sickness, elaborating how illnesses in non-Western contexts often are conceived by people in ways that diverge from Western clinical diagnoses (Das 1997; Farmer 1992; Farmer and Good

1991; Good et al. 1992; Sontag 1989). They have also been used effectively to describe the cultural construction of emotional and physical suffering as a result of violence (Das

2000; Feldman 1991, 1999), terror (Daniel 1994; Scarry 1985), warfare (Quesada

1998), war-time experiences (Adams 1998; Hinton, Um, and Ba 2001a; Olujic 1998),

and even the trials of everyday life (Jenkins and Cofresi 1998; Lock and Wakewich-

Dunk 1987; Scheper-Hughes 1992). My research project draws upon this research, but my thinking is built upon a synthesis of two specific theoretical conceptualizations of embodiment, one from anthropology (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987) and one from social epidemiology (Krieger and Smith 2004).

In an influential paper reviewing embodiment research, Scheper-Hughes and

Lock (1987) detail three important levels of analysis, which they refer to as abstract

“bodies,” for researchers to address when examining the impact of society on individual well-being: (1) the individual body, which pertains to the ways in which an individual’s lived experience is culturally constructed; (2) the social body, which refers to the symbolic representation of the human body in culture, nature, and society; and (3) the body politic, which concerns how individuals are the product of large-scale forces of sociopolitical regulation and control. Scheper-Hughes and Lock argue that the body is the locus of interaction between individuals and the social, cultural, and political- economic forces that impact the etiology and meaning of illness; thus, understandings of health and illness should be based on more than just the interpretation of bodily symptoms. By considering these “bodies” as fundamentally integrated, researchers can move beyond biomedical conceptions of wellness toward a critical-interpretive medical anthropology that instead privileges local understandings of health and suffering.

Krieger and Smith (2004) make a similar point about the important influence of political-economic and sociocultural contexts for understanding how well-being is understood by those who are suffering. However, they argue that those same contextual engagements can create spaces of vulnerability and risk: health and well-being, when

evaluated across groups of people, can be expressed in the form of societal disparities that, in turn, may expose people to even more sources of health-disrupting life experiences. Connecting embodiment theory to biomedical outcomes, Krieger and

Davey Smith (2004, 92) note,

Asking the question as to whether bodily being can itself affect health in no way discounts that 1) people’s behavioral, emotional, and cognitive responses to adverse (and beneficial) circumstances may influence somatic health (in ways that vary according to disease outcome); 2) psychosocial adversity impairs the quality of people’s lives, whether or not it harms somatic health; and 3) psychosocial stressors are socially patterned (with some groups being subject to unique stressors, e.g., racial discrimination).

Their argument is that, in addition to being mindful, as anthropologists assert, bodies are also literally corporeal, and an exploration of individual corporeal bodies, constituting as they do larger groups of community, can provide important information about the ways in which local understandings of health can shape and reconstitute social inequalities.

A synthesis of these two perspectives requires a research framework that moves from an understanding of local social context, to the individual’s experiential understanding of how that social context impacts their health and well-being, and then back again to how individual experiences, and their health-related consequences, reinforce vulnerability in already vulnerable populations. Researchers working in post- conflict settings must focus on how informants describe what is important to them, giving explicit consideration to (1) the historical context that gave rise to violence and the structural factors that conferred differential risk of direct violence during the war, (2) the sociocultural conditions associated with structural inequalities, and (3) the ways in which individuals and communities interpret and contest the impact of distressing life

experiences. In an attempt to better research these conclusions, the broad problems that people face in the wake of violence, and how people cope with those problems, many anthropologists have turned to the concept of social suffering to privilege the voices of those who are suffering.

Social Suffering

Research perspectives that incorporate the construct of social suffering explore the relationship between culture, social order, and the many influences that shape individual suffering, describing how structural inequalities impact both individual and collective understandings of well-being. “Social suffering results from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people and, reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems” (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997b, ix). Thus, in conjunction with theoretical constructs that problematize structural vulnerability and with analytical frameworks that reorient the researcher’s gaze away from biomedically-defined corporeal dysfunction, a social suffering perspective is useful for exploring the impacts of post-war society on individual and collective well-being. My own perspective is informed by two overlapping conceptions of social suffering.

Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “social misery” was instrumental to the development of social suffering as a theoretical construct. His theoretical orientation of structuralist- constructivism sought to move beyond the dualism of structure and agency to explore how socioeconomic change shapes the everyday suffering of individuals (Bourdieu et al. 1999), arguing that suffering results not only from an inequitable distribution of material goods and institutional services but also from feelings that are engendered by

the lived experiences of domination, repression, and deprivation associated with that inequitable distribution of resources (Frost and Hoggett 2008).

This idea extends from Bourdieu’s theory of practice and his ideas about embodiment to describe how people sharing the same social world, enmeshed in the same intersecting structures of inequality, talk in similar ways about the negative impact of those structures. The suffering that can result is part of the context of everyday life, rather than the suffering that occurs as a result of traumatic exposure or extreme distress, and Bourdieu addresses in particular the restrictive social boundaries reflected by class distinctions, gender and racial discrimination, and the structural conditions within society that privilege the resource-rich over the resource-poor. From this perspective, vulnerability is shaped by societal forces that are more widespread, more powerful, more entrenched, and potentially more insidious than the distressing everyday social interactions that occur within a specific community context. Unfortunately, these forces are largely unseen and difficult to pinpoint, and they are most often located in the fault lines between the political-economic institutions, cultural practices, social interactions, and historical trajectories of spaces, places, and people.

American anthropologists extended the concept of social suffering beyond an exploration of how individuals talk about the marginalization of social groups to a focus on how individuals describe the causes, courses, and consequences of a broader range of distressing life experiences, including illness, natural disaster, and violence. In

American medical anthropology, the social suffering construct is rooted in theory that developed over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, in which studies of medical pluralism and folk models about health became a larger interest of anthropological

research (Leslie 1976, 1980; Rubel 1964; Rubel, O'Neill, and Collado-Ardon 1984).

During this period, medical anthropologists began to differentiate between “illness” and

“disease” in order to draw attention to the limited usefulness of biomedicine’s clinical approach in cross-cultural settings. Local understandings about psychophysiological function became the focus rather than the diagnostic symptomatology of Western clinical medicine, and a large body of literature emerged to describe how folk knowledge, healers, and alternative medicines impact the diagnosis and treatment of individual health problems.

One important development out of this research was the study of culture-bound syndromes, a term not often still used in contemporary scholarship but nevertheless influential to anthropological research about health. Medical anthropologists working in non-Western settings commonly invoke local narrative expressions about illness to a wide range of bodily problems, behaviors, and solutions that may not be reflected in

Western biomedical understandings of health but are meaningful in local contexts.

These “folk” or culture-bound iIllnesses may share many bodily symptoms in common with Western conceptions of stress-related disorders, but originate from aspects of the social world that are not explicit considerations of Western diagnostic practices (Adler

1995; Guarnaccia, Rubio-Stipec, and Canino 1989; Oths 1999; Weller et al. 2002). This incongruence between clinical and lay understandings of illness and disease, even in the West, can have a dramatic impact on the management and treatment of disease

(Baer et al. 2003; Darghouth et al. 2006).

This point is also critical for research in post-conflict settings, and many of the same researchers who have described the cultural construction of sickness have also

described how individuals and communities respond to the consequences of war and endemic violence (Das 2000; Kleinman and Kleinman 1997; Scheper-Hughes and

Bourgois 2004). Their work provides compelling ethnographic context to evidence that the suffering of individuals in war-torn regions is shaped by individual and collective experiences of physical and psychological violence, by the structural inequalities that plague communities before, during, and especially after the war, and by memories of the past and fears about the future (Desjarlais et al. 1995; Nagengast 1994). This research, though, also argues that the subjective meaning of traumatic experience is itself culturally constructed and, thus, is critically important for understanding the ways in which people appropriate and contest the many forms of violence, and insults to individual and collective well-being, that shape life after the violence is over (Das et al.

2001; Dickson-Gomez 2002a).

Conclusion

One of the most important and lasting contributions of medical anthropology— and, really, anthropology in general—is that meaning matters: the experiences of health, illness, and suffering should be viewed as expressions of a local moral worldview that is shaped as much by collectively-shared cultural beliefs as by one’s own idiosyncratic experiences in life. The primary goal of this chapter, presenting so much theoretical background from so many different academic disciplines and intellectual traditions, is to establish a broader baseline from which future research might better consider the causes and sources of human suffering in post-conflict settings. The health-related research discussed in the first section of this chapter provides substantial justifications that an exploration of suffering in post-conflict contexts must incorporate a larger suite

of societal stressors and individual life experiences than are typically evaluated in biomedical studies about the health consequences of traumatic exposure to warfare.

Similarly, the social theory described in the second section of this chapter provides a starting point from which to think about the many sources of potential stressors and from which to explore the structural connections between them, regardless of the research setting. The framework of theory incorporated in this dissertation starts with a primarily structuralist and political-economic understanding of how suffering is distributed throughout society, including war-related experiences as well as aspects of society that influence well-being after the cessation of war. The chronic problems of national institutions and state policies, infrastructural limitations and aspects of sociocultural context that shape community life, the ways these forces impact domestic relationships and household economy, and problems related to the material resource deprivations of entrenched poverty may not be explicit concerns of post- conflict health and development interventions, but they may be the source of a great deal of distress.

Researchers, though, must also privilege the roles played by local meaning, that people generally understand distress and suffering according to the shared beliefs and sentiments of the community in which they carry out the day-to-day activities of their lives. In the following chapter, I describe the research design of this dissertation, which views the sources of post-conflict suffering in rural Guatemala through a meaning- centered lens that takes seriously the importance of both structure and culture in how suffering is expressed and shared by members of a community.

CHAPTER 3 A METHODOLOGY FOR THE STUDY OF POST-CONFLICT SUFFERING

In this dissertation I want to contribute additional ethnographic context to academic literature about life in post-conflict settings, but the specific goal is to describe the ways in which rural Guatemalans compare in their beliefs about the struggles of rural agrarian life after decades of war. In ethnographic fieldwork, anthropological arguments about cultural context are built from a careful consideration of how the ideas and stories described by informants relate to previously published academic literature and, more important, to the researcher’s own observations while immersed in ethnographic context.

My research is no different, beginning with my arrival in Guatemala and building from my initial thoughts about post-war Guatemala, through the use of traditional ethnographic methods like participant-observation, informal conversations, and the composition of ethnographic fieldnotes. However, these basic anthropological methods enabled increasingly more structured and systematic methods of ethnographic data collection and analysis in later stages. In this chapter, I describe the theoretical and methodological paradigms underlying the project’s research design, drawing from ethnographic theory and research methods that are commonly used in the social sciences to describe how people share and contrast in their idiosyncratic understandings of health and well-being.

The data collected and analyzed for this dissertation occurred over two broad phases of formal ethnographic interviews. The first phase centered on the collection and analysis of semistructured informant interviews. The primary goal of this phase was to elicit informant narratives about life in rural Guatemala over the last 30 years, from the

war era to the present; in particular, I was concerned with the sources of distress that most impact people’s sense of well-being. The analysis of these interviews, in turn, produced much of the data incorporated into the second phase of formal ethnographic interviews, in which I constructed a survey questionnaire asking informants to rate the relative difficulty of 113 different problems faced by community members. The iterative and reflexive nature of these complementary methods provides a sound framework for exploring cultural models of suffering in post-conflict settings.

Studying Culture

This dissertation embraces a definition of culture that derives from perspectives in cognitive and psychological anthropology, in which the things that people say, the form and expression and force of their words, the ways that people act as they do, and the motivations they ascribe to themselves are based upon an idiosyncratic understanding of the world that results as much from individual life experiences as from the shared values and beliefs of the sociocultural networks within which people are forever embedded. Every person has unique life experiences to draw upon and unique understandings about how the world works, but those understandings are also shaped by sociocultural forces external to the individual—by family members, by friends, by the larger community, at school or church or the sporting field, and by a wide range of media that shape one’s knowledge, opinions, and worldview. The world within is always shaped by the world without.

The starting point for this project derives, in particular, from literature in cognitive anthropology, which conceives of “culture” as a body of knowledge that is differentially and imperfectly shared between individuals (D’Andrade 1981, 1984; Goodenough

1956). Cognitive theories of culture focus on the relationship between human society

and individual thought processes (D’Andrade 1995), frequently framing the personal knowledge of individuals in terms of overlapping and socially-transmitted “maps” of how the world works (Ross 2004, 53; Shore 1996). Rather than fixed systems that structure individual thought and action, these mental maps are flexible but socially-patterned frameworks that shape individual and collective representations of human experience.

I find this description of culture to be useful for two reasons. First, it aligns well with traditional anthropological perspectives on culture, which have always emphasized the sharing of knowledge1, but this view of culture also aligns with modern perspectives that emphasize the important role of “intersectionality”2 in the constitution of any one person’s social identity and worldview3. A cognitive theory of culture takes as axiomatic that people share beliefs and perspectives on the world but also that no two people can share perfectly or overlap completely in their understandings of the complex whole of culture.

1Though there are many definitions for culture in anthropology, the one most often cited in introductory textbooks and classrooms comes from the first page of Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), wherein he writes, “Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

2“[T]he relationships among multiple dimensions and multiple modalities of social relations and subject formations” (McCall 2005, 1771).

3Though much of the recent work in social theory about intersectionality that I am familiar with comes from women’s studies and race studies, the concept also encompasses differences in class, (dis)ability, religion, sexual orientation, and many other markers of individual identity that might be used by others in society to oppress or marginalize a person or larger group of people. The key takeaway, for the purposes of considering the culture concept, is that the ethnographer cannot look at a single person as just a man or a woman, as just one ethnicity or another, as just literate or illiterate, just Catholic or evangelical, or just a member of a particular socioeconomic class. Instead, we should consider each of these (perhaps arbitrary) markers that might be used by society to categorize a person as pieces of an integrated social identity.

Cognitive perspectives on culture also accommodate the concerns raised by important modern debates within the discipline of anthropology about how to research, interpret, and write about culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986).

One of the lasting legacies of the postmodern turn in anthropology is the recognition that researchers must not assume that their view of cultural phenomena is correct; their interpretations of culture and their writings about culture, however insightful and valuable they may be, are inherently biased snapshots rather than some kind of objective truth (Geertz 1973).

This philosophical reorientation in contemporary anthropological work also reminds us that ethnographers must be careful not to assert that members of a community all believe the same things in the same ways about how best to understand living in the world, much less that a group of people can be characterized as constituting

“one culture.” I am by no means suggesting that this is the intended goal of all or even most ethnographers, but one of the primary criticisms outlined by Clifford, Marcus,

Geertz, and others was that ethnographic writers too often obscure the obvious asymmetric power relations between the researcher and informants to better present a more cohesive narrative of cultural agreement.

Roy D’Andrade (1995a, 399) described a similar intellectual shift within cognitive anthropology about what should be the discipline’s object of study, away from an agenda focused on the study of an objective model of the world toward one focused on a subjective moral model of the world: “An objective description tells about the thing described, not about the agent doing the description, while a subjective description tells how the agent doing the description reacts to the object.” If we apply D'Andrade's

comment to questions about ethnographic data collection and analysis, he might be referring to how the object of anthropological inquiry is defined―by the researcher, or by the informant?―or perhaps to the justifications underlying the theoretical and methodological approaches chosen by the researcher. However, the critical point is that beginning fieldwork with the understanding that our research is inherently subjective allows us to strategize methods by which we might limit our own subjectivity in favor of privileging our informants’ subjectivity.

Cognitive perspectives on culture attend to these concerns, accommodating both interpretivist and positivist trends within the discipline of anthropology, offering important insights into the ways that people systematically agree and disagree about their world, leaving open for interpretation the reasons why but also providing empirical evidence to guide those interpretations and give support to conclusions. The theoretical traditions and methodological frameworks presented in this chapter are driven by cognitive views of culture and a variety of systematic qualitative and quantitative methods of ethnographic data collection and analyses, but they all begin with the fundamental tenets of classical ethnography: immersive participant-observation and the development of ideas through the writing of ethnographic fieldnotes.

A Tale of Two Newspapers and Learning (How to Fail at) Fieldnotes

One week after arriving in Guatemala, I departed from the capital city and relocated to the highlands of Coban, the department capital of Alta Verapaz. Because the success of my ethnographic research was predicated entirely upon my ability to actually communicate using Spanish, I enrolled in a course of one-on-one Spanish language instruction to reinforce my university training, living with a Guatemalan family

on the outskirts of the city and each day buying and reading two of Guatemala’s daily newspapers.

Though life in Coban is very different than life in either Guatemala City or

Yalpemech, the two months I spent there allowed me to immerse myself in Guatemalan society, to get a sense of the local and national news, and to take the first tentative steps toward a fieldwork routine. The two newspapers―Prensa Libre and Nuestro

Diario4―gave me insight into the types of violence and criminality occurring around the country, ongoing problems with State institutions, and details about the relationships between economic conditions and the government’s social programs for the development of Guatemala’s rural communities. Reading these papers each day, discussing the news stories with both my language instructor and my host family in

Coban, and even interviewing them about their thoughts on the state of contemporary

Guatemala, gave me ideas that served as the content of my first fieldnotes and as the initial basis of the interview protocols I would finalize in the months after arriving at my fieldsite.

The fieldnotes I wrote about these stories and my early experiences in

Guatemala were organized according to guidelines of systematic ethnography that I had

4When talking to family, friends, and colleagues back home, I often likened these two newspapers to, respectively, the New York Times and the New York Post. Prensa Libre is a much larger newspaper―in terms of page numbers, the number of stories per page, and the scope of the paper’s coverage and analysis―and even has a New York Times supplement in the Sunday edition, while Nuestro Diario is by contrast more like a tabloid that typically features graphic, full-color, full-page photos of corpses or the aftermath of violence on the front page, far fewer stories, and a much less incisive view of national trends, tending to favor instead entertainment, pin-up girls, and populist-driven sensationalism. Both papers provided important insights on life in Guatemala, though unfortunately only Nuestro Diario was typically available to me once I moved to my fieldsite. I still wonder if my fieldsite’s informants might have described to me a different picture of Guatemala had they regular access to more than one newspaper.

been trained to use and that I strived to follow. Initially, I worked hard to heed the counsel of Russ Bernard (2011, 292-300), whose sage advice calls for allowing four distinct types of fieldnotes: (1) jottings, those seemingly mundane but sometimes seemingly brilliant thoughts that strike at a moment’s notice, no matter how inopportune;

(2) a diary, to purge on paper the emotional, grueling, and decidedly personal aspects of ethnographic research; (3) a field log that accounts for how time was used each day; and, finally, (4) “academic” fieldnotes related to the details of the fieldwork project, incorporating notes that are specifically coded in relation to the development of (a) methodological strategies, (b) ethnographic descriptions of local context and interview settings, and (c) incipient ethnographic analyses.

However, after only a few months at my fieldsite, the lines between the types of writing required in systematic fieldnotes, as I had learned them, became blurry and mostly unsustainable as I juggled the pressures of time, fine-tuning the research design, and an environmental context that was more difficult for me to acclimate than I had expected. I became overwhelmed by a litany of frustrations that are likely familiar to anyone who has done extended ethnographic field study. Feelings of insecurity, pangs of homesickness, bouts of real bodily sickness, fears about safety, and the passage of time seemed constantly to be working against me to derail my progress. I was most frustrated though by what I thought was my inability to find acceptance with the villagers, no matter how many times I tried to explain what I thought were relatively benign reasons for being a presence in their lives.

I was able to maintain a semblance of systematic organization when evaluating the news and compartamentalizing my jottings, but the separation of my writing into a

field diary, a work log, and a “proper” fieldnotes journal eventually became untenable under these field conditions. Though I continued to write about fieldwork every night, having internalized my professors’ advice that the real work of anthropology is to be found in daily fieldnotes, my attempts to be thoroughly systematic devolved to the point that, after a particularly bad weekend, an entire day’s fieldnotes consisted of one frustrated statement, “I should not have come here.”

The obvious pessimism of that statement did not fully subside until I finally sensed that at least some of the villagers felt I was a (somewhat) legitimate member of the community. However, I did get much better at writing fieldnotes, and I found more success writing when I allowed for a format that blurred the lines between the formal categories of systematic fieldnotes in favor of a more stream-of-conscious style.

Instead, I used those formal categories as broad writing prompts when I sat down each night to attend to my fieldnotes, which I usually entered directly into a text analysis software program. Once completed, I could then organize my writing, in a sense, by tagging the text itself with index codes that corresponded to those formal fieldnote types.

Building Rapport and Getting Settled

When ethnographers enter into a new fieldwork community, their first task is to establish a residence, to introduce themselves and to “get known,” to develop contacts, and to start thinking about working relationships with key informants and potential research assistants. Just as so many anthropologists have experienced before me, I entered Guatemala with a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed confidence that I would accomplish all of these tasks immediately upon my arrival in the village. However, what many ethnographic texts, and even my own teachers and mentors, do not often discuss

are the difficulties the newly-arrived ethnographer might face just to get settled and

“established” within the community.5 I found my own transition from visitor to resident of the community to be less than smooth, despite my self-assured belief that a lifetime of worldly travels had prepared me well. In hindsight, though, my first days and weeks in the village were still a success.

I established my living quarters in a small private room in the back of a compound owned by a group of Franciscan nuns living in the village, far enough away from them to feel somewhat comfortable that I was not too much of a burden in their lives but close enough to personally feel safe being mostly alone. Although the room itself was somewhat susceptible to the elements, with unshuttered windows and meager protection from the local Guatemalan insect and animal wildlife, the room offered electricity (most of the time), relative privacy (most of the time), a concrete floor and walls, a sturdy roof, and barricaded screens on the windows that helped me to feel secure at night as I slept.

I am most grateful, however, for what the Sisters did to introduce me to the community. Through the nuns, I was immediately set up with a host family who agreed, in exchange for a modest donation to cover the added expense, to ensure that I ate three meals a day and wore clean clothes. This family became my best friends in the village: my most trusted confidantes, my favorite informants and, to an extent, my protectors. I was introduced to catechists within the Sisters’ congregation, many of

5My assertion here does not mean that there are not texts detailing the problems faced by new ethnographers or by ethnographers working in ethically challenging or physically dangerous ethnographic contexts. See, for instance: Kloß (2016); Li (2008); Pollard (2009); VanderStaay (2005); Van Maanen (2011).

whom were also respected leaders in the political-economic and social life of the village, and the nuns tasked members of the community to provide tours of the village as well as “to offer” their availability for my first tentative interviews about the community.

Through these first contacts in the village, I was able to start fostering relationships that would ultimately turn into important friendships and sources of support throughout my fieldwork and during the course of a sometimes dark personal journey there. As I grew more settled and comfortable, I often ventured out into the village on my own, farther from the safety of my room and for longer periods of time.

By taking part in familiar activities in an unfamiliar environment, what Brewer

(2000) calls “observant participation,” I started to develop a rhythm for the daily flow of public activity. I started to arise, most days, with the light of the sun and the sounds of roosters and the noisy generators running the corn-grinding machines. I drank sodas and ate snacks along the main road each day with the men returning from their fields, striking up conversations about their work and answering questions about my own. I attended church services and loitered around village meetings. I played futbol (soccer) in the afternoons with the village’s young men, who gravitate toward the playing field as twilight approached each day.6 I started to receive lunch and dinner invitations from

6Although I no longer have the speedy legs for the game, or the stamina, that I once did, the players were all impressed with my passing ability and ball control. In fact, as word spread around that the gringo was playing each day, the number of onlookers increased and shouts of “Beckham” and whistles drifted down from the hillside on the rare occasion that I actually made a nice play. My love of the “beautiful game,” playing each afternoon, and creating opportunities to answer questions about the United States and to tell stories about my own life, ended up being perhaps the most important factor in establishing an initial baseline from which to interact with people over the course of my fieldwork. Whatever else villagers thought of me, they knew that I was different than the other Americans who had visited in the past, and playing in the daily games allowed anyone who passed to see that I was actively contributing to community life.

different families, and I became quite comfortable sitting in front of the bodegas after dinner each night, when people crowd around tiny flickering televisions to watch the telenovelas (soap operas) and bootlegged DVDs. I came to value the calm that normally falls over the village after the sun sets, when the night air fills with hushed conversations and outbursts of laughter, and the shadows are briefly illuminated by dancing flashlight beams and the faint flickering of shared cigarettes. My walk home at night, across the wide open soccer field and far from light pollution, became my favorite time of the day because of the spectacular views of the Milky Way galaxy.

My participation in these activities soon led to invitations from men to visit the parcelas (agricultural plots) encircling the village, and I quickly discovered how much pride people have in their land and in what their land can provide. I also learned that to show interest in visiting a family’s land and their work is an important sign of respect but also one of the only ways to find some distance and some privacy from the rest of the village. Looking back on my life there, the times spent out in those fields are among some of my fondest memories, and the casual conversations about the history of

Guatemala and the village, as well as more intimate conversations about life and love, hopes and fears, God and Mayan cosmography, and the importance of the land were the source of important personal and professional breakthroughs. Some of the best interviews I recorded happened whilst sitting in the long grass after planting seeds, walking through rows of corn, climbing fruit trees, tending to animals, or just casually riding horses along the outermost paths of the village.

However, the ease with which those interviews occurred did not happen overnight, or even after six months time, and my initial expectations for talking to people

about the hardships of life in rural Guatemala were ill-advised at best and disrespectful at worst. I should not have been surprised. During the process of applying for grants to fund my research, I received criticism from an anonymous reviewer who noted a fundamental obstacle for the successful completion of my research: I could not expect to pose the kinds of questions to Guatemalan refugees that I proposed to ask, that the kinds of topics―war, violence, torture, death―which I hoped to discuss in the village would be too difficult to navigate in a community that was not already familiar with me.

My naive insistence that the reviewer’s criticism was unwarranted in my case only served to further deflate my confidence when I finally discovered just how correct that anonymous reviewer had been.

Before my arrival, I expected to receive curious looks and a lot of questions, asked to my person and whispered behind my back. Despite the fact that white-faced foreigners are hardly a strange sight in Guatemala―tourists, missionaries, and development workers, not to mention anthropologists, are seemingly everywhere―my presence in a remote rural village was a different matter altogether. Though the

Franciscan nuns with whom I lived are led by an American who has been a member of the community since she began her work at the El Tesoro refugee camp, and though mission-related visits to the village by Americans occur annually, my presence there was unusual because I was neither a medical doctor offering care nor a missionary volunteering labor on behalf of the Catholic Church. I was...someone else. Questions about my presence in the village, and many more rumors about my motivations and intentions, persisted throughout my stay in the community.

I became aware of the danger of rumors and misconceptions during my first visit to Guatemala, years before I began my formal fieldwork, when I was advised not to travel to the village with the company of the young, white, American female anthropologist who I was visiting elsewhere in the country. We were told that people in the countryside do not take kindly to foreign strangers and that there was a very real danger that people would think I was there to adopt, via kidnapping, a Guatemalan child7. Though I now know, at least for my fieldwork community, that this warning was comically exaggerated, I was only three weeks in Yalpemech when I received word regarding rumors of my own impending abduction. I was informed that gossip about the

“rich American with expensive electronics” researching the war had traveled beyond the village’s boundaries, and I was chastised for walking around unattended outside the nun’s compound after nightfall. For the next month, I usually had a chaperone at night, until I tired of always feeling kept.

However legitimate (or, more likely, illegitimate) those particular rumors may have been, the threat was never too far from my mind, a concern made worse because I identified myself as an anthropologist, a calling that many residents associated with human rights work and forensic investigations of war-time atrocities. I was acutely

7 Bunkers, Groza, and Lauer (2009) provide a nice overview about how the high international demand for adoptions has impacted child protection systems in Guatemala. The problems with the adoption system in Guatemala grew so bad that, for a brief time, the international adoption of Guatemalan children was banned altogether. While there were many news stories about child kidnappings during my time in country, and though I was on a couple occasions asked if I intended to adopt a Guatemalan child (and even a couple times asked if I was interested in “adopting” a child-bride that I could provide for in the United States), the vast majority of news accounts that I saw about kidnappings-for-adoption ended up being caused by extended family members rather than foreign interlopers. This, of course, does not undermine at all the fact that international demand may have driven those kidnappers to view children as a viable source of income.

aware that I needed to tread lightly when describing my research to strangers, particularly when I hoped to later ask those same strangers to interview with me, and this was especially important outside the boundaries of the community. Whenever asked, and whenever given the opportunity, I explained to the curious that I am a medical anthropologist interested about life in the Guatemalan countryside and curious about the problems that they face on a daily basis. I tried to articulate how academic research about post-conflict life in rural areas typically focuses only on what people experienced in the past while neglecting the problems and struggles that those people face on a daily basis in the present.

These issues forced me to consider that perhaps I needed to spend more time trying to build rapport in the community before beginning formal interviews with informants, which delayed and extended my time schedule for completing the work.

This extra time, though, allowed me to participate in some of the most enlightening, enjoyable, and eye-opening experiences of my fieldwork, and ultimately I felt much more grounded in village life and taken in by the community as a result. I absolutely believe that the extra time also allowed me to develop interview protocols that better reflect the concerns of the villagers I lived amongst; more important, I developed the confidence and comfort, with myself and with residents, necessary to broach so many sensitive issues during the two formal stages of ethnographic interviews.

Phase One: Semistructured Interviews and Exploring Narratives

The first formal phase of ethnographic interviews for this project involved the administration of a semistructured interview protocol to elicit informant narratives about life in rural Guatemala since the war era, particularly in regard to the sources of strain and distress that impact people individually and the community as a whole. This

approach—and the narrative construct, in general—is a hallmark of anthropological research, and is frequently employed to explore how informants situate their individual experiences within a larger framework of sociocultural meaning (Brody 1987).

Narratives facilitate the reinterpretation of past experiences within a more general cultural framework of “normal” behavior (Ochs and Capps 1996) but also allow individuals to shape present and future experiences according to a culturally- appropriate meaning system (Garro and Mattingly 2000). While there are justifiable criticisms about the use of narrative analysis in social science research, the stories that people tell about their life histories, about their fears and hopes, are simply the best way to learn about a community of people, regardless of the research topics or the ethnographic contexts.

The semistructured interview phase described here was directed at the elicitation of narratives that address not just informants’ views about the Guatemalan civil war and the history of the village but also informants’ views on a number of broad topics relating to the social theory described in Chapter 2, including national institutions since the end of the war, community and domestic life in the present, and the experience of everyday struggles to persevere in the context of endemic poverty. The data analysis and discussion of this first phase of research are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6, but here I describe the background theory and methodological paradigms underlying my research design decisions in this stage, which are grounded in qualitative research about how sociocultural context impacts individuals’ understandings of health and well- being.

Considering Narratives of Health, Suffering, and Society

In their wide-ranging review about the contributions of the narrative construct to anthropological research, Ochs and Capps (1996, 19) describe the narrative as a

“construction of the self,” stating that a person’s narratives “interface self and society, constituting a crucial resource for socializing emotions, attitudes, and identities, developing interpersonal relationships, and constituting membership in a community.”8

Narratives, as understood by anthropologists, are imperfect and incomplete representations of an informant's life experiences but nevertheless they provide a reflection of a cultural worldview that each person shares with others in their unique sociocultural contexts. Ethnographic narratives—and qualitative research methods, more broadly—have been the dominant focus guiding anthropological research on the cultural construction of health and illness. Medical anthropologists exploring the topic of suffering incorporate a broad range of qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis, but the vast majority of this research is premised on the fundamental belief that ethnographic narratives are the best starting point from which to identify the meaning systems and broader themes that help to shape individual and collective experiences of suffering.

8Ochs and Capps (1996, 21) further note that “[t]he inseparability of narrative and self is grounded in the phenomenological assumption that entities are given meaning through being experienced and the notion that the narrative is an essential resource in the struggle to bring experiences to conscious awareness. At any point in time, our sense of entities, including ourselves, is an outcome of our subjective involvement in the world. Narrative mediates this involvement. Personal narratives shape how we attend to and feel about events. They are partial representations and evocations of the world as we know it.”

The narrative construct has a long history in the social study of health—and in the social sciences, in general—and there is a rich body of literature outlining the diverse methodologies and interpretive strategies used to analyze what informants tell us. Contemporary theories about narrative analysis are influenced particularly by the

“narrative turn” in the social sciences. In the broader field of cultural anthropology, the narrative turn generated academic debates about ethnographic reflexivity, postmodern social theory, and the poetics of the narrative form; in medical anthropology, these debates have occurred in concert with a growing recognition of the roles informant narratives can play in the context of medicine, sickness, and healing. This project, and my own thinking about suffering in post-conflict settings, is informed particularly by narrative research that incorporates the constructs of illness narratives and idioms of distress.

Illness narratives: meditations and models

The concept of illness narratives grew out of two broad trends in the 1970s and

1980s concerning how patients describe their health-related suffering. The first trend reflected a then-emerging movement in the literary world that was characterized by long-form meditations and autobiographical tales of lives disrupted by chronic illness, acute pain, and a variety of physical and mental disabilities. Of particular relevance to the development of my project are Susan Sontag’s (2001) Illness as Metaphor and

AIDS and Its Metaphors, Elaine Scarry’s (1985) The Body in Pain, and Arthur Frank’s

(1995) The Wounded Storyteller. Collectively, this work calls attention to the creative nature of the suffering narrator’s public rhetoric, often juxtaposed in contrast to biomedical narratives of clinical diagnoses, and to the myriad ways in which the social scientist might analyze that rhetoric.

Sontag, writing about her own experiences with cancer treatment, describes how patients are pressured to discuss their personal experiences with illness within the same linguistic framework of metaphors that doctors use to frame their treatment.

Hearing doctors’ metaphors about fights and battles and wars, which to Sontag's mind reflect a clinical pessimism on the part of doctors, she describes feeling stigmatized about a condition that was mostly out of her control. Sontag (2001, 46) sees parallels between contemporary characterizations of cancer and antiquated understandings of tuberculosis, arguing that biomedical diagnoses, though ostensibly about a disease of the body, nevertheless become framed as an unfortunate reflection of the suffering patient’s immoral experience in the social world:

Ceasing to consider disease as a punishment which fits the objective moral character, making it an expression of the inner self, might seem less moralistic. But this view turns out to be just as, or even more, moralistic and punitive. With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer), the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease―because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

Scarry’s (1985) meditation on the human body’s vulnerability to pain speaks similarly to the ways in which bodily trauma can be exacerbated by an associated psychic trauma when those who suffer are left without a familiar language or the

“conceptualization abilities” required to mentally process their bodily pain. Writing about torture, and the psychophysiological breakdown that is torture’s ultimate goal, Scarry

(1985, 279) notes:

[T]he failure to recognize what is occurring inside a concussive situation cannot be simply explained in terms of who controls the sources of description, for an observer may stand safely outside the space controlled and described by the torturer, by the proponents of a particular war, by the priests of an angry God, or by a temporally distant ruling class. Our susceptibility to the prevailing description must in part be attributed to the

instability of perception itself: the dissolution of one’s own powers of description contributes to the seductiveness of any existing description.

The struggle to find some sense of meaning before latching onto a “prevailing description”—some common form of language or expression drawn upon to better explain and find meaning in a body, or life, disrupted—is examined more closely in the work characterizing a second broad trend in anthropological research about illness narratives: the clinical encounter between physician and patient.

The perspectives of Elliot Mishler, Arthur Kleinman, and Byron Good are especially influential to the development of my project. Though my research does not address directly the ways in which my informants’ narratives conflict with those of medical professionals in a clinical setting, the work of these researchers was enlightening to me because of their compelling descriptions about how conflicts between physician and patient understandings of illness can complicate an individual's personal experience and expression of health and suffering. One of the broad takeaway points of these authors, which overlaps well with the work of Sontag, Scarry, and Frank, is to recognize that the observer does not always understand the thought processes, social worlds, or symbolic associations drawn upon by the observed, particularly when the observed are not given the opportunity to openly express their suffering in a way that makes sense to them.

Mishler (1984, 104) asserted that there are two voices in doctor-patient interactions: “the voice of medicine” and “the voice of the lifeworld.” Rather than distinct voices mapped onto either patient or doctor, these abstract voices are instead two types of narrative discourse that compete in the context of a medical consultation. The medical voice refers to the doctor-driven discourse that results from the physician’s

questions and the responses of the patient; the voice of the lifeworld, on the other hand, reflects a discourse driven by patients, within the context of the doctor’s questioning prompts, in which the patient frequently takes on the role of a protagonist in a story.

Mishler and colleagues (Clark and Mishler 1992; Hyden and Mishler 1999; Mishler

1997) note that patient beliefs about attending symptoms―including contextual associations of a temporal, spatial, or social nature―can be derived from this kind of storytelling. As a result, patient narratives can shed light on the ways in which patients’ understandings of illness differ from clinical understandings but, more important, can introduce important information that would better facilitate accurate clinical diagnoses.9

Kleinman, Good, and colleagues (Good and Good 1981; Kleinman 1978a,

1978b, 1988; Kleinman, Eisenberg, and Good 1978) recognized this clinical conflict, and they developed a theoretical and methodological framework—“explanatory models”—by which clinicians might begin to bridge the gap between biomedical and lay understandings of disease. Kleinman’s initial interview instrument consisted of eight open-ended questions10 that elicited patients' personal feelings about their attending symptoms in a fashion uncommon to clinical evaluations at the time. Because explanatory models implicitly privilege patients’ beliefs about their illness and their hopes for treatment, the instrument offered physicians a chance to address the conflicts

9Unfortunately, these authors also argue, physicians typically interrupt patients’ responses in order to establish boundaries that recontextualize symptoms into a strictly biomedical model of disorder, thereby diminishing the patients’ roles in their own experience of illness and potentially undermining the effective implementation of treatment regimens.

10e.g., What do you think has caused your problems? What do you think your sickness does to you? What kind of treatment do you think you should receive?

highlighted in Mishler’s work: to explore the ways in which patients' unique sociocultural backgrounds shape their personal beliefs and understandings of illness, which may provide the language and important contextual cues necessary to overcome patients' misconceptions about the psychophysiological course of their illness.

The use of explanatory models grew in influence as a qualitative method for eliciting cross-cultural narratives of patient well-being during the Western clinical encounter (Eisenbruch 1990; Fox, Ward, and O'Rourke 2005; Lloyd et al. 1998; Luyas,

Kay, and Solomons 1991; Weiss 1997). This work has helped to introduce to physician training programs the notion that biomedical models of clinical illness are themselves culturally-constructed. Medical programs now often teach that sociocultural context must be an explicit consideration of doctors, because that context shapes patients’ vulnerability and risk but also shapes their understandings of health and, by extension, the degree to which patients follow doctors’ clinical prescriptions (Chavez et al. 1995,

2001; Kirmayer et al. 2007, 2014).

Kleinman later extended the scope of his work with explanatory models, turning his attention more broadly to the elicitation of storytelling narratives that were even more open-ended than typically allowed by the explanatory model framework. This formative work became particularly influential to future ethnographies of health when Kleinman,

Good, and other clinician-ethnographers extended their broader investigations of patient narratives in a clinical setting to narratives of chronic illness in cross-cultural contexts.

For example, Good and Good (1994) explored narratives associated with generalized seizure disorders in Turkey. Interviewing a subset of patients identified as epileptic by a much larger epidemiological survey, the authors found that informants

often reevaluated their clinical diagnoses in order to reframe the associated symptoms of epilepsy into a less stigmatizing condition. The authors describe how epilepsy was believed by many to be a kind of madness, yet people dealing with milder cases could reframe the characteristic seizure spells to better fit prevailing frameworks of meaning in which fainting and falling belonged to different (and less socially stigmatizing) semantic domains, explanatory models, and behavioral origins.

These narratives, the authors argue, allow both patients and their friends and family to transform the conditions of the disorder into stories of hope, rather than signs of potential and inevitable danger or some bodily inadequacy, allowing those afflicted with epilepsy to transgress the prevailing sociocultural norms about what the disorder means. In many of the cross-cultural studies of epilepsy in medical anthropology that have followed this seminal research, ethnographers describe how illness narratives provide insights into the ways that people with epilepsy can feel marginalized but also how narrative strategies help epileptic patients to better navigate, and counter, societal expectations about their illness.11

Cross-cultural ethnographic research has also incorporated illness narratives to connect individual life experiences to global processes of political-economic marginalization. A prominent example of this work is Farmer’s (1994) discussion of

“AIDS-talk” and cultural beliefs about the modern emergence of HIV and AIDS in rural

11Kleinman et al. (1995), working in rural China, describe how the prevailing narratives about epilepsy stigmatize afflicted persons by delegitimizing their lived experience on moral grounds, positioning the social and economic burdens of epilepsy as an affront to cultural norms that value the long-term success of the family unit. Fadiman (1997) provides a powerful account of Hmong beliefs about the valued spiritual significance of episodic seizures that contrast starkly with Western biomedical understandings of epilepsy.

Haiti. Over the course of many years of ethnographic work, Farmer mapped the spread of sida (AIDS) across the countryside as well as the spread of local theories pertaining to the origins, meaning, and symbolic associations of the syndrome’s symptoms.

Farmer describes how the pathogenesis of AIDS and its concomitant medical side effects came to be organized within a narrative plot structure already familiar to rural

Haitians, who explained the proliferation of AIDS by calling upon previous knowledge about tuberculosis, folk beliefs about contamination from “dirty blood,” and the supernatural forces of sorcery and witchcraft.12 Farmer notes that many of his informants place blame13 for the spread of AIDS in context of North American imperialism and the corruption of the ruling elite class in Haiti.

However, as clinician-ethnographers turned their attention to cross-cultural explorations of clinical illness, their conclusions raised important concerns about the usefulness of Western biomedical constructs when evaluating the wellness of patients in non-Western settings. Cross-cultural research consistently presented clinical doctors and medical anthropologists with a wide-range of seemingly culture-specific frameworks of illness categories and culturally-constructed trajectories of illness course that depart substantially from Western biomedical understandings of health and bodily disorder.

12See also Farmer (1988, 1990) for additional information about dirty blood, politics, and AIDS in rural Haiti.

13Farmer’s work is not the only research to note informants’ perceptions of links between the relatively quick spread of AIDS and the negative effects of globalization. Mogensen (1997) describes an account of AIDS in rural Zambia where Tongan informants recontextualize the disorder using the same cause- effect framework used to talk about kahungo, a local category of illness that associates fetal miscarriage with unclean blood; however, Tongans place blame for the spread of AIDS on a changed modern world in which too many people come into contact with one another without adhering to traditional rules of interpersonal social interactions that help keep people clean and healthy. See also Fassin (2011) and Thomas (2008).

Thus, medical anthropologists increasingly focused on the meaning systems that give context to illness categories in cross-cultural settings.

Idioms of distress

Anthropologists working in non-Western societies have always been interested in local knowledge about health and medicine, particularly in regard to the cultural expression of individual suffering. For instance, many of the formative ethnographic works of the discipline describe the prominent role of sorcery and witchcraft as explanatory frameworks that connect kinds of social distress to bodily misfortunes (e.g,,

Evans-Pritchard 1937; Fortune 1932; Kluckholn 1944).

Yap (1965, 1969) introduced the concept of culture-bound syndromes to explain the wide variety of culture-specific psychiatric symptoms and behavioral disorders that were frequently described in cross-cultural research but were not covered in conventional diagnostic manuals. The concept resonated with the social and health sciences for decades. One early example of culture-bound syndromes, a Latin

American condition called nervoso (elsewhere, nervos, nervios), is one of the most widely researched, and concerns “nerves” generally but also a wide-range of associated behaviors and somatic symptoms that anthropologists describe as expressions of distress.

Katz and Csordas (2003, 279) describe nervoso as more of a mood than a disorder: “[I]rritability, withdrawal, weakness, and moral isolation constitute a mode of being absorbed in an existential situation rather than a series of symptoms subject to medicalization.” Perhaps the most well-known description of nervoso comes from the shantytowns of urban Brazil, from which Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992) describes the condition as “a state of disequilibrium” born of nervous agitation that reflects, more than

anything else, bodily cries of dissent at the suffering resulting from poverty in the slums of Brazil: “at times a refusal of men to continue demeaning and debilitating labor, at times a response of women to violent shock or tragedy, and also in part a response to the ongoing state of emergency in everyday life” (Ember and Ember 2004, 121).

Rebhun (2003) writes that many of the findings in anthropological research on culture-bound syndromes overlap, broadly describing the manifestation of psychophysiological and behavioral problems to be a direct consequence of disruptive sociocultural change in local context. The concept of culture-bound syndromes was formalized14 in the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association 2000), but there remained questions about whether the descriptions published by ethnographers and cultural psychiatrists actually represented distinguishable “disorders” (Good et al. 2008; Mezzich et al. 1999).

Illness narrative research in cross-cultural settings helped to extend this kind of work, in part, by contributing to a growing consensus about the metaphorical associations peppering stories of suffering heard by ethnographers. Anthropologists have always been taken with the metaphors used in colloquial speech, but researchers embraced the concept of idioms of distress as a heuristic for examining how these

14The DSM-IV defines culture-bound syndromes to be “[r]ecurrent, locally-specific patterns of aberrant behavior and troubling experience that may or may not be linked to a particular DSM-IV diagnostic category” and are “generally limited to specific societies or culture areas, and are localized, folk, diagnostic categories that frame coherent meanings for certain repetitive, patterned, and troubling sets of experiences and observations” (American Psychiatric Association 1994)

verbal expressions, particularly when shared within a larger cultural community, reveal informants’ understandings about the root origins of their illnesses.15

Mark Nichter (1979, 1981) developed the concept of idioms of distress during the course of his research on psychosocial stress in South India. He argued that Brahmin women are socialized to restrict their emotive distress and, because women are traditionally relegated to the household in Brahmin culture, have few outlets to which they might express feelings of dissatisfaction about their life. Instead, women covertly express those feelings in the context of visits to medical practitioners, incorporating a variety of idioms that relate their bodily concerns to a suite of core values traditionally associated with Brahmin culture.

Nichter (1979, 402) writes that these idioms may serve an adaptive function by allowing women to cope with psychosocial stressors when they might otherwise be constrained in their abilities to do so. “In any given culture, a variety of ways exist to express distress. Expressive modes are culturally constituted in the sense that they initiate particular types of interaction and are associated with culturally pervasive values, norms, generative themes, and health concerns” (Nichter 1981, 379). When Nichter

(2010) more recently reviewed idioms of distress in a special volume of Culture,

Medicine and Psychiatry, he further elaborated this point by arguing that health-seeking

15The concept of idioms of distress is by no means the only construct used to describe these associations, though perhaps it is the most ubiquitous in contemporary medical anthropology research. For instance, Coker (2004) draws a distinction between the ways that Sudanese refugees in Egypt describe illness (“illness talk”) and the specific metaphors used to describe the psychological stress produced by the combined stressors of refugee trauma and forced dislocation (“body talk”).

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and treatment-avoidance behaviors, as well as individual coping mechanisms, should also be considered as expressive forms of distress.

Not all idioms are the same across cultures, nor do they reflect the same problems. However, much of the literature describing idioms of distress have overlapping conclusions. One critical finding is that people in cross-cultural contexts frequently link their health complaints to causes originating out of local sociocultural context, with somatoform symptoms that co-occur along with the metaphorical and idiomatic language patients use to talk about their health complaints. Much of this ethnographic work finds that the pathological symptoms associated with local understandings of bodily dysfunction align, at least partially, with the symptom checklists of stress-related clinical disorders like depression or PTSD; however, cross-cultural informants also frequently report a wide-range of health complaints that are not specific symptoms of those clinical disorders. Furthermore, much of the cross-cultural research has concluded that the underlying causes of distress—as well as the appropriate treatments and coping behaviors—are determined according to sociocultural values that lend emic validity to expressions of distress in ethnographic context.

Idioms of distress in post-war contexts have received significant attention in recent medical anthropology research (de Jong and Reis 2010; Kohrt and Hruschka

2010; Pedersen, Kienzler, and Gamarra 2010; Rasmussen et al. 2011). Although these researchers frequently incorporate different theoretical backgrounds and methodologies, a common finding that connects much of this work is that these idioms, though used to describe feelings engendered by war-era experiences, are also used to

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talk about feelings associated with ongoing problems in the post-conflict present.

Themes of material deprivation and environmental insecurity are especially common.

For instance, many medical anthropologists have explored life in post-war Peru, following many years of domestic conflict between Sendero Luminoso squads and the

Peruvian state in the 1980s and 1990s. Researchers with ethnographic experience in the region (Darghouth et al. 2006; Larme and Leatherman 2003; Oths 1999) describe how the economic marginalization characterizing agrarian life in modern Peru has produced categories of illness that reflect both somatic complaints and a generalized social distress associated with individuals’ inability to effectively carry out the domestic roles expected of them. Pedersen et al. (2010) present a variety of idiomatic expressions related to worry, suffering, and sorrow that emerge in conversations with

Peruvian Quechua informants about that distress. The authors suggest that these idioms have not simply evolved to explain difficult life experiences in the post-war era but rather they reflect the same ongoing social inequalities that exposed them to wartime distress in the first place, linking wartime violence and ongoing marginalization in modern Peru as consequences of post-colonial policies that continue to resonate in the post-conflict present.

Phase Two: Structured Interviews and Cultural Models

The second formal phase of ethnographic interviews for this project involved the administration of a structured interview questionnaire, building from narratives about the various struggles faced by Guatemalans in post-war communities to more closely examine and compare informants’ beliefs about the relative severity of those struggles for members of the community. Though the previous round of interviews offered informants the opportunity to react to open-ended questions in whatever way they

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wished, the structured ratings questionnaire used during this stage was rigid about the kind of responses given by informants. I was not so concerned with hearing about informants’ life stories, the varied life experiences of agrarian life in rural Guatemala, or the problems my informants face. Instead, I wanted to test the assertions made by previous researchers that the stressors associated with everyday life in post-war communities are perceived to be as distressing, if not more distressing, than the acute traumatic stressors commonly associated with victims of the Guatemalan civil war.

Thus, this stage was focused on producing the empirical data necessary to compare patterns of agreement and disagreement between informants about these various life stressors. In this section, though, I describe the background theory and methodological paradigms that have shaped the research of contemporary cognitive anthropologists, and how systematic ethnographic methods like cultural consensus analysis can be used to extend the usefulness of informant narratives to provide a more detailed view of post-conflict suffering. The presentation and discussion of results from data analyses in this research stage are discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.

Cognitive Anthropology and the Study of Cultural Models

The research design for this stage draws heavily from the ethnographic theory and methods developed by cognitive anthropologists during the latter half of the twentieth century. Cognitive anthropologists view culture as an intersection between human society and individual thought processes (D’Andrade 1995b), frequently describing cultural knowledge in terms of overlapping and socially-transmitted mental frameworks about how the world works (Ross 2004, 53; Shore 1996). Rather than fixed systems that structure individual thought and action, these frameworks are flexible, but socially patterned, “maps” that help to shape individual and collective representations of

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human experience. Cognitive perspectives do not view culture as a monolithic or static thing that exists apart from and outside of individuals, but instead culture is considered to be an evolving system of mental connections that results as much from one person’s memory and expanding life history as it does from that person’s relative engagement with a larger collective social world. This latter point is important to keep in mind, because cognitive perspectives on culture do not suggest that all people in a given sociocultural context think the same way about all aspects of life.

In particular, this project is informed by the theory and methods that have developed from two influential paradigms in cognitive anthropology. The first paradigm includes research working with the concepts of schemata (D’Andrade 1995b; Johnson

1987; Strauss 1992), cultural models (D’Andrade and Strauss 1992; Holland and Quinn

1987; Strauss and Quinn 1997), and cultural domains (Borgatti 1994; Boster 1985;

Brewer 1995; Gatewood 1984). Each of these concepts16 refer to ways of conceiving of culture as a kind of integrated system of knowledge, an abstract mental framework for organizing the general knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors that individuals use to navigate their way through the world.

The second paradigm important to the research design in this phase is cultural consensus analysis, which is both a theory and a formal method for exploring cultural

16The demands for brevity here prevent a full and thorough dissection of the various ways that researchers, across many academic disciplines and intellectual perspectives, have historically adapted and conflated these particular concepts. Understandably, the wide range of uses can lead new researchers on the topic to grow confused about how they might be operationalized into a logical research design. I faced similar difficulties navigating the diversity of terms and definitions during the development of my project, but my studies coalesced into a specific understanding of how these constructs are related.

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knowledge and the amount of informant agreement about that knowledge (Romney,

Batchelder, and Weller 1987; Romney, Weller, and Batchelder 1986). As described below, both paradigms tend to broadly talk about research results in terms of “cultural models” but the types of data collection and analyses associated with each one are often different.

The development of cognitive anthropology

The modern study of cultural models by cognitive anthropologists draws from a broad interdisciplinary research literature17 but is commonly cited as being rooted in the theory and empirical research of anthropological linguistics and ethnoscience that emerged in the 1950s. In the first half of the 20th century, anthropological research on culture was commonly focused on the identification of “traits” that could be used to compare and categorize distinct culture groups. However, mid-century shifts in thinking about how to study culture led to important developments in both culture theory and ethnographic practice across the discipline.

Goodenough (1956), Lounsbury (1956), Sturtevant (1964), and Wallace and

Atkins (1960) feature prominently in the early development of ethnoscience18 as both a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of culture. Goodenough (1957,

167), in particular, is widely cited for establishing both the theoretical perspective and the research agenda that initially guided the study of a “culture in the mind”:

A society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members. Culture is not a

17This literature includes research from cultural psychology, psychological anthropology, artificial intelligence, and computer systems theory.

18Also sometimes called ethnosemantics or “the new ethnography.”

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material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the form of things that people have in mind, their models of perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them.

Ethnoscience research generally eschewed materialist descriptions of culture groups and the rote documentation of culture “traits” (e.g., artifacts, rituals, phonemes, etc.) to study instead the underlying mental structures that organize people’s knowledge of, and interaction with, the world around them (Blount 2011, 13). Ethnoscientists believed that a formalized methodological design and rigorous data analysis would allow researchers to identify these organizing mental structures. Drawing heavily from the systematic methods of anthropological linguistics and the test-driven explanatory approaches of psychology (Gatewood 2012), componential analysis emerged as that formal method.

The basic methods of data collection and analysis were already well-established in the phonological research of anthropological linguistics, which focused on the

“distinctive features” of sounds/phonemes that give meaning to words in a language.

The basic method involves identifying whether or not a feature is present—(+) for yes and (-) for no—to make “as many discriminations as conceivably possible”

(Goodenough 1956, 196).

However, rather than distinguishing between individual words and their constituent phonemes, componential analysis aimed to identify the distinct features demarking meaning differences in lexical contrast sets (Gatewood 2012). Bernard

(2006, 541) identifies two broad objectives in componential analysis: “(1) to specify the conditions under which a native speaker of a language will call something (like a plant, a kinsman, a car) by a particular term and (2) to understand the cognitive process by

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which native speakers decide which of several terms they should apply to a particular thing.”

In a series of influential articles, Goodenough (1956, 1957) championed the logic and practice of this kind of analysis in his research on the semantic structure of kinship terminologies. His goal was not simply to identify all of the terms that one might use to describe family members, but to identify the salient features that differentiate relationships between people (and the terms applied to them) into contrasting variants of like type (e.g., man/woman, aunt/uncle, etcetera). The elaboration of folk taxonomies soon dominated ethnoscience research (Conklin 1972); in addition to kinship terminologies, researchers explored a number of semantic domains related to colors, ethnobotany, ethnozoology, and health and illness (Berlin 1963; Berlin and Kay 1974;

Conklin 1955; Frake 1961, 1964; Romney and D’Andrade 1964).

A guiding principle of this work was that folk taxonomies could produce evidence of innate mental structures in the ways that humans, regardless of cultural origin, organize and categorize their world (Goodenough 1957). And this research did produce important findings about human cognitive universals, as well as some cross-cultural evidence that people reason about similarity and dissimilarity in predictable ways.

However, connecting the structural organization of taxonomic features, particularly within narrowly defined semantic domains, to the structural formation of the larger culture was a more difficult intellectual and methodological exercise.

Consequently, a number of critiques of ethnoscience developed within the larger discipline and within the ethnoscience community itself (Gatewood 2012). The broadest critique developed in connection with the interpretivist trends that were, by the 1970s,

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transforming culture theory within the larger discipline (e.g., Geertz 1973). First, many cultural anthropologists argued that the topics typically pursued by ethnoscientists were domains of knowledge unlikely to explain the formative impact of culture, particularly in comparison to questions about political-economy or religion (Gatewood 2012). Others questioned whether language is the best, or even most important, representation of a culture’s values, beliefs, and organizing principles (Atran 1993). Still others (e.g.,

Keesing 1972) worried that the formalized methodology of ethnoscience tended to reify culture as a homogenous and unchanging thing, neglecting the inherent sociocultural variability underlying individual knowledge and worldviews.

But many ethnoscientists were also concerned with the apparent limitations of componential analysis. For instance, some semantic domains—like trees and illnesses—were more difficult to analyze with existing methods than were domains, like kinship and colors, characterized by relatively closed lexical systems (Gatewood 2012).

A related concern was that componential analysis might be an effective way to reveal the base prototype of a narrow-defined cultural domain, and even some of the important distinctive features that organize a wider range of items within that domain, but the identification of those distinctive features did little to advance our knowledge of how meaning is assigned to them in the first place.

By the 1980s, the label of “ethnoscience” and the volume of ethnoscience research diminished within the larger discipline. However, the broad intellectual concern

(and some of the methods) for modeling cognitive relationships between experience, knowledge, and memory continued to drive the work of cognitive anthropologists. The academic heirs of ethnoscience broadly aligned into two distinct paradigms that have

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dominated contemporary studies in this type of cognitive anthropology: cultural models and cultural consensus.

Cultural models

In recent decades, schema theory has become an important point of intersection between the various strands of the cognitive sciences. Cognitive anthropologists embraced schema theory in part because it retained the perspective that culture exists in the mind but also because it provided a conceptual solution, if not a perfect methodological solution, for overcoming the limitations of componential analysis.

There are many definitions for schema, even within cognitive anthropology

(D’Andrade 1995b; Garro 2000b; Strauss and Quinn 1997), but they all consider schemas to be abstract mental frameworks by which humans call upon their unconscious memory of past experiences to shape their expectations, and actions, during present and future events. In a sense, schemas are a mental map, instantiated through experience, learning, and repetition; they can be relatively simple (e.g., making coffee, taking a shower) or relatively complex, featuring multiple schema that interact at both horizontal and vertical structural levels.

For instance, my schema for “commuting to work” each morning might include smaller schemas relating to starting the car, and driving the car, and economic transactions at the coffee shop, and the written and unwritten rules of transit on the

American highway. These schemas exist in my mind independent of one another but come together to establish expectations for that morning commute, even if my behaviors (and the associated schemas I draw upon) occur largely without thought.

Schemas are also flexible and adaptable. Perhaps I have overslept, or a road is blocked, or the coffee shop line is unusually long, or the car has a flat tire; in each of

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these scenarios, additional schema are called upon to inform how I should act (e.g., call work, take a different route, go to a different coffee shop, change the flat tire with a spare).

D’Andrade (1992, 48) defines schemas as “simplified interpretive frameworks used to understand events” but he also notes that this framework organizes relationships between objects and events in such a way that they can later be “filled in with concrete detail,” as if slots were open to be filled with additional information or smaller schemas as warranted (D’Andrade 1995b, 124). Strauss and Quinn (1997) refer to “cognitive elements that represent the generic concepts,” also implying a kind of plug- and-play mental framework composed of prototypical schemas that are quickly and intuitively invoked by the brain. So, for instance, if I am confronted with a scenario with which I have no prior experience—perhaps something has gone wrong with my car’s computer-electrical system—I can instantly call upon similar (but basic) pre-existing schemas to reason what might be occurring, potential actions I might take, and the possible outcomes resulting from each. Sometimes these basic schema are referred to as prototypes.

Casson (1983, 434) describes prototypes as the “stereotypic, or generic, representation of a concept that serves as a standard.” A simplistic way of thinking about prototypes is via the real world example of “a bird” (Lakoff 1982). When someone is asked to generically describe or visualize the main identifying features of a bird, most people will call to mind a prototype whose base characteristics are two legs, two wings, a beak, and some feathers. However, a resident of coastal Florida might call to mind a crane while a falconer may imagine a bird of prey. That base prototype, though, allows

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us to differentiate birds from other animals and to fill out, in a sense, all of the taxonomic details (e.g., size, color, habitat, mating behaviors, etc.) that may be necessary later to differentiate among varieties of birds. Thus, though we may share the “bird” prototype, we each fill out that prototype with our own idiosyncratic associations. One person’s prototype may evoke positive personal experiences with their own pet, while someone else might evoke fear as the result of watching Alfred Hitchcock films as a child. These idiosyncratic prototypes, though, represent the foundation of our discriminant knowledge, which every individual uses to construct larger models.

Ross (2004, 168) suggests that these larger models are distinct from schemas in part because of the inclusion of goals, values, and motivations. This seems to align with

D’Andrade’s (1995b, 399) view that models are a “set of cognitive elements used to understand and reason about something.” To wit, a schema may represent how the cognitive elements—the knowledge—fits together, but personal models help to explain why.

Shore (2009, 46) uses the example of his neighborhood to describe how individuals can develop personal mental models “on the fly” and through the course of life experiences. For example, the new transplant to a residential neighborhood must learn a series of steps necessary to travel from her home to her university. After a few trips, she can envision a basic mental map of the path, including an estimation of spatial distance, the sequence of turns, and the presence of relevant landmarks along the way.

Over the course of a year, she may learn short-cuts, or she might learn that different modes of transportation are more efficient at certain times of the day. All of this information can be reflected in her basic schema of the commute to university, but her

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personal model is dependent upon idiosyncratic preferences and desires. Perhaps she walked to school, and chooses a path home that takes her through the university’s botanical garden to decompress from the day’s events; perhaps she avoids a construction site on campus because of an uncomfortable experience with catcalling laborers in the past.

These personal models, though, become cultural when they are shared, communicated, and widely held by a group of people. Holland and Quinn (1987, 4) define cultural models as:

presupposed, taken-for-granted models of the world that are widely shared (although not necessarily to the exclusion of other, alternative models) by the members of a society and that play an enormous role in their understanding of the world and their behavior in it.

D’Andrade (1995b) later identified three criteria that differentiate cultural models from personal models: (1) they are high-level configurations, composed of multiple associated schema; (2) they are implicit rather than explicit, and perhaps not even consciously recognized by the individual; and (3) they are composed of more than just symbolic associations, but they are nevertheless learned over time, reinforced and modified as a consequence of social sharing.

Gatewood (2012, 366) notes, though, that “individuals are not passive receivers of cultural models, rather they actively use and interpret these for their own purposes.”

Cultural models may be widely shared, but they are always shared imperfectly, from person to person, because everyone’s cognitive processing is mediated by personal memory and experiential learning. Cultural consensus, both a theory of culture and a formal measurement model, developed as an ethnographic tool to explore more precisely the aspects of cultural models that people share.

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Cultural Consensus

The theory underlying cultural consensus analysis (CCA) builds from previous research in cognitive anthropology that assumes that culture exists in the mind.

However, unlike most cultural models approaches, cultural consensus analysis applies that theory of “culture in the mind” to formal statistical procedures that attempt to estimate the distribution of cultural knowledge across informants and then compare the degree to which individuals share that knowledge (Romney, Batchelder, and Weller

1987; Romney, Weller, and Batchelder 1986; Weller 2007).

In practice, cultural consensus is a type of factor analysis, quite similar to the statistical procedures used in psychometric test construction and reliability theory.

However, while reliability theory is interested in the relationship of the informant to knowledge about the “items” of study, cultural consensus is concerned with the relationship between informants. A good way to think about this difference is a scenario described by Russ Bernard in my graduate seminar on research methods, in which a college exam’s answer key has been misplaced.

Typically, exam grades are obtained by comparing two “vectors” of numbers—the student’s answers and the professor’s answer key—in what amounts to a basic matched coefficient test that identifies the percentage similarity between the two vectors. That is, the comparison of the answer key (Vector 1) to the student’s exam responses (Vector 2) provides the grader with a sense of the student’s knowledge.

However, in a scenario where an assistant has misplaced the professor’s answer key,

CCA provides a mathematical tool for calculating the most likely correct answer for each question by comparing each student’s response to every other student’s response.

Here, the informants are treated as variables, and the intercorrelations between each

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individual informant’s responses are analyzed to determine whether an underlying construct exists to explain those intercorrelations. The main assumption of the model is that the amount of correspondence between any two individuals is a function of the extent to which each individual has knowledge of a given topic (Weller and Romney

1988, 75).

When grading the exam under normal circumstances, with an answer key, the student’s knowledge of the material is essentially irrelevant so long as the correct answer is chosen (e.g., a correct answer can be chosen due to a fortuitous guess).

Without an answer key, though, the possibility of chance must be an explicit consideration. CCA estimates an individual student’s knowledge of the correct answers by analyzing three statistical probabilities for each exam question: (1) the probability that each individual student knows the correct answer; (2) the probability that each student guesses the correct answer; and (3) the probability that any two students will choose the same answer. Assuming that the professor has constructed an exam with questions that cover the actual course materials, that everyone has received the same exam questions, that there is only one correct answer for each question, and that each student has taken the exam without assistance, the amount of agreement seen in the students’ aggregate responses has the potential to provide an approximate but imperfect idea of what are the correct answers.

I describe in depth the technical details of cultural consensus in Chapter 7, but for now I will simplify the discussion by noting that CCA, not unlike earlier work in ethnoscience, helps us to describe a taxonomic framework of relationships between

“items” in a cultural domain. Like ethnoscience research, consensus analysis begins

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with similar methods of data collection and also aims to explain the “cognitive structure of cultural belief systems” (Aunger 2002, 37). However, the analytical methods of cultural consensus differ from those of ethnoscience; where componential analysis focused on the relationships between semantic terms, cultural consensus is concerned with how informants compare in their beliefs about those relationships.

Much of the formative work incorporating cultural consensus has examined the same cultural domains addressed in earlier ethnoscience research. For instance, a common use of CCA since its inception has been the identification of “experts” and

“novices” in the domains of ecological knowledge (Boster 1986; Boster and Johnson

1989; Miller et al. 2004; Shafto and Coley 2003). But CCA has also been used to explore more abstract domains related to models of economic success (Dressler 1988;

Dressler et al. 1998; McDade 2001), food choice (Groves 2012; Oths et al. 2003;

Szurek 2011), evangelical life (Dengah 2013), ethnicity (Gravlee 2005), and social support (Dressler and Bindon 1997, 2000; Handwerker 1999).

This dissertation project has been influenced in particular by the research of medical anthropologists who have incorporated CCA to explore variations in beliefs about a wide range of health conditions, including AIDS (Trotter et al. 1999), asthma

(Pachter et al. 2002), cancer (Luque et al. 2010; Mathews 2000), diabetes (Weller et al.

1999), hypertension (Dressler et al. 2004; Garcia et al. 2012), and malaria (Ruebush,

Weller, and Klein 1992; Winch et al. 1994). Collectively, this research has shown that the frameworks revealed in consensus results, particularly when there is high agreement between respondents, can provide useful information about the structural

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relationships underlying a cultural model of illness. But consensus results alone do not explain meaning.

Kightley, Tyler, and Gravlee (2008) found that patterns of high informant agreement in CCA research are often cited in academic literature as evidence of a shared cultural model. But perhaps consensus results are better thought of as evidence of a cultural “prototype,” a basic framework of object relationships, because the value of these results and any subsequent interpretations is primarily dependent upon ethnography. Without it, we can only intuit why people agree, through the filter of our own etic perspectives.

This is a critical point because more recent CCA research increasingly shows that the usefulness of consensus analysis does not stop with an identification of the structural relationships underlying cultural models (Dengah 2013; Dressler 2012, 2016).

Instead, the consensus results are in many ways a starting point; the relationships between knowledge “items” can redirect our ethnographic thinking and our narrative analyses, and the data revealed about informant agreement allows us to explore in finer detail patterns of systematic variation within the main consensus model.

I argue in this dissertation that the data produced by ethnographic participant- observation, informant narratives, and consensus models combine to present a more detailed picture of the cultural models shaping informants’ views on the world. However, there are important critiques of illness narratives, cultural models, and consensus analysis that we must also consider.

Criticisms of Narrative Methods and Cultural Model Approaches

Illness narratives and idioms of distress are influential paradigmatic constructs within medical anthropology, and their heuristic usefulness has shaped the development

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and direction of the social suffering theory that provides much of the foundation for this project. However, as ubiquitous as these constructs have become in contemporary ethnographic research, there are also reasonable critiques about the consequences of relying upon personal narratives to identify broad connections between individual experiences and collective understandings about the sociocultural origins of disorder.

Paul Atkinson (1997, 2005)19 provides widely cited and well articulated arguments against using patient narratives—and explanatory model frameworks, in general—as the driving methodological focus in sociocultural studies of health. In his article, “Narrative Turn or Blind Alley?,” Atkinson (1997) specifically draws attention to the major works of Frank, Kleinman, and Mishler, which inspired a lengthy debate over many years and across a series of academic journals about the relative benefits of illness narrative perspectives. Atkinson’s main contentions center on his belief that these scholars, and many others influenced by their work, treat narrative data through a lens of sentimental romanticism that privileges patient statements as more “special” and more authentic than other forms of data typically found in studies of health. As a consequence, he argues, illness narratives are not usually evaluated with a robust analytical rigor but rather with an eye toward storytelling, which undermines the systematicity necessary for researchers' claims to scientific objectivity in favor of genre writing that, while perhaps more compelling to read, amounts to a less ethical form of analysis.

19See also Atkinson and Delamount (2006) and Atkinson and Silverman (1997).

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Describing Atkinson’s criticisms, Carol Thomas (2010) suggests that his goals are not to diminish the relative benefits of narrative research but instead to draw attention to the potential analytical peril created by an over-reliance upon narrative data in studies of health and well-being. I tend to agree, as Atkinson’s critiques seem to be less about methodological rigor in qualitative analyses and more focused on reining in researchers’ claims to objectivity and, especially, the strength and scope of their interpretive conclusions.

Merrill Singer notes that there is little to argue against the reality of sociocultural influences on health beliefs, or the importance of informant narratives as tools for exploring those influences, but he critiques explanatory model approaches for similar reasons. “Much of the tension in the clinical encounter...does not derive from the existence of diverse health subcultures, nor is it due to a failure in medical education to instill an appreciation of folk models of health and illness; rather, it is a reproduction of larger class, racial, and gender conflicts in the broader society” (Singer 1995, 85).

The ethics of drawing grand conclusions from informant narratives is a topic worth debating, and there are certainly merits to criticisms about the preeminence of narrative methods in social studies of health. However, the question then becomes how to accept, and move beyond, those criticisms. For instance, to address Singer’s critique:

(1) how do we attend to the likelihood that no two persons’ models will be the same, (2) how do we evaluate whether these larger class, ethnic, and gender conflicts really are shaping the form and content of diverging models, and (3) how do we explore variation in beliefs about larger societal forces that may not even be recognized by the individual informant?

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Fortunately, the question of whether or not people actually agree in their beliefs, and why they do or do not, is testable. In this project’s second broad phase of research,

I attempted to do that by incorporating structured ethnographic methods to complement and extend the rich narrative data revealed during semistructured informant interviews.

However, there are also a number of criticisms of cultural consensus research that also demand consideration.

Robert Aunger (1999, 2004) outlines a broad critique of cultural consensus, although his criticisms have less to do with the measurement model itself than with the explanatory power of the consensus results. Aunger’s (2004, 88) broad concern is that many of the researchers who have developed or used CCA since its inception have come to treat consensus models as “idealized depictions of cultural groups.”. One of

Aunger's principal critiques is that findings of “consensus” lead many researchers to describe evidence of sharing as evidence of a shared cultural model, when average competency (or knowledge) scores can obscure patterns of disagreement between informants. “My argument with the standard CCA approach lies in the use of CCA to attribute ideals to individuals who do not report them, with the tendency of CCA users to suggest that statistical constructs are ontologically real, and held in the mind of individuals” (Aunger 2004, 92).

Aunger points to several sources of potential variation that can emerge from the interview design itself. A central critique is that CCA is rooted in psychometric approaches, which is designed for written tests, and Aunger (2004, 33) asserts that the

CCA framework may be inappropriate for the ethnographic case. Furthermore, Aunger wonders whether the small sample sizes that are typically drawn in consensus research

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are large enough to identify patterns of inter- and intra-cultural variation. These issues reflect larger concerns with the decisions of the ethnographer, and Aunger (2004, 33-34) questions the effects of observer bias, both in defining the “domain” to be studied and the content within it, as well as potential interviewer effects resulting from the imperfect use of already imperfect elicitation techniques.

Garro (2000b) highlights similar concerns in her comparison of cultural consensus theory and cultural models theory, through the lens of her ethnographic research of diabetes talk in an Anishinaabe (Ojibway) community. Garro (2000b, 312) presents the two broad bodies of theory as contrasting approaches, and aims to identify which of the approaches “provides more insight into the nature of individual and cultural knowledge.” She concludes that, for her, cultural models theory is more effective:

Because knowledge is seen to be distributed unevenly, cultural consensus theorists anticipate intracultural variation but view variation as analogous to performance on a cultural test, with some individuals serving as better guides than others to the cultural information pool. Here, the intracultural variation observed seems to be more a matter of knowing differently than knowing more or less.

Our preliminary review of consensus research (Kightley, Tyler, and Gravlee 2008) found some evidence to reinforce Garro’s point; there does seem to be a tendency in published papers to frame informant competence scores in terms of experts and novices, and to interpret findings of consensus as empirical evidence of a cohesive and widespread cultural model. Garro (2000b, 312) concludes that CCA “helps to corroborate claims about shared cultural understandings, while pointing out areas where there is less agreement,” but she does not feel that CCA is effective for understanding intracultural variability. As described in more detail in Chapter 7, recent work in cognitive anthropology has extended the usefulness of consensus analysis with

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novel approaches to the study of systematic variation within consensus models

(Dengah 2013; Dressler 2012), which I believe attends to some of the important points made by Aunger and Garro.

Conclusion

Not long after my return to the United States from Guatemala, a long-standing debate between anthropologists erupted once again over the role, and meaning, of science within the larger discipline. The Executive Board of the flagship professional organization of anthropology in the United States—the American Anthropological

Association—had distributed an early version of the group’s updated and revised draft of the group’s long-range planning mission statement, which featured the prominent removal of the word “science” in reference to the types of public and scholarly audiences that anthropologists should direct their future research findings.

The online publication of commentaries from Inside Higher Ed20 and the

Chronicles of Higher Education21, as well as a Nicholas Wade article in the New York

Times22, all described a long-simmering internal rift within the discipline about what constitutes the essence of anthropological research, with the “fluff-headed cultural anthropologists” and their interpretivist, anticolonial, postmodern thick descriptions contrasted against the positivist scientists and their pursuit of hard data and reliable replicable empirical results. These depictions of the debate, drawn for public

20Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/30/anthroscience

21Sources: See pieces by Peter Wood (http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/anthropology- association-rejecting-science/27936) and David Glenn (http://www.chronicle.com/article/Anthropologists-Debate-Whether/125571).

22Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/science/10anthropology.html

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consumption and probably also to drive internet page clicks, presented an exaggerated caricature of tribal warfare in the academic wilds, in which both “sides” of the anthropological debate were lining up against each other across a great philosophical and ideological divide.

Online pundits discussed how much of this old debate has to do with the marked differences between the types of data collection and analyses done by the classic cultural ethnographer compared to those of the laboratory-dwelling biological anthropologist or dirt-dwelling archaeologist. However, in my own academic department, amongst my colleagues, fellow graduate students, and anthropology professors, I heard many of the same distinctions being noted for “types” of cultural anthropology, as well.

Though I usually find much of these conversations about cultural anthropology’s methodological foundations to be useful, I sometimes sensed from those conversations an underlying implied commentary aimed squarely at establishing what constitutes anthropological authenticity in ethnographic work.

Following the somehow unexpected uproar, the Executive Board compromised by keeping some reference to science in the Association’s broad mission statement, noting “the crucial place of the scientific method in much anthropological research”

[emphasis mine]. Nicholas Wade’s Times article on the matter asserted that this qualification better accommodates the inclusion of anthropologists who do not situate their work as being scientific, and there is little reason to doubt that assertion. However, much of the contention in the conversations I read online and heard in person obscured an important consideration about what ties together the interpretivist and positivist leanings of all anthropologists: meaning is a central foundation from which both sides of

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the ideological and methodological divide do their work. Observations in all anthropological work, regardless of the contexts within which they occur, constitute anthropological data from which we interpret our conclusions; all anthropological research is based upon observation, and all anthropological writing is based upon scholarly interpretation.

Although my research goals and my research design were never focused on attempting to bridge ideological divides within the discipline, in the wake of this debate I have become more convinced that the kind of systematic mixed-method research design described in this chapter does much to overcome the concerns of both sides.

The diverse methods of anthropological inquiry should not be considered as signpost markers of disciplinary purity but instead as complementary tools that align in purpose of exploring all that is unique and shared and contested within the rich tapestry of human culture. The research design for this project builds from a broad interdisciplinary literature of informant-driven health research, illustrating how mixed-method research designs can provide a wider range of ethnographic data and, hopefully, more insights that in turn will drive the production of new research questions in the future.

In the next chapter, I present an overview of Guatemala’s historical trajectory which, although not exhaustive, establishes some of the dominant themes of the country’s development from the colonial period to the formative negotiations of the

Peace Accords in 1996, which officially brought an end to the civil war and which established goals for the development of the State in the post-conflict era. My hope is that the remaining chapters of this dissertation will present a persuasive argument that an understanding of a community’s historical trajectory within a larger national or

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regional context, a prolonged observant participation in community life, the incorporation of interdisciplinary social theory about the causes of human suffering, and the use of systematic methods of ethnographic data collection and analyses can provide a relatively straightforward framework by which future research in post-war settings might better explain individual variations in post-conflict community health outcomes.

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CHAPTER 4 GUATEMALA: A HISTORY OF MARGINALIZATION

The national history of Guatemala, like those of its Latin American neighbors, is a story characterized by powerful political-economic interests that have shaped the rural countryside and its populace in order to maximize the country’s economic potential.

From the time of the Spanish Empire, to independence from Spain in 1821, to the present Guatemalan state, the majority of Guatemala's rural and indigenous communities has largely been excluded from access to economic and political institutions, social programs, and services by a landed, monied, and ethnic minority elite.

For much of this historical trajectory, long-standing connections between agrobusiness interests and political-economic powers effectively institutionalized inequalities throughout the country, particularly impacting rural indigenous populations. Even after long-standing legal racism was formally abolished, hierarchical spending in Guatemala excluded most citizens by privileging the minority at the expense of the majority, ethnicizing the poor in a convergence of race and class through a systematic deprivation that still resonates in the present. Despite little recourse to resist or reform the conditions underlying these inequalities, rural populations have throughout

Guatemala’s history organized around calls for economic, political, and social reforms; however, these calls have consistently been met with violent opposition by militarized agents of the State. This strategy of state-orchestrated rural suppression culminated in a civil war that waged for 36 years in Guatemala, when a battle against Communist insurgents turned into a wider attack against threats to the State's domestic and

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international commercial interests posed by peasant unrest over institutionalized inequalities and demands for labor, land, and political reforms.

This chapter describes the historical trajectory of Guatemala, beginning in the colonial era and moving forward in time to the worst years of the civil war, focusing on how policies of exclusion and exploitation, and the infrastructural weaknesses that bolstered those policies, culminated in 36 years of civil war, violence, and suffering throughout Guatemala.

The Land of Eternal Spring

Guatemala is often referred to as “The Land of Eternal Spring.” With its fertile soils, diverse climate ranges, and physical beauty, from the rising volcanoes in the west to the flatland jungles in the north and its rolling hills in the east, from the rich coffe, fruits, and vegetables produced in its fields to the wild orchids growing in the jungles of the highlands, the country, particularly in the highlands, really does feel like a land perpetually in a spring season. However, the fruitful land that give rise to this poetic moniker is also at the root of the colonial and post-colonial exploitation of Guatemala’s agricultural sector, and hence the source of suffering for a majority of the country’s population. Power struggles to control the best lands and the labor force to work those lands has thus led to a different take on Guatemala’s nickname: “The Land of Eternal

Tyranny” (Simon 1989).

Compared to its neighbors in Central America, Guatemala is a large country, covering over 42,000 square miles (108,889 sq km), roughly the size of the state of

Tennessee. Geographically, Guatemala is located south of Mexico and north of El

Salvador and Honduras, with the Pacific Ocean to the west and, to the east, the

Caribbean Sea and a small border with Belize. The administrative divisions of

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Guatemala are called departamentos (departments), 22 blocks of land that roughly correspond to the bounded states of the United States. Within these departamentos live approximately 14 million people, with roughly half living in urban areas.1 Guatemala is a multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural country, in which 22 Maya dialects are spoken in addition to Spanish, the national language, and over half of the population is composed of indigenous Maya, Garifuna, and Xinca peoples. Though primarily Catholic in religious orientation, Guatemala has experienced in recent years a significant increase in Protestant and evangelical religious affiliations, but also features traditional indigenous Mayan beliefs that are often enmeshed within the non-traditional religious belief systems.

The land itself is shaped by tectonic activity, creating beautiful mountain ranges, over 30 volcanoes, including the highest point in Central America, and a notoriously unstable earthquake zone. Guatemala features three general climate zones, from the tropical maritime regions along the coasts to more alpine temperatures in the mountainous region of the northwest; in between these two zones lies a temperate and seasonally unchanging highland region, the land of eternal spring (Simon 1989).

Smith (1990b, 6-7) identifies three primary regions of agricultural industry in contemporary Guatemala. The flat northern lowland region, bordering the Atlantic

Ocean and largely contained within the modern department of Peten, has traditionally been characterized by low population density, slash-and-burn agriculture, and the exploitation of forest resources; however, in the modern era, this region is characterized

1Source: C.I.A. World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gt.html

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by growing numbers of subsistence farmers, cattle ranchers, and mineral industries.

The highland region, which accounts for approximately one-third of Guatemala’s total land area, has historically contained more than half of Guatemala’s rural population, most of which is widely dispersed across the landscape, apart from larger towns and cities. Smith (1990b) notes that scholars further distinguish this region into the occidente

(the higher western highlands and the heartland of the contemporary Guatemalan

Maya) and the oriente (the eastern highlands populated mostly by mixed ancestry ladino populations). In the western lowlands that border the Pacific Ocean, economic activity has historically centered primarily on large coffee plantations in the higher altitude areas and on banana, cotton, and sugar plantations in the lower altitudes. Prior to the introduction of the plantation system, the population of this region was relatively small and sparse; however, today approximately one-third of Guatemala’s total population lives in this region. Over the course of Guatemala’s colonial and post- colonial history, the ways in which lands and labor were exploited in these regions have changed dramatically. Similarly, the agendas established by governmental legislation and the policies of business interests to maximize profit potentials in these areas have also changed dramatically, shaping the land, labor, and political-economic disparities that Guatemala’s rural poor continue to face in the modern era.

This diverse climatic range, with its tropical rainfall and rich soils resulting from volcanic activity, has supported the region’s residents since before Spanish Conquest as well as, more recently, international agricultural corporations. Maize, beans, and squash have long been the primary and traditional sources of subsistence for

Guatemalans; maize, in particular, is viewed as having divine origin and, for many

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centuries, the land on which maize was grown was thought to have ancestral origins, as well. However, colonial enterprises and, later, international agrobusiness exporters have transformed much of the ancestral Maya land for the production of non-traditional, non- staple crops, including coffee, bananas, and broccoli. Furthermore, Guatemala’s rich natural resources―namely, petroleum, nickel, timber, and hydropower―2are also the source of increasing international economic focus. These natural resources, as well as labor resources, and the economic potential they represent in a market economy driven by capitalism are the source of much of the long-standing structural inequalities, and the suffering those inequalities produce, that Guatemalans continue to face.

Since Guatemala’s independence in 1821 and into the present, the form of the

State is characterized largely by authoritarian governmental policies and an anti- democratic political tradition, embedded within and enacted through the economic system and supported by violence whenever economic, political, social, or cultural movements provoked political instability (Carmack 1988; Handy 1984; Lovell 1988;

Smith 1990a). I argue here, like many other scholars far more versed in the intricacies of its history, that Guatemala is a country that has long suffered from external exploitation that invariably results in violent conflict when the most vulnerable populations, and those most negatively impacted, attempt to resist that exploitation. The history of the last century provides ample evidence that this is indeed a fair depiction of the country.

Early Historical Context

2Source: C.I.A. World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gt.html

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Guatemala has a long history as a seat of power in the Central American region: first as the center of a large and diverse Maya civilization spanning thousands of years, then as the center of Spanish colonial control in Central America, and still later as a driving force in the establishment of the Central American Union. Until the overthrow of

Guatemala’s central government by military force in the mid-twentieth century,

Guatemala’s history is also characterized by attempts at economic reform that served as a model for much of the region. Unfortunately, the effect of these reforms more often bolstered the international economic and capitalist standing of Guatemala rather than provide support to the majority of the population within its own borders, and many of the reforms created social and economic inequalities that the rural and indigenous populations had little recourse to resist or overcome.

The Colonial Period (1540-1800)

Spain’s original intent in Guatemala, as in most of its occupied territories, was the accumulation of gold, silver, and other riches; however, Spain soon realized that the true value of Guatemala was its land and labor and the occupiers hastened to exploit these resources for the Crown, as well. Shortly after Spanish hegemony was established,

Guatemala’s cultural and geographic landscape began to change dramatically.

The two primary exports of the Spanish empire during the colonial period were

(1) agricultural products like indigo, cochineal, cacao, tobacco, and sarsaparilla, which were grown in the humid and highland regions and (2) cattle ranching products, including livestock, hides, and tar, which were based out of the drier and more temperate regions (Calvert 1985, 58; Perera 1993, 6). The addition of these products to the traditional agricultural focus on maize, beans, and squash had important ramifications for indigenous life into the present; however, the attempts to maximize the

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labor potential of the indigenous population had far more important cultural, social, and structural impacts on the traditional Maya way of life (Lovell 1992).

Despite laws in Spain that were designed to protect indigenous populations in new territories, whole communities in Guatemala were nevertheless forced to capitulate to the pillars of Spanish society: religion, government, and culture. These pillars were introduced in the form of three broad forms of social control (Tooley 1997, 30-31), ostensibly meant to bolster the economic development of Guatemala but ultimately serving to institutionalize the colonial accumulation of wealth and resources (Smith

1990b).

First, a system of royal grants (encomiendas) awarded to conquistadores and loyal colonists the right to tribute from entire villages or groups of villages in exchange for continued support of the Crown. Consequently, much of Guatemala was carved into vast colonial estates (haciendos), with requirements of residents living on this land to pay tribute in the form of produce, poultry, and woven goods (Perera 1993, 6). The later establishment of royal codes for humanely treating indigenous populations in the colonies was meant to abolish the encomienda system; however, these reforms were short-lived, and the encomienda system remained a source of colonial power into the eighteenth century, effectively institutionalizing the subjugation of indigenous populations in Guatemala.

Second, a labor draft was instituted to maintain Spanish aspirations for a stable economic system in Guatemala. The repartimiento (distribution) system allowed the colonial elite to siphon the village’s population for the benefit of landowners (Lutz and

Lovell 1990), working not just in the encomienda's agricultural ventures but often forced

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to work in colonial mines and on infrastructural development projects. Though landowners were required by law to pay laborers for each day of work, the allocated pittance did not compensate for the true costs accrued by laborers, who often were required to travel at their own expense to work sites and who were essentially kept captive until completion of their work. Traditional indigenous social life, which had previously been concerned primarily with subsistence for the family and the community, became centered increasingly on the accumulation of capital wealth that benefited landowners.

Third, the Catholic Church, in collusion with the Crown, instituted a policy of congregación (congregation) in which small indigenous villages were encouraged, and often forced, to move to larger centralized towns. The initial purpose of the policy was to break communal bonds in those communities located outside the margins of the encomiendas, where unrest over labor and tribute policies were perceived as destabilizing threats to Spanish control (Perera 1993, 7). While the ostensible goal of the Church was to facilitate missionary efforts, the direct consequence of these relocations was to provision an increased labor pool to large landowners who were primarily located near large towns.

These policies transformed community structure, redirecting traditional relationships between subsistence practices, labor, and village organization, and gave birth to a new class of Guatemalans that has had important consequences into the modern era. Marriages, and “other” relations, particularly between male Spanish colonists and indigenous women, resulted in a new socioeconomic class: ladinos (Tax

1937, 1941). During the early colonial period the ladino class was a somewhat

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ostracized and politically liminal category of people―not Spanish and not Indian.

However, following the formal abolition of Indian slavery in Guatemala, ladinos carried more influence in the agricultural sector and the country's political-economic life more generally. Though they were prohibited from owning land and from holding political office, and though they were often relegated to sharecropping, tenant farming, wage labor, and artisanal work, ladinos gained more status and power over the course of the colonial era by serving as traders between the settled peripheries and the affluent urban and capital cores (Lutz and Lovell 1990). The role of ladinos as mediators brought them considerabe influence compared to the non-ladino indigenous population, but the lasting impact of this new social category was the conflation of ethnicity and class in context with a power struggle for control of valuable resources, shaping a legacy of commercial exploitation that is still being negotiated in modern Guatemala (Carmack 1988).

Indigenous communities generally survived where Indians could maintain land and a certain degree of self-reliance despite Spanish demands. Lutz and Lovell (1990,

45-46) identify six factors that in large part determined the degree to which indigenous populations were able to remain relatively autonomous during the colonial period: (1) the survival of a viable population base; (2) the extent of Spanish encroachment onto community land; (3) the ability to maintain control over lands for the sole purpose of community support; (4) the capacity to obtain new lands; (5) the size of Spanish and other non-indigenous populations in or near Indian communities; and (6) the ability of indigenous communities to rely upon their own skilled workers and natural resources. In those areas where Indians were pushed out or relocated, or where the needs of colonial

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enterprises were too great, indigenous communities were less stable and more prone to a gradual “ladinoization” of traditional ways of life.

Due to a lack of administrative resources and a need for expediency, colonial control of the countryside was obtained through means that often had the undesired effect of enabling popular resistance (Lovell 1992). During the distribution of encomiendas to loyal subjects, indigenous lands frequently were bundled according to preexisting territorial markers, allowing local populations to maintain both their traditional community borders and their communal identities. In addition, the Spanish

Church, though overseeing the local administration of colonial policies as an agent of the Crown, provided indigenous populations with the means to organize around popular concerns that were important to their communities. As a consequence, Spanish attempts to centralize and supervise indigenous communities largely failed. This problem was not unique to Guatemala and, by the eighteenth century, Spain was struggling to secure its colonial holdings around the world and to solidify its declining status as an empire. The onset of industrial revolution in Europe brought changes to

Spanish economic strategies in the colonies, with rippling impacts on the nature of colonial agroexport production in Guatemala.

The Bourbon Reforms in Spain―more like a series of mostly unrelated state decisions than a unifying program of deliberate reforms―contributed to the transformation of nineteenth century Guatemala from a colonialist enterprise into what would become a liberal capitalist-state. Woodward (1990, 53) identifies six important changes that the Reforms brought to economic life in colonial Guatemala: (1) freer trade, the reduction of taxes on commerce, and other incentives to production, (2) the

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expansion of African slavery, (3) the introduction of new industrial technologies and the development of infrastructure in the form of improved roads and navigational aids, (4) more liberal credit and capital accumulation laws, (5) easier acquisition of land for agriculture, and (6) the authorization of new commercial organizations that promoted capitalist growth away from subsistence agriculture toward plantation production.

Collectively, these strategies pushed development in Guatemala away from colony-supporting subsistence farming toward a plantation-based export economy. As a result, colonial assets gained stronger economic and political footing in the region as well as increasingly larger land holdings; indigenous populations, however, were pushed farther and higher into areas of Guatemala that were less hospitable to traditional modes of subsistence and community formation, a pattern that characterizes

Guatemala’s post-colonial history.

Guatemalan Independence: The Early Liberal Period

In order to diversify political-economic influence in the region and to solidify control of its holdings, Spanish reforms allowed intercolonial trade both within and beyond the kingdom, facilitating more flexibility in movement for the Empire’s subjects but also enabling an influx of foreign immigrants. The migrations increased trade lines but also increased the size of immigrant populations in Guatemala, further contributing to mixing of blood lines in Guatemala, with immigrants marrying into established Creole merchant families and ladinos becoming a larger, and increasingly better represented and better educated, segment of the population.

The economic changes created by the Bourbon Reforms also created contentious divisions in Guatemala over who should and should not share in the resulting economic gains. Spaniards in the New World supported the Reforms’ changes,

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because they served the economic demands of the Empire but also appealed to concerns about providing better representation and more equality to the Indian populations under Crown control. However, many Guatemalans, and particularly those from Creole merchant guilds, opposed the changes created by Spanish reforms; these groups formed Conservative parties, arguing that their contributions to Guatemala's economic success demanded both an increased proportion of wealth distribution and a greater role in political participation. Those Guatemalans gaining the most power and wealth from the emerging capitalist structure became the foundation of Liberal parties, and the struggle between the two broad political groups dominated politics in

Guatemala and throughout Central America into the twentieth century (Woodward

1990).

In the long term, the consequences of the Bourbon Reforms, increased communication and contact with non-Spanish communities in Central America, and rising tensions between a consolidating upper class and increasingly larger and more economically marginalized lower classes in Guatemala led to the development of a legislative assembly and an active political dialogue in Guatemala’s capital city. In turn, growing independence from Spain and increased reliance on trade interactions with the

Americas produced calls for independence throughout Spain’s Central American kingdom, culminating in a formal declaration of independence in 1821 (Grandin 2000a).

Following independence, Guatemala for two years was run by a provisional government, though it remained technically a part of the Mexican Empire. In July 1823, a second independence was declared with the creation of the United Provinces of

Central America (Provincias Unidas del Centro de America) and, in 1824, the signing of

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a five-state constitution gave each signatory a free and independent government, with

Guatemala serving as the seat of the United Provinces.

The political-economic elite at this time, mostly representing Liberal political parties, favored an agenda that called for the modernization of a new progressive state, but without the colonial structure of the recent colonial past. Guatemala’s first constitution established the equal status of all Guatemalan citizens, stripping away the special protections previously provided by the Spanish to both the Church and indigenous communities (McCreery 1990). In addition, the five states enacted a series of liberal reforms throughout the confederation, promoting freedom of worship and a division of church and state, the institution of civil marriage, the abolishment of tithes, and the establishment of public education programs (Calvert 1985, 62).

Though favoring policies that benefited the urban economic elite, Guatemalan

Liberals saw the continued exploitation of Indians as the most serious problem facing a modernized and independent state. Reforms were legislated with the aim to include the downtrodden indigenous populations in the political process and the goal to more effectively incorporate rural communities into the State (Smith 1990c). However, in practice, Indians did not have the resources or the education to take advantage of these opportunities (Woodward 1990) and they were thus, ironically, exposed to even greater levels of exploitation.

The Liberal-controlled government in Guatemala hoped to rapidly propel economic development by centering on an agroexport system modeled on the ideal system initially envisioned with the Bourbon Reforms, which, despite concerns about the poor treatment of indigenous communities, nevertheless demanded a labor force

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composed of the lower classes. Though religious tithes were abolished, the new policy of equality for all citizens meant that the already poor had to instead contribute taxes to the State. Consequently, indigenous populations in Guatemala were subjected to the same marginalizing social, political, and economic forces in the post-independence period that they experienced during the colonial period. Following independence from

Spain, these new kinds of economic strains resulted in growing resistance from indigenous populations throughout Central America.

In Guatemala, resistance in rural areas became uprisings, which increased in the decades following independence. They received broad support across Guatemala, from both indigenous and non-indigenous sectors, particularly after Liberal policies establishing equality under law for all citizens implemented changes to the previous judicial system in rural areas. An unfortunate consequence of these changes, however, was the further curtailment of the political autonomy traditionally characterizing rural indigenous communities, where respected village leaders were usually charged with making decisions according to specific cultural rituals in accordance with specific community needs (Carmack 1990). Because judicial reforms, and the codes they were based upon, required a literate population, the new rules put the mostly illiterate indigenous majority at greater risk for exploitation and mistreatment by corrupt State officials in rural areas. It is thus not surprising, then, that rural communities came to view agents of the State, as well as the governmental policies that these agents pushed, as threats to political and community rights (Smith 1990c). By attempting to homogenize the Guatemalan State, the Liberal government mainly succeeded in uniting the masses

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against it, as Guatemalans ultimately saw these reforms as both the imposition of an elite culture and an insult to local cultural values.

Just fifteen years after gaining complete independence from Spain and Mexico,

Guatemala again sought independence in 1838, seceding this time from the confederation of states and its liberal reform agenda. Within Guatemala, a conservative movement grew upset both by liberalized social policies that stripped the commercial elite of title and economic superiority and by Liberals’ efforts to strip the Church of its connections to government and economic policies (McCreery 1990). Ironically,

Conservatives also simultaneously blamed Liberal policies for resisting the will of the people and for subjecting the indigenous majority to further degradation. The

Conservatives ascension to political dominance in Guatemala, via military takeover, brought a reinstitution of laws and economic policies that benefited the landed elite and the Church, enabling the consolidation of power squarely in conservative hands.

The Carrera Government

While early Liberal attempts to bring rural, and mostly indigenous, communities into the national fold failed, the era of Rafael Carrera—the military leader of a rebellion against the Liberal government—did produce a fairly long period (1839-1865) of relative calm in the countryside. Executive authority was reestablished and the liberal reforms from the preceding era were repealed in favor of a more feudal-like decentralized government, with most authority falling on military generals and the elite upper-class

(Handy 1984). Carrera delegated authority over each department to administrative proxies, most of whom were military men, with broad powers over all sectors of society

(Woodward 1990, 62). In addition, the Carrera government repealed Liberal rules about the separation of Church and State, explicitly citing the importance of the Church in the

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development of a modern nation-state. These two developments, meant to maintain the security of rural areas outside the economic core, recalled and supported the old system of Spanish control in the countryside.

Elite Conservatives recognized the need to address indigenous issues in

Guatemala and they recognized that the maintenance of power in Guatemala required support, or at least little dissension, from the lower classes and from communities in the country's rural margins. Rural communities were given increasing autonomy with the reinstatement of laws protecting traditional ways of communal policing and political involvement, and the lower classes were given slightly larger roles in commodity production; however, the Carrera dictatorship reinforced barriers against the upward mobility of the lower classes and popular dissent continued to be addressed with military intervention (Calvert 1985). The government, though, generally enjoyed broad support across the classes, and the Guatemalan economy experienced a period of financial prosperity that enabled the government to withhold the addition of new taxes or labor levies on depressed rural communities. Unfortunately, political autonomy in rural communities came largely at the expense of their properties, holdings, and equal status in the eyes of the State (Smith 1990c).

Though ethnic divisions were recognized in law and in practice, these divisions were not the most important factor shaping societal discontent; instead, class distinctions were more important, even though class lines largely reflected ethnic differences between the Creole-white minority elite and the non-white lower class masses. Historical records of this period suggest that ladinos and indigenous Maya were both classified as lower “classes” and not as distinct ethnic or class-based

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categories (Smith 1990c, 82). This is likely the result of Carrera’s focus on protecting the lower classes from exploitation by the elite white minority; a strength of the Carrera government was in recognizing that the minority elite could be held in check as long as the lower classes presented a unified and stable front of popular resistance.

Carmack (1990,132-133) notes that the Carrera government allowed Indian communities to retain a considerable amount of political autonomy, even while these communities were obligated to pay tribute in the form of local goods and military service. In a sense, Carrera was able to stave off popular uprisings in part by keeping the lower classes largely united against the minority elite; however, following Carrera’s death in 1865, the distinction between white, creole, ladino and Indian became a larger and more contentious issue. In the new Liberal era that followed, government needs were accomplished by dividing the masses, preventing the social unrest created by the new plantation economy by offering new and better social positions to ladinos in coffee producing regions.

Liberalism and the Plantation Era

During Carrera’s long tenure as President of Guatemala, the country experienced a period of relative social and financial stability. However, opposition to Carrera gained renewed influence in the region by promoting a new form of Liberalism that was less focused on concepts of democracy and equality and more focused on large-scale development goals. At the time of Carrera’s death in 1869, capital investment in Central

America was at an all-time high, and Liberal leaders, most of whom were white land- owning Creole elites, grew increasingly frustrated with the State’s inability to maximize the profit potential of unused lands. They wanted to take advantage of the agroexport

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success that many of Guatemala’s neighbors had experienced during the Carrera years following the introduction of the coffee plantation economy (McCreery 1990).

The subsequent development of a thriving coffee industry created a similar financial windfall in Guatemala, as coffee exports quintupled from 1870 to 1900 and overall international trade in Guatemala skyrocketed. The success of the Guatemalan market, in turn, created an increase in European immigration and an influx of European culture. However, while Guatemala City became a bustling European-like city, rural populations continued to grow more impoverished and economically marginalized; while international donors contributed much to infrastructural development in Guatemala, the price was paid by appropriating increasingly larger tracts of indigenous land and by instituting a discriminatory system of labor that differentiated previously ambiguous social categories.

With the introduction of the plantation system in Guatemala, new laws were established by the State to provide cheap labor to powerful international investors

(Smith 1990c, 84-85): (1) a state levy on Indian villages effectively renewed colonial forms of forced labor for white farmers; (2) a program of debt bondage was encouraged that left indigenous workers in economic servitude to large plantation estates; and, (3) new agrarian laws were established to diminish the importance of communal property, long a defining characteristic of Maya communities, and traditional community lands were again taken from rural populations. As a consequence, many indigenous workers had no choice but to labor on plantations in order to buy the food that they no longer could farm for themselves.

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Smith (1990c) argues that ladinos truly became a new class during the plantation era as the result of geography and demography. During the colonial period, the western highlands were primarily populated by Indians, while throughout the rest of the country ladinos and Indians, both of whom were considered to be lower classes, were more evenly distributed in local populations. However, in the late nineteenth century, ladinos were given more responsibility in the plantation system as mediating agents between plantation owners and plantation laborers; the introduction of the plantation economy to the western highlands thus introduced members of the ladino class as authoritarian agents of the State.

The status ascribed to ladinos with this new mediating role led inexorably to the institutionalization of the ladino category as a higher social class in Guatemalan society.

As a consequence, indigenous communities continued to lose the political autonomy they had enjoyed under Carrera’s tenure and they began to cling tighter to the customs and culture that defined them as a category distinct from ladino. Smith (1990c, 89) argues that this transformation of the dynamic between race and social class in

Guatemala disguised similarities between the plights of ladino and Indian and muted the visible influence of a white elite class.

Ladinos increasingly became the most visible agents of the State, a status that was further reinforced by ladino integration into the national military and an increased presence of military forces in rural areas. From the end of the nineteenth century to

World War II, unrest in rural communities over working conditions and increased expropriation of community lands was quelled by the State’s military wing and by various police agencies associated with the State (Carmack 1990, 121). These

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militarized groups became an institutionalized part of rural communities Guatemala, particularly in plantation regions, and the State sought to legitimize its presence in these communities by offering opportunities for indigenous men to also join the military.

Into the twentieth century, with the national economy becoming more reliant on coffee plantations and the State’s presence more integrated in rural communities, the inequalities created by the new status of the ladino further marginalized indigenous populations. With ladinos attaining higher status, and consequently more control over the marketplace, they also enjoyed greater participation in the governing and judicial institutions in Guatemala. Adams (1990, 154) identifies four strategies that were used by ladinos to differentiate themselves as distinct from Indian populations in order to solidify their higher social and political-economic status: (1) to depreciate Indian culture and society through networks of national and regional media; (2) to manipulate State control of the market economy as a means of reducing the influence and holdings of Indians;

(3) to use legal and illegal devices to inhibit Indians from full participation in the political process; and (4) to periodically exercise military force as a reminder to Indians of their subordination. The repressive 13 year presidency of Jorge Ubico exemplifies well the ways in which the Guatemalan government incorporated these strategies as tools of

State manipulation in order to prevent Indian populations from gaining political, economic, and social equality in Guatemala.

Ubico, a wealthy internationally-educated aristocrat and former General of the

Guatemalan army, came to power in 1931, with the assistance of the United States, and assumed responsibility of a bankrupt state in the midst of a Great Depression. Though his previous political appointments were in many ways models of success—for instance,

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initiating public works projects and improving the education and public healthcare systems—Ubico was also known for repressive and brutal punishments against criminals. Upon taking the office of the President, the self-identified fascist Ubico militarized government and public sector institutions throughout Guatemala, including the postal and school systems, and he established a network of spies throughout the country to inform on, and assassinate, political opponents.

To help turn around the country’s economic crisis, the Ubico administration worked closely with the U.S. State Department, ultimately exempting many U.S. corporations from paying taxes in Guatemala. Further, he gave many of those same corporations—most notably, the United Fruit Company (UFC)—hundreds of thousands of fertile hectares of farmland.3 Ubico also worked closely with U.S. military interests and ultimately allowed the United States to establish a number of military bases in

Guatemala. In rural areas, he instituted a system of debt slavery and forced labor, and he allowed landowners a high degree of autonomous disciplinary control over workers.

Ubico’s repressive agrarian policies only exacerbated the economic hardships in rural communities, and the calls for his removal from office grew louder: Guatemala’s middle-class intellectuals in the capital became openly hostile to Ubico, a large-scale general labor strike dramatically slowed production, and disillusionment from within the army’s ranks of junior officers led to widespread military protests. Finally, in 1944,

President-General Ubico was deposed, with the Guatemalan masses largely united

3The United Fruit Company also owned and operated Guatemala's electric system and the only railroad system in Guatemala, and it also controlled the country's most significant port, Puerto Barrios.

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about their perceived mistreatment by governmental policies, the State’s increased militarization in the countryside, and the growing inequity fostered by international agricultural food barons (Adams 1990). In the decade that followed, frequently referred to as “the ten years of spring,” Guatemalan intellectuals worked to undermine military rule and enacted a series of socioeconomic reforms meant to overturn the institutionalized political-economic marginalization of the majority rural population, particularly in regard to land distribution, labor rights, and participation in both the political process and the economic marketplace.

Guatemala in the Modern Era

Much of the post-World War II history in Guatemala is characterized by the same struggles that characterize the post-colonial era: the struggle of Indian populations to push back against structural inequalities and the political-marginalization of their communities, and the struggle of the State to maintain civil obedience and political, economic, and social control of the rural countryside. However, the decade of spring that followed Ubico’s reign of repression, though marked by fears of encroaching communism and repeated attempts by conservatives to overthrow the government, is a brief era characterized by relative prosperity, an increase in the organization and popular support of social movements, and renewed hope for much of Guatemala’s populace.

Though these changes were short-lived, they had repercussions that resonated throughout the civil war era, and to an extent into the post-war present. The reactions of fearful political-economic interests, both domestically and internationally, to the liberal socioeconomic reforms that followed Ubico’s removal laid the groundwork, and the justifications, for 36 years of civil war, but the social freedom fostered by those same

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reforms encouraged Guatemala’s rural, poor, and indigenous populations to organize and resist against the repressions of the minority urban elite controlling power in the government and in the marketplace.

To address grievances with the State and to resist the State’s influence in local communities, Guatemalans in the twentieth century increasingly established popular movements as a politically-motivated extension of traditional community organization.

Falla (1994, 4-8) identifies four main periods for the modern development of popular organizations in Guatemala: (1) the decade of democracy that followed the Guatemalan

Revolution, (2) the beginnings of guerrilla movements, non-violent community groups, and the resurgence of religious organizations and activism, (3) the increase of guerrilla operations and indigenous participation, and the consequent suppression of community, populist, or opposition organizations, and (4) the bloodiest years of the military’s repression. The organization of this section generally follows the time periods associated with these trends, describing how they impacted the shape of the civil war and the suffering experienced by rural Guatemalans.

The “Guatemalan Revolution”

After President-General Ubico was deposed, the new liberal administration, led by the first democratically elected President, Juan Jose Arevalo Bermejo, sought to establish a reformist capitalist economic system centered on the drafting of a new state

Constitution in 1945, social security, reforms to land and labor laws, and the growth of economic and political democracy (Handy 1994). Arévalo outlawed racial discrimination, repealed unfair labor laws, granted suffrage to women, and improved health services for all citizens. He enacted the first social security law, as well as a number of labor reforms that established a minimum wage, rules for child labor, and the right of individuals and

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groups to collectively bargain. Arévalo also instituted reforms for education programs, increasing expenditures and establishing literacy campaigns throughout the country.

Though he encouraged the enfranchisement of labor unions to support the lower and middle classes, pushing for increased rights for the poorest campesino farm workers in rural areas, the benefits of Arevalo’s reforms were realized mostly in urban areas rather than in the rural agrarian margins of the state, where the long entrenched latifundia system made easing constraints on campesino farm workers’ rights more difficult without widespread national agrarian reform.

After six terms in office, Arevalo was succeeded in the democratic election of

1952 by Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, a former military officer who previously served as

Arevalo’s Defense Minister. Arbenz’s primary goal was to reinforce and extend Arevalo’s plans for agrarian reform. Though formal land reforms were never mandated during

Arévalo's tenure, he did take substantive steps in that direction by redistributing land seized from Nazi sympathizers and by creating a number of government programs and national laws that enabled small farmers to increase their production. Arbenz continued these programs; however, he also implemented a plan that would be his political downfall. Following a World Bank study of poverty in Guatemala, which concluded that the country's economic troubles would continue unabated until something was done about indigenous poverty and unequal land distribution in the highlands, Arbenz passed a formal land reform law, known as Decree 900 (Tooley 1997). This law allowed the government to expropriate any land that had not been cultivated for the previous three years, reimbursing owners for the value of the land according to the owners’ formal declarations of taxable value.

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One of the primary targets of Decree 900 was the UFC, which owned much of the unused land and which was a significant international influence that the legislation sought to diminish. Based out of the United States, the UFC was, at that time, the largest landholder in Guatemala, controlling approximately 550,000 acres; yet, less than

15% of those holdings were actually being used (Costello 1997, 10). Under Decree 900, the majority of these holdings, some 400,000 acres, were expropriated by the government, with the UFC receiving payment for those lands according to the very same price-manipulated valuations it had previously used to avoid paying taxes. In sum, the Arbenz government redistributed some 1.5 million acres of land to over 100,000 families.

Reforms like Decree 900 were meant to curtail the influence of non-domestic interests in Guatemala and to focus more attention on the plight and recovery of

Guatemalan, and predominantly indigenous, peasants. However, these reforms understandably angered the land-owning elite, international agroexporters, and the

Catholic Church, all of whose influence was significantly minimized in the burgeoning participatory democracy. More threatening to the elite minority, though, was that indigenous populations in the countryside used the opening created by reforms to establish a number of left-leaning political parties and to elect representative political candidates that favored community needs and goals, which in turn facilitated a dramatic increase in the number of rural workers’ unions and federations in indigenous communities (Handy 1990). The reforms, though, also angered right-wing members of the military, which was mandated under Arévalo to uphold the new constitution and to take on an explicitly apolitical role in society. Dissidents within the military, prominent

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political opposition party members, and influential heads of olagarchic families in

Guatemala turned to the United States government to help orchestrate a government takeover (Schirmer 1998).

In the United States, these concerns reached sympathetic ears in part because two of the most powerful men in American politics at the time—brothers John Dulles, the

Secretary of State, and Allan Dulles, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)— had strong ties to the UFC (Arias 1990). Under their guidance, and in cooperation with the agroexporter and a number of right-wing dissidents within Guatemala, the CIA organized a campaign of disinformation about communist activities within Guatemala, planted false evidence associating the Communist-leaning Arbenz administration with the Soviet Union, and helped manufacture a series of staged “guerrilla” attacks in border towns and even in Guatemala City (Nash 2007). This campaign ultimately led to the resignation of Arbenz in June 1954, to the installation of a U.S.-backed military government headed by Colonel Castillo Armas, and to the end of the most progressive and peaceful era of Guatemalan history.

The Development of a National Security State

In place of Arbenz, the U.S. helped to institute a military government that was more sympathetic to America’s concerns about and expectations for Guatemala: showcasing democracy and stemming the perceived Communist threat in Central

America (Schirmer 1998). As Brockett (2002, 91-92) notes, these two objectives seemed by many policy makers and business interests in the United States to be compatible goals, but they were incompatible in practice and “[w]hen conflict did occur, anticommunism invariably trumped reform.” A significant difference between U.S. and

Guatemalan ideologies about the nature of democracy lies at the heart of this

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incompatibility. The democratic principles favored by the United States focused on economic development and were driven, in part, by beliefs about the equal rights of citizenship, an almost foolhardily optimistic expectation in light of the reality of the

Guatemalan socio-political-economic context.

However, the Guatemalan government was faced with a number of competing interests, both from within the country itself and from the international community, which made accommodating the goals of the United States a difficult task. In particular, the government felt pressure due to (1) the need to diversify economic strategies in the agriculture and industry sectors, (2) a desire of the elite to reestablish itself as the source of power in Guatemala, (3) the United States’ interest in the success of the

Guatemalan anti-communist counter-revolution campaign, and (4) the need for international capital to expand infrastructural development (Jonas 1991, 45). In the conservative sectors of Guatemalan society, the ideal economic reforms envisioned by

U.S. ideological thinking was a direct threat to the control of political-economic power that the minority elite in Guatemala had previously enjoyed before the Liberal

Movement. To many, the reforms idealized by U.S. political-economic interests were too similar to the leftist leanings of the liberal era policies espoused by Arevalo and Arbenz.

Favoring instead a re-solidification of the elite’s privileged and controlling status within Guatemala, the new conservative government, now directed by military Colonel

Carlos Castillo Armas, began to overturn the previous administration's socioeconomic reforms and development programs in the poorer, rural sectors of society. Almost immediately, social democracy and the redistributive reforms of the last decade were eliminated; the lands that were redistributed to peasants under Decree 900 were

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returned to their previous owners, unions were disbanded, and the Communist Party was outlawed.

However, the demise of social democracy also contributed to the decline of coffee profits and, consequently, the domestic economy more broadly; exports did increase, but earnings decreased, limiting a profit potential already in decline due to foreign corporate monopolies over banana production (Jonas 1991, 46). In order to stimulate the economy, cotton, sugar, and cattle became a greater focus of rural development plans, and so a new land distribution program was initiated to relieve population pressures in areas with the most fertile soils in order to accommodate the new agricultural strategy. Indigenous populations who occupied those lands were relocated from their communities and pushed to uncultivated frontier areas, where the

State redistributed small sections of its unused lands, further exacerbating pre-existing land tenure problems (Handy 1990).

Meanwhile, in order to fight the “communist” threat in Guatemala, the new government founded the National Committee to Defend against Communism, and the

Preventive Criminal Law against Communism was enacted. The Committee’s responsibility was to maintain a list of “communist” sympathizers, who, as a result of inclusion on this list, did not have the right to employment or the right to habeus corpus

(ODHAG 1999, 189). In reality, many of the political leaders deemed to be controlling actors in the communist apparatus had already fled Guatemala, seeking asylum within neighboring countries. Consequently, most of the people purged and pursued following the 1954 coup were people who were not strident Communists or even communist sympathizers. The broad scope of these new anti-communist legislation allowed for the

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arbitrary detention of any opponent or critic of the government that could be deemed a threat to the State―including the architects of social democracy, peasant and labor activists, and members of political parties like the Communist Party and the Guatemalan

Worker’s Party―and laid the groundwork and justifications for the interrogation, torture, murder, and disappearance of thousands of people in the decades that followed.

Entering into the 1960s, poor rural peasants continued to organize, lobby, and protest to maintain both their rights as citizens and their identities as contributing members of the Guatemalan market economy. Though fear of an increasingly authoritarian and militarized government prevented much vocal opposition, the decade of social democracy in Guatemala remained an inspiration for political opponents of the government, activists for indigenous rights, and, in the years ahead, support for the causes of insurgent guerrilla groups.

The 1960s: The Rise of a Guerilla Movement

The Guatemalan civil war began as a consequence of growing political and economic disenchantment, with large segments of the population calling for change to the unjust systems characterizing agrarian economy after decades of institutionalized economic oppression (Smith 1990d). The outbreak of war, however, did not start as the result of peasant discontent but rather from the 1960 revolt of a discontent army brigade. Left-leaning army junior officers were increasingly frustrated with the post-coup government, demanding (1) a just distribution of wealth to combat growing socioeconomic inequalities and corruption in both the military and the State government and (2) an end to what they perceived to be government collusion with, and capitulation to, the capital interests of the United States (Nash 2007). This new coup was suppressed and many of the officers were court-martialed; however, many officers

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escaped to settle in the departments of Izabal and Zacapa, where they later helped to found a number of rebel groups, including Moviemiento Revolucionara 13 de noviembre, Frente Revolucionara 12 de abril, and most notably the Rebel Armed Forces

[Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR)] (Schirmer 1998, 15-16).

The presence of these groups allowed the military government to justify an increase in the army’s strength in both number and firepower. Throughout the 1960s, with the assistance of military and intelligence allies from the United States, a secret police was established and the military government was reinforced by professional training and war supplies (Arias 1990). Though the formative guerilla groups remained a threat to government control, their activities did not generate a significant response from the increasingly larger military complex until May 1965, when rebels ambushed and killed 17 army soldiers. This event, as well as evidence that the guerillas were recruiting and arming peasants, provided the impetus for the military government to establish counterinsurgency operations, including death squads, to push back the growing rebel insurgency. Between 1966 and 1968, with the assistance of U.S. resources, the guerilla groups operating in the eastern, southern coast, and capital regions of Guatemala were swiftly and brutally eradicated. Furthermore, in the areas where rebel groups were know to operate, the army also engaged in the selective repression of the peasant population; members of church groups, trade unions and campesino cooperatives, and professional associations—between 2,800 and 8,000 peasants—were also systematically killed or disappeared (Ball, Kobrack, and Spirer 1999).

With the government touting the guerilla defeat, foreign investments increased, stimulating agricultural, industrial, and infrastructural development throughout the

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country. For indigenous communities in rural Guatemala, these changes brought more contact and interaction with the State and, consequently, a growing international market.

However, these changes also hastened the breakdown of traditional indigenous society in rural areas; commercial families and community cooperatives who were accustomed to holding power within the boundaries of traditional village structures began consolidating power outside of their own community (Arias 1990, 232-233). Many of these families found support, in particular, from the Catholic organization Acción

Católica (Catholic Action), whose main goal in the region was to break indigenous communities of their reliance on traditional religious and cultural customs.

This alliance had devastating consequences in rural villages where the power of local leaders was further usurped, creating a conflict between adherents to traditional models of community life and adherents to a new capital-driven ideological framework

(Brintnall 1979). The fracturing of the traditional community led to the rise of a broad if disorganized left-leaning popular movement in rural areas, which instilled fear in the military government that it was losing control of the indigenous majority. Though the military continued to fight pockets of armed insurgency, this fear underlies a shift in the counterinsurgency strategies of the 1970s, when the large-scale suppression of community organization intensified into a military campaign that international observers now identify as ethnic genocide.

The 1970s: Grassroots Populism and Government Repression

In the capital city, the electoral process born out of a new Constitution in 1965 was corrupted throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s by various factions in the military and business sectors, with elections rigged to maintain and consolidate economic, political, and military control (Arias 1990). The government's economic

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strategies continued to focus on the production of non-traditional exports, but also turned to the development of extractive mining and oil industries as well as maquiladora

(foreign factory) industries that enabled international investors to cheaply import parts, to assemble them in tax-free zones with cheap labor, and then to export the final product outside of Guatemala (Jonas 1991, 76-80). This new strategy was oriented toward participation in the world market, not to support domestic growth or to integrate rural workers into the Guatemalan economy as producers and consumers. Thus, the most prosperous entrepreneurs in the 1970s were those people and companies allied with the government and its economic objectives.

Yet again, these economic strategies further marginalized rural and indigenous populations, which increased the development and support of activist and reformist social movements throughout Guatemala. In particular, the government’s ongoing land appropriations fueled calls for land tenancy reform, which encompassed parallel demands from labor, student, and urban reform movements, as well as from administrators and catechists in the Catholic Church. The government was now removing whole communities, and often with military force, from the lands that had traditionally supported the community's needs to reduced parcels of land that were too small and too inadequate for families to satisfy their needs and sustain themselves

(Arias 1990b). The land problem for the poorest classes was further exacerbated by a dramatic rate of population growth in the 1970s and then by the earthquake of 1976, which left over one million, predominantly indigenous, Guatemalans homeless (Plant

1978). In this context, the Catholic Church became a greater influence, and an advocate for the poor, in rural and indigenous communities. In the post-Arbenz years, the Church

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was mostly supportive of military governments, sharing in common some similar ideological beliefs about the existential threat of communism. Following the Second

Vatican Council, however, priest and lay catechists in Central America increasingly embraced a liberation theology that advocated the use of training programs, community organizations and social programs, and teachings about human rights and social injustice as mechanisms by which poor communities might become more self-sufficient in addressing their suffering from social, economic, political, and cultural inequalities.

The embrace of liberation theology in Guatemala, particularly by indigenous clergy, provided in many rural communities an institutional and moral legitimacy to the concerns of the underprivileged and marginalized in Guatemala.

At the same time as these popular movements gained force in agrarian society, old (and new) guerrilla groups renewed activity in Guatemala, turning their attention to the poor, rural, and indigenous communities at the margins of State control, hoping to gain support from the long oppressed peasant class in the region by appealing to their sense of frustration and injustice at long-institutionalized inequalities (Falla 1994). The

FAR regrouped from its earlier defeats in the jungles of the northern-most department of

Guatemala, El Peten; the Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms

[Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA)] began operating in the mountainous region of Guatemala’s south-west coast; the Guerrilla Army of the Poor

[Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP)] moved into the lowland jungles of El Quiche; and the military wing of the communist party, the Guatemalan Party of Labor4, operated

4Also known as the Guatemalan Workers Party.

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primarily in the capital city (Oettler 2006, 7). Due to growing dissatisfaction and frustration at having no legitimate recourse for formal grievance, peasants in the rural communities around which guerrillas organized and operated began to reconsider their status as active non-participants in the rebel struggle.

The militarization of the countryside reinforced a growing feeling in many indigenous communities that the guerrilla struggle against the State really was a struggle of the people; influential members of the Indian petit bourgeoisie encouraged this belief by supporting the notion that the indigenous struggle should have a distinctly

Indian character and should be directed at the inheritors of post-colonial power (Arias

1990b). Though many communities in rural areas, particularly in the Ixil triangle, were indeed sympathetic to the guerrilla fight, estimates suggest that the ranks of guerrilla militias in Guatemala numbered no more than a few thousand at their peak (Arias 1990,

255). Yet the existence of guerrilla militias in the countryside was used to justify the army’s expanding influence in the interior, building military bases, occupying public buildings, and redirecting repressive policies and extrajudicial activities at entire communities (Carmack 1995).

As protests against government policies grew larger and louder and more widespread through Guatemala, they also grew more violent.5 In February 1980, a

5Two of the most famous and, until that point in time, notoriously violent massacres on civilian groups opposing government policies were (1) a demonstration in Panzos, Alta Verapaz, which resulted in the killing of approximately 150 Q’eqchi’ campesinos who were protesting the government’s failure to provide them with their rightful land titles, and (2) an occupation of the Spanish Embassy by peasant workers, students, supporters of the Peasant Unity Party (CUC), and members of the EGP in protest of the extrajudicial kidnapping and murder of peasants in El Quiche, which somehow ended—reports are not entirely clear how—in a fiery blaze after police stormed the building, killing nearly everyone inside, including a former Guatemalan vice president, Spanish officials, and most of the occupiers, one of whom was the father of the activist and Nobel Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchu.

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coalition of indigenous leaders produced the “Declaration of Iximche,” which condemned government-orchestrated massacres, explicitly calling for support of the armed struggle against the Guatemalan government and appealing to the indigenous population to unite around labor and market reforms and to fight against ongoing discrimination, violence, and economic injustices (Konefal 2003). As the 1980s began, this declaration was taken by the military-government as an explicit act of war against the State, and the violence of the war escalated dramatically.

The 1980s: La Violencia and Genocide

With guerrilla groups growing in influence and strength in the countryside, gaining acceptance both by force and by sympathetic appeals to campesino communities’ ideological leanings, the military-government’s primary focus in rural areas remained countering a militarized insurgent threat. However, after the Declaration of Iximche, the focus turned more broadly to a strategy guided by the elimination of any person, group, or social organization that could be identified as an internal threat and, thus, an enemy of the State. These groups included clergy and catechists of the Catholic Church, which increasingly offered a galvanizing moral institutional base from which to draw attention to the plight of the underprivileged in Guatemala, as well as students and teachers, village elders, and community organizers, and anyone known, suspected, or accused of fomenting community dissent in support of economic, political, or social reforms.

Throughout the 1970s, Guatemala’s three army general-Presidents―Carlos

Arana Osorio (1970-1974), Kjell Laugerud Garcia (1974-1978), and Romeo Lucas

Garcia (1978-1982)―each represented well the corruption of the era and each expanded violence against their perceived internal enemies. However, the ascension of

General Lucas Garcia to political power in 1978 is associated with a widespread

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campaign against the countryside and an unprecedented escalation of violence; the violence was only intensified further in 1982, following Lucas Garcia’s political ouster and the installation of General Efrain Rios Montt. The policies and campaigns of Lucas

Garcia and Rios Montt underlie the bloodiest years of the civil war (Ball, Kobrak, and

Spirer 1999), and are commonly referenced in academic literature as La Violencia or La

Situacion.6

While early military actions in the countryside were ostensibly directed at the eradication of guerrilla groups and, frequently, communities who were deemed sympathetic to the cause of the guerrillas, goals in the second half of the civil war turned to focus more explicitly on the complete disruption of life in rural communities. These goals were achieved through a number of mechanisms. The military asserted its power and control over the countryside by (1) constructing and maintaining military bases in rural areas, (2) moving communities out of war zones into army-monitored model villages, (3) establishing a system of forced conscription of men into the army, national civilian patrols, and other paramilitary groups, (4) disrupting traditional social networks and systems of community authority, (5) threatening individuals, groups, and villages with violence, and (6) carrying out those threats with assaults, rapes, torture, disappearances, executions, the massacre of entire communities and, in my cases, literally burning whole villages to the ground (CEH 1999; ODHAG 1998).

6At my fieldsite, however, I do not believe that I once heard anyone refer to these years, or to the war in general, as either of these terms commonly cited in ethnographies of the Guatemalan civil war. The people I spoke with simply referred to La Guerra (“The War”).

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What had started out as a policy of eliminating key individuals and groups deemed to be oppositional leaders, social activists, or simply perceived threats to State control became a policy of eliminating entire communities. The Office of Human Rights of the Archbishop of Guatemala [La Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de

Guatemala (ODHAG)] describes the quality of life in many communities before the large massacres of the early 1980s:

Most of the massacres were preceded by a deteriorating social climate, increased selective repression, and measures taken by the population to protect itself from violence. Military persecution leading up to the massacres usually included murders and disappearances. Prior attacks by the guerrillas or civil patrollers are occasionally described (ODHAG 1999, 135).

Army and paramilitary groups would descend into rural villages, destroying lands and homes as part of a scorched-earth strategy that was previously endorsed by

American military policies during the Vietnam conflict7 (Schirmer 1998). Attacks on entire communities became more swift and sudden, leaving a much larger trail of burned out crops and houses and larger numbers of women, children, and the elderly among the victims (Wilkinson 2004; Zur 1998, 1999).

7Ranking officers of the Guatemalan military’s high command are well-known to have trained at the now- infamous School of the Americas (SOA), which has since been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, where attendees were trained by American military and intelligence strategists in a National Security Doctrine that advocated the same kind of scorched-earth counterinsurgency policy used during the United States' activities in Vietnam, in which all adversaries were viewed as potential enemy combatants. Former graduates of the SOA include General-Presidents Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt, recently impeached President of Guatemala Otto Perez Molina, and the murderers of Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi and Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack. Freedom of Information requests, declassified diplomatic cables, and intelligence community memos, as well as the accusations of prominent international activists, like Jennifer Harbury, and torture victims, like Sister Dianna Ortiz, provide compelling evidence that the United States government not only knew about the activities of these former SOA graduates but also advocated and even oversaw many of the human rights abuses and atrocities via the Central Intelligence Agency.

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The vast majority of human rights violations that occurred over the war’s 36 years happened as a result of the campaigns of Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt: an estimated

75,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared, with the vast majority coming from the indigenous Maya population, an estimated 600 communities were destroyed, and as many as 200,000 children lost one or more parent to the violence (CEH 1999; ODHAG

1998). Individuals, families, community groups, and sometimes entire communities were forced to flee the military campaigns. ODHAG (1999, 55-56) estimates that over one million people were displaced from their communities and approximately 400,000 people escaped across Guatemala's domestic borders.

As news of the widespread violence reached a larger international audience, as the human toll of the government’s campaign of violence grew, diplomatic support for the Guatemalan government decreased, at least publically. Direct security aid from the

United States to Guatemala was formally suspended in 1977, following the release of a

U.S. State Department human rights report that identified widespread and systematic violence against the Guatemalan people; however, financial assistance was channeled to Guatemala surreptitiously through less public means. Nevertheless, above-the-board financial assistance from the United States and the larger international diplomatic community significantly decreased as a result of the escalating violence.

Domestic political opposition to the military-controlled government also increased with the escalating violence, particularly after the loss of international aid and development funds. The resource-heavy fight against the countryside, as well as the usual scourge of governmental corruption and graft, hurt Guatemala’s economic outlook, but even the elite began to feel the war’s economic impacts with the

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diminishment and regular disruption of basic services like water and electric provisioning (Farer 2000). International observers were not surprised, in 1983, when

Rios Montt was deposed in a military coup by General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, who cited as justification the religious zealotry and official corruption that was rampant at the upper levels of Montt’s government. In order to make amends with the international community that demanded both an end to the war and progress toward civilian democracy, Mejia oversaw a controlled transition to the first relatively democratic processes in over 30 years: a new democratic constitution was instituted in 1985, followed shortly thereafter by the election of Christian Democrat Marco Vinicio Cerezo

Arevalo to be the first civilian president since 1950.

The First Steps on the Road To Peace

As the 1980s came to a close, following a period of time that academic researchers of Guatemala commonly refer to as La Violencia and international human rights organizations refer to as ethnic genocide, violence continued in rural areas but at levels far lower compared to the carnage that occurred under the brutal regimes of

Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt (Ball, Kobrak, and Spirer 1999). The Guatemalan government, the guerrilla movement, private sector business interests, and the civilian population at large had grown increasingly more amenable to the formal cessation of civil war. Jonas (2000) notes that opposition leaders recognized that a complete overthrow of the State through military engagement was an untenable goal that came at too high a cost, both to their political interests and to the rural population in whose favor they were ostensibly fighting. Similarly, government and corporate business interests realized that international pressures to end the war overlapped with domestic pressures

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to limit government spending against an entrenched, albeit diminished, armed opposition.

After decades of civil war, in Guatemala and throughout Central America, substantive steps toward peace were taken in May 1986, when the sitting presidents from each of the five Central American nations met for a diplomatic summit in

Esquipulas, Guatemala, to discuss bringing an end to wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, and to encourage political stability, economic cooperation, and increased democracy throughout Central America. In August of 1987, the presidents met again in Guatemala City, this time signing a formal agreement between the nations.

The “Procedure for the Establishment of a Firm and Lasting Peace in Central America“8 established legislative goals and national reforms aimed to bring an end to violence and to demilitarize the region, to promote democratic principles and to increase the participation of marginalized peoples in the political process, and to assist the repatriation of refugees and the reestablishment of armed forces into the national fold of each country. The key developments of these agreements for Guatemala were the establishment of a National Reconciliation Commission and the granting of a blanket amnesty to military forces involved in the civil war.

Costa Rican President Oscar Arias9 later accused several of the signatories―primarily Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua―of not fully complying

8Also called the “Esquipulas II Accord.” A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/centralamerica-esquipulasII87.

9For the role he played as the architect of the Esquipulas Accords, Oscar Arias was awarded the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize.

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with the agreements because they continued to respond to internal dissent with military action and extrajudicial violence. Nevertheless, the Esquipulas meetings established a diplomatic precedent for the Guatemalan government and representatives of guerrilla groups to begin negotiations for ending the civil war. The first formal meetings to discuss an organized peace occurred in Madrid, Spain, in October 1989, and included representatives of the State and the leadership of a new coalition of guerrilla forces, the

Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity [La Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional

Guatemalteca (URNG)].

Following the 1991 democratic presidential election of center-right Jorge Serrano

Elias in 1991, who pledged a “civilian dictatorship,” the URNG and officials from the government and military secretly met in Mexico City to begin negotiatiations about how to establish the process toward peace. The resulting Mexico Accord10, the “Agreement on the Procedure for the Search for Peace by Political Means,” specified an eleven point agenda and identified seven broad themes, including democracy, human rights, refugees, a truth commission, indigenous rights, the economic, social and agrarian situation, the army, strengthening civil society institutions, and constitutional reform.

Shortly thereafter, the “Framework Agreement on Democratisation in the Search for Peace by Political Means”11 defined the meaning of “democracy” for the purpose of future negotiations and also formalized consensus on the need to reform the electoral

10A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-mexicoagreement91

11Also known as the Quetaro Agreement. A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-queretaroagreement91

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process by encouraging and bolstering voter participation and by eradicating vote tampering and other kinds of electoral fraud. Throughout 1992, the parties to these talks continued meeting with international diplomatic, economic, and human rights observers, civic and political organizations, and each other to overcome sticking points to the negotiations, including the specifics of disarmament and potential immunity for military forces, but the process was ultimately declared by observers with the Catholic Church to be at an impasse over these points in early 1993. Nevertheless, these small positive steps did mark important progress toward peace.

The final push for ending the civil war arrived in the wake of a Constitutional crisis that galvanized civil society, reformist factions within the government and military, and the international community to finally end decades of war. In 1993, President

Serrano attempted an autogolpe to retain the presidency. Claiming the action was necessary to fight corruption, Serrano suspended the country’s Constitution, dissolving the Congress, the Attorney General’s office, and the Supreme Court, and sought to censor the nation’s media. Unfortunately for Serrano, he underestimated the degree to which the civil sector and the international community would react to his attempted coup and, though he did have some support from hardline factions, he also overestimated the degree to which the rest of the military-government would be loyally complicit. One week after seizing power, Serrano was forced to resign and subsequently went into exile in Panama, where he remains to this day wanted on corruption charges.

In the wake of the coup, Ramiro de Leon Carpio, a former human rights ombudsman, was installed as President to oversee the transition out of the

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constitutional crisis.12 As the human rights ombudsman, Carpio was often a critic of the military, the civil patrol system set up under former President Rios Montt, and extrajudicial disappearances and executions against political reformers, human rights activists, and leaders of popular movements. He argued, as well, for the demilitarization of the national police force and the disbanding of the military intelligence and security apparatuses that had long been the driving force behind human rights violations.13

Carpio had a reputation for fighting ethnic discrimination and for helping to draft

Guatemala’s Constitution in 1984, he had in his favor a rare solidarity of the public and private sectors, and he was further bolstered by international condemnation of

Serrano’s actions and demands for political and social reforms after decades of war.14

As a show of good-faith to the incoming new president, the URNG coalition called for a unilateral cease fire, and Carpio immediately began work to facilitate formal peace negotiations to end the civil war.

12Serrano’s vice president, Gustavo Espina, was the first to replace him. However, Espina held the office as an interim President for only four days. After evidence of his own participation in Serrano’s attempted self-coup came to light, he was forced by Congress to resign, at which time he too fled in exile. Espina eventually returned to Guatemala in 1997 to face prosecution, was convicted of violating the Constitution, and was sentenced to prison, a punishment that was promptly commuted to the payment of a modest fine.

13However, he also began his political career in the same far right party—the National Liberation Movement [Movimiento Liberación Nacional (MLN)]—that supported Efrain Rios Montt’s coup and that used violence as both a political tool and a form of rural suppression.

14The administration of United States President Bill Clinton may be viewed as having played a critical role in the international condemnation of Serrano’s autogolpe. Within days of the coup, the U.S. State Department suspended resources for security, military and police training, and economic assistance for institutional support, and threatened trade benefits from international economic organizations unless Constitutional governance was reinstated. Clinton’s administration was also instrumental in persuading the military to not assume power for itself but, instead, to allow for the establishment of constitutional provisions that would lead to a newly elected President.

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Negotiating Peace Accords

Following President Jorge Serrano’s attempted autogolpe and Ramiro de Leon

Carpio’s subsequent installation as President in 1993, the peace process gained some political momentum but still faced distinct opposition from with the government. Carpio had to rely upon the shaky support of the military high command by necessity in order to maintain control of the office, which put his governing at odds with, and in contradiction to, many of the pronouncements he had previously made against the various militarized forces of the State while serving as Human Rights Ombudsman.15

De Leon Carpio, though, was instrumental in bringing demonstrable change to

Guatemala; his government included indigenous Mayans and oversaw the first democratic elections in Guatemala to feature political candidates and parties that were not explicitly vetted and “approved” by the military wing for electoral consideration. One of the first successes for Carpio, the negotiating parties, and the peace process itself came on January 10, 1994, with the signing of the “Framework Agreement for the

Resumption of the Negotiating Process between the Government of Guatemala and the

Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity.”16 This framework served as a foundational blueprint for all future negotiations.

15Carpio had been given control of a deeply divided government and was not duly elected by Guatemalan citizens in a democratic election, so he lacked the electoral mandate he might otherwise have claimed and thus was politically limited in his ability to garner support for significant legislative measures against the State’s security apparatus and ongoing human rights violations.

16A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-resumptionnegotiationsurng94

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The next two agreements were completed and signed in Mexico City on March

29, 1994. The first of these was the ”Agreement on a Timetable for Negotiations on a

Firm and Lasting Peace in Guatemala,”17 which established a calendar for negotiations, setting target deadlines for future agreements and an anticipated completion date in

December 1994. The Mexico City meetings also produced the “Comprehensive

Agreement on Human Rights,”18 which called for a range of mandates promoting institutional mechanisms for the protection of human rights. The completion of the framework and calendar accords were instrumental in establishing the foundation, and expectations, for future negotiations; the Guatemalan government’s acceptance of the human rights agreement was particularly important, as well, for establishing a commitment to the Guatemalan people (and to international observers) that the violence and atrocities of the recent past would be reined in. However, the road to peace ahead was not a smooth one, and the government was not without its own biases, particularly in relation to the role that civil society interests would play in further negotiations.

The organization of a “civil society assembly” and the inclusion of such a disparate group of civil concerns was for State representatives an unfortunate but necessary compromise. Peace negotiations without civic representation would be viewed as illegitimate, but the ASC was ultimately limited in the degree of influence it could actually wield. Each sector’s representative had to navigate the varied interests of

17A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-timetablenegotiations94

18A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-humanrightsagreement94

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the many groups participating in negotiations for each sector. In addition, the ASC was not an equal negotiating partner with veto power; it could only provide recommendations to the formal negotiating parties. These conditions, and the competing interest groups, were sources of tension ongoing throughout the remainder of the peace negotiations.19

On June 17, 1994, negotiators meeting in Oslo signed the accord to address the status of internally and externally displaced refugees. The “Agreement on the

Resettlement of Population Groups Uprooted by the Armed Conflict”20 placed a heavy burden on the Guatemalan government to promote the safe return of externally displaced refugees, to ensure the reintegration of both externally and internally displaced refugees into Guatemalan society, and to endeavor to return expropriated and abandoned lands to those people and communities displaced during the war. The agreement provided a number of guarantees to uprooted individuals and populations, ranging from how returning groups would reintegrate into Guatemala, the kinds of protection (and other resources) they would receive from the government, and the need for mechanisms of community sustainability and rural development.

A week later, on June 23, 1994, the parties in Oslo also completed the

“Agreement on the Establishment of the Commission to Clarify Past Human Rights

Violations and Acts of Violence that have Caused the Guatemalan Population to

19In fact, when the ASC added the additional sectors not initially outlined by the Framework agreement, CACIF withdrew from negotiations, citing the questionable legality and ambiguous membership of many of the groups included in the assembly (Krznaric 1999, 5).

20A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-resettlementagreement94

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Suffer,”21 which stipulated the governance of a truth and reconciliation commission to address the human rights violations that occurred, by both State and guerilla forces, from the beginning of the war until the future signing of the final peace agreement. The agreement called for the Commission to begin its work immediately following the completion of the Peace Accords, to be moderated by a representative of the United

Nations, and to be composed of “a citizen of irreproachable character” agreed upon by all parties and an academic to represent university rectors.

The completion of the Human Rights and Clarification accords were important first steps on the road to peace, but they were also quite contentious. From the beginning of the peace process, the Guatemalan government and, particularly, ranking military officials were deeply opposed to the establishment of a truth commission about war-time violence or any allowance for the future judicial investigations of human rights violations. The final version of the accord reflects those fears: the agreement mandated that the Commission had a very short period to investigate and publish its report; the

Commission did not have the power to search, seize, subpoena, or report the names of accused human rights violators; and, the Commission’s findings and recommendations were not legally binding.

Still, the military was resistant to these human rights measures, and membership of the coalition URNG rank and file also expressed growing concerns about the concessions made by their own negotiating representatives. Shortly after the conclusion

21A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-humanrightsinvestigation94

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of the Oslo meetings, there was a resurgence of on-the-ground conflicts in Guatemala.

The URNG representatives complained that the renewed violence represented the government’s breach of the human rights mandates already signed, and they subsequently removed themselves from the peace process, leading to a stagnation and delay of formal negotiations. The divides between negotiating parties grew even more pronounced as the peace process turned to the consideration of wide-ranging reforms in the agrarian and indigenous sectors, which were already the source of simmering tensions within Guatemala’s economic sectors.

An early conflict arising out of the mandates of the first peace accords related to the makeup of the Assembly of Civil Society (ASC): the indigenous population, the majority of Guatemala’s overall population and by far the war’s most vulnerable and victimized, were relegated as a “sector” of civil society whose contributions to peace negotiations were limited to representation in the ASC (Seider 1997). Winning that conciliation was itself hard-fought, as the government of Guatemala initially rejected the inclusion of indigenous representation as a partner in the peace process. To the dismay of many of the negotiating parties, the growing influence of indigenous activists and populist indigenous rights organizations made their exclusion untenable.

In May 1994, the Coordination of Organizations of the Mayan People of

Guatemala [La Coordinación de Organizaciones del Pueblo Maya de Guatemala

(COPMAGUA)], a group representing over 200 organizations, presented a consulting proposal to the ASC that outlined its broad concerns and demands (Seider 1997, 68). In addition to criticizing both the Guatemalan military and guerrilla forces, the wide-ranging demands of COPMAGUA’s proposal included: calls for constitutional recognition of the

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multiethnic multicultural nature of Guatemala’s population; guarantees for political reforms to support indigenous inclusion in the political process and policy-making more generally; greater autonomy, independence, and protection for the education and expression of Mayan culture; and, a comprehensive program of land reform. The task of condensing the broad concerns of so many indigenous interests into a single consensus document was itself a remarkable achievement, proving to the negotiating parties that indigenous rights groups now represented a formidable political bloc that wielded significant influence in Guatemalan governance.

Although not all of the demands were accepted in the resulting peace negotiations, the majority of COPMAGUA’s concerns are reflected in the final form of the peace accord. Nearly a year after the proposal was submitted to the ASC, on March

31, 1995, the “Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples”22 was signed in

Mexico City, establishing a path forward to formally recognize Guatemala's diverse cultural roots and to protect, and promote, the development of indigenous cultural rights.

The State's campaigns of violence escalated following the human rights and clarification accords, and the indigenous rights agreement was signed in the midst of similar discord. Ongoing violence, human rights violations, and illegal land appropriations by the State continued unabated, leaving many in the opposition feeling as if the peace agreements were not affecting change rapidly enough. The agreements also increased concerns within Guatemala’s business sectors, which increased

22A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-identityindigenouspeoples95

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pressure on government negotiators to ensure that their own influence would not be undermined by the peace process.

In the midst of this acrimony, President Carpio oversaw in late 1995 the first democratic election of a new President, Alvaro Enrique Arzu Yrigoyen, the five-time elected mayor of Guatemala City, who narrowly won the election against Alfonso

Portillo, and brought with him a thin majority of his party’s representatives to Congress.

Arzu was a member of one Guatemala’s elite oligarchic families, and this curried favorable support from important elements of the country’s business and military sectors. The guerrilla coalition, URNG, despite its diminished bargaining position, was heartened by Arzu’s stated commitment to peace. Their confidence was reinforced by important conciliatory steps taken by Arzu immediately following his election: he personally led a government delegation in secret meetings with URNG leadership in

Italy to discuss the resumption of formal negotiations, and he named a prominent guerrilla supporter as both his Personal Secretary and the government’s lead negotiator.

The URNG announced its return to negotiations and, as a conciliatory show of support for the new administration, another unilateral cease-fire, an action that had the ancillary benefit of opening inroads to a cessation of war tax collection and a formal demobilization of armed forces once the remaining accords were put to signature. The first of these accords, the “Agreement on Socio-economic Aspects of the Agrarian

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Situation,”23 was signed shortly thereafter on May 6, 1996. The completed agreement is presented in four chapters, and its opening remarks reflect its broad scope:

This is necessary in order to overcome the poverty, extreme poverty, discrimination and social and political marginalization which have impeded and distorted the country’s social, economic, cultural, and political development and have represented a source of conflict and instability.

Although the wide-ranging concerns from the ASC’s consensus proposal, and much of the language, made its way into the final agreement, the mandates also reflect the influence of CACIF and some critics argued that the final draft favored the interests of the landholding elite in Guatemala (Sieder et al. 2002).

However, over the course of the spring and summer, the government made preemptive decisions that gave the URNG additional motivation to continue negotiations: in April, the military revised its code so that non-combat crimes committed by its soldiers and officers could be prosecuted in a civilian court of law, and then in

August announced the demobilization of the civil defense patrol system by mid-

November. These concessions encouraged continuting negotiations, and on September

19, 1996, the parties signed the “Agreement on the Strengthening of Civilian Power and on the Role of the Armed Forces in a Democratic Society,”24 which centers on six broad themes related to the State and its system of government: the legislative, judicial, and executive branches; the social participation of civilian citizenry; the increased participation of women; and, operational considerations related to ending the civil war.

23A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-agrariansituation96

24A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-civilpowerarmy96

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The last three constituent agreements of the accords were signed three months later in December 1996. The primary mandate of the “Agreement on the Definitive

Ceasefire,”25 signed on December 4th, was a cessation of all insurgent actions by the

URNG and all counter-insurgent actions by the Guatemalan military, to commence as soon as the United Nations verification commission was in place with full operational capacity. The “Agreement on Constitutional Reforms and the Electoral Regime”26 was signed three days later, on December 7th, 1996, in Stockholm. This accord proposed a number of specific and immediate changes to the 1985 Constitution, with particular regard to reforms addressed in the Indigenous Rights and Armed Forces agreements.

The government was given the mandate of 60 days to draft and submit new constitutional amendments to Congress; these amendments would require a two-thirds majority to pass Congress, and then another two-thirds majority of voters to go into effect. In Madrid, on December 12, 1996, the parties signed the “Agreement on the

Basis for the Legal Integration of Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca

(URNG),”27 which established a commission and a program of integration to facilitate

URNG forces out of armed engagement with the State, in accordance with the Definitive

Ceasefire agreement. The entire integration package consisted of legal, political,

25A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-definitiveceasefire96

26A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-constitutionalreform96

27A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-legalintegrationurng96

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economic, and security measures, as well as a mandate for the government to sponsor a National Reconciliation Act in Congress.

The long road to peace finally came to an end in Guatemala City on December

29, 1996. The “Agreement on the Implementation, Compliance and Verification

Timetable for the Peace Agreements”28 established detailed and thorough mandates for the implementation of the peace accords but also provided clear guidelines from which to begin navigating the agreements’ mandates into actionable legislation. The final remaining accord was the “Agreement on a Firm and Lasting Peace,”29 which bound all the previously-signed agreements into a formally recognized agenda to guide all negotiating parties in the years ahead. This final agreement also brought a formal end to civil war in Guatemala after 36 years. However, the path forward from the accord mandates to legislative reality turned out to be a more difficult process.

Following the successful completion of the Peace Accords, Congress was expected to produce a package of substantive constitutional reforms based on the agreements’ mandates, to be put to the country’s voters in a national referendum within a year. The continued spotlight of international observers and international donors instilled hope in many of the negotiating parties that the agreements’ mandates would lead to substantial reform in post-war Guatemalan society. However, the reforms languished in Congress, as politicians negotiated with civil society, business, and

28A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-implementation96

29A copy of the agreement can be found on file with the United Nations: http://peacemaker.un.org/guatemala-firmlastingpeace96

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military sectors to elaborate the details of actionable reform from the often ambiguous language of the Accords. The reform platform was finally approved by Congress in

October 1998, nearly two years after the signing of “A Firm and Lasting Peace,” and the package had grown from the initial proposal of 12 amendments to 50.

For their part, most of the political parties in Guatemala followed a strategy of non-opposition to the referendum, although many of them offered only muted support because a new national election was upcoming (Holiday 2000, 81). However, a heavily funded oppositional campaign was unleashed in the weeks leading up to the vote, presenting the reforms in a decidedly negative light, and some of my informants described how they came to believe that the reforms included in the package had been undermined in such a way as to actually effectuate the opposite intent of the Accords’ mandates. These informants were frequently unclear, citing the passage of time, about precisely what had been undermined, but this belief seems to support analysts’ assertions that people distrusted the constitutional reforms in the package. This gives additional credence, as well, to analysts’ assertions that the platform was too complicated for people to fully understand. When the national referendum was moved to the public, less than 20 percent of the voting population came out to vote, and the reform package was defeated by nearly 2 to 1, with most of the votes coming from the capital city and departmental capitals.

The negative press campaign may have impacted the decisions of some voters, but many of many of my informants described how they were simply unable to vote, a factor I find less often in the historical postmortem of what happened with the referendum. Informants gave me a variety of reasons why they did not vote: they were

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unable to leave work to travel to submit a vote, the voting station was only open for a few hours, or they did not even know what day the vote was to occur. I wonder if this last reason is believable, due to the expensive and widespread media campaign, funded mostly by international donors, which widely publicized the upcoming vote. I was also unable to verify the other two claims. Perhaps all of them are true, and I certainly believe that the remote and relatively isolated fact of San Jose’s geographic location likely played a significant role in the residents’ confusion. If the experience of my informants is at all common to other similar communities in the countryside, I have no doubt that the combined effect of these issues undermined whatever chance the reforms had to pass. Since the referendum's defeat, there has not been substantial motivation to renew the process of legislating the Accords' mandates and at the time of fieldwork, 15 years after the Accords were signed, many of my informants laughed or scoffed at my questions about the possibility that they might ever be taken up again.

Conclusion

Guatemala’s history is characterized by the marginalization of the poor, rural, and indigenous majority population, and a historical political-economic elite that has long enacted legislation that serves to maintain that status quo in order to maximize capitalist profits at the expense of marginalized groups. Though occurring throughout the post- colonial era in Guatemala, authoritarian violence spiked during the civil war years to suppress populist movements of dissent against those same policies of exclusion and marginalization.

While much of the academic research on the civil war during the last few decades is perhaps justifiably focused on the brutal oppressive violence of the State against its own citizens, researchers of violence, in Guatemala and elsewhere, must

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keep in mind that State violence is most often a tool meant to further political, economic, social, and cultural values that undermine the progress of those living at the margins of the State who would most benefit from a more equitable political-economic system. The

Guatemalan civil war, though clearly exacting a terrible and dramatic toll on the nation’s citizenry, infrastructure, and international standing, should be viewed as an extension of a long-standing policy of State-orchestrated marginalization of the country’s poor, rural, and indigenous populations that existed in different forms before the outbreak of armed internal conflict. Although the Guatemalan peace agreements represented an unprecedented degree of indigenous participation, civil organizations, and sweeping mandates, the failure of the post-signature referendum platform to pass created an obstacle to post-conflict recovery for so many of Guatemala's citizens.

In the following chapter, my discussion turns to an ethnographic case study of one remote village in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala—San Jose El Tesoro—and the ways in which the post-Accords era has helped to shape the its development. Though the story does not do justice to the many wonderful people who live there, I believe it does reflect the diverse stories of many other contemporary agrarian villages struggling to sustain and grow in Guatemala's post-conflict present.

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CHAPTER 5 SAINT JOSEPH THE TREASURE

The trip to San Jose El Tesoro from the capital city is, typically, a two-day journey.

The first step is to purchase a bus ticket to Coban, the department capital of Alta

Verapaz. Being the privileged (and funded) foreigner, I always chose one of

Guatemala’s corporate bus lines. These buses range from the fancy to the somewhat barren, but usually feature a television and DVD player, which in my experience typically shows “classic” cinematic fare like American Ninja, Streetfighter, or some film starring

Nicolas Cage. Depending on the time of day in which the bus leaves the capital, and depending on the conditions of traffic between the cities, the journey can last anywhere from eight to fourteen hours; if one were to take the much cheaper route, via the colorful

“chicken bus” or smaller vans, both of which involve many more stops and far less comfortable conditions, the trip can last even longer.

Once in Coban, a seat on one of these vans is purchased for Raxruha or

Sayaxche. Both of these destinations sit alongside the national highway connecting

Coban to the more isolated areas of eastern Alta Verapaz and to Guatemala’s northernmost departamento, Peten. The winding highway from Coban curls down from the Alta Verapaz highlands, and mountains give way to rolling foothills and warmer temperatures. Just outside of Raxruha, at the crossroads where the highway turns north toward Sayaxche and, ultimately, Flores, the beautiful department capital of Peten, sits a gas station that sticks out amongst the green rocky tree-covered hills that burst from the land. Small vans swing by, with drivers’ assistants, usually teenage boys, precariously leaning out of the wide open passenger side door, shouting out their final destination. While awaiting the right van, locals are likely to see fancy tourist buses fly

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by on their way to Flores, the colorful island city that also serves as the way-point for visitors to Tikal, a former center of the vast Maya empire.

From this crossroads, the traveler might wait for the rare van traveling to

Sayaxche or one of the two (but sometimes three) buses owned by a family in the village that travel to Raxruha. The best bet, though, is to find some way—I often hitchhiked—to arrive at the crossroads in Yalpemech where the highway passes the dirt-rock road that leads to the center of the village, a foot-bound journey that can take nearly an hour if inclement weather conditions have made the trip more treacherous.

Even in the worst conditions of rain and slippery mud, the walk itself is not a bad one, featuring a view of the land that is amongst the most beautiful I have ever seen and, alone on the path, with the sound of the rain hitting the earth and vegetation along the road, I often found a lot of peace. In the best conditions, though, under a bright blue sky that allows a view of the highlands’ foothills for many miles, when the corn stalks are grown high and the breeze cascades across the fields in waves, the walk is an absolute joy.

Shortly, before arriving in the village, a small cemetery sits atop a high spot along the southern edge of the road, and even on foot you can see the cement and concrete tombs, which reminded me of the cemeteries in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the remnants of colorful ribbons and decorations from recent interments, fighting against the forces of weather and new vegetation. Shortly after is a bridge over a large creek where, even during the driest months of the year, children can be found bathing and playing, men resting their horses, and girls and women washing their clothes and collecting water in large containers to carry back home. When the rains are strong and

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widespread across the region, the creek fills quickly with fresh running water from upstream; when the rains are not so plentiful, however, the creek is much more stagnant, and the water visibly contaminated by its use. Once over the last hill and into the village, the farmland gives way to one-story concrete homes and large paths branch off to separate the village into grid-like sectors. Although the traveler will cross people walking to and from the crossroads, or to and from their parcelas or the creek, there is much more noise and activity once inside the village center, with people walking, working, playing, chatting, and simply watching passersby.

This main street continues straight through the village center, all the way to the opposite side, but here in the center is where much of the public activity occurs. Along the northern edge of the road sit several different bodegas, most of which sell the same items and serve the same functions. Behind those shops, and down a steep hill, sits the largest open area within the community: the futbol field. To the right, on the southern side of the road, sits the house where a group of Franciscan nuns have lived since the village’s founding in 1991, as well as the compound that consists of their church and a large event space that doubles as both a learning annex and a communal meeting space. Next to this compound is the village’s primary school facility, featuring several long one-story concrete buildings, where village children and teenagers are required to attend formal education classes. Further down the road sit more shops, a couple large public use buildings that go mostly unused, and a small clinic and pharmacy that are operated primarily under the auspices of the Franciscan Sisters and are otherwise rarely used except for emergencies and visits from outside medical professionals. Apart

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from this main road, the view of the village on all sides is of homes and kitchens nestled amongst the trees and former jungle that still remains of the former landscape.

The area around San Jose El Tesoro has long been a focus of international and domestic development as part of a broad rural development program that stretched across northern Guatemala during the civil war era. But the people who live there now only arrived in the spring of 1991, refugees displaced from their communities in the departments of Alta Verapaz, Baja Verapaz, Izabal, and elsewhere. They came to

Yalpemech as part of a broad plan to resettle populations uprooted by decades of unjust land policies and war-related violence. I was told that the first residents in San Jose El

Tesoro are responsible for the village’s name, which arose from two sources: the El

Tesoro (“the treasure”) refugee camp in Honduras, from which many of the residents originate, and San Jose (“Saint Joseph”), the Catholic patron saint of the month of

March, when the first waves of displaced refugees started to arrive. The view of San

Jose that I know now from my fieldwork is a much different one than was visible during the war era and as seen by the village’s first residents, who started to arrive just as international and domestic parties entered into formal negotiations to finally end the civil war. The story of the village’s origin and history occurs in concert with that peace process.

Yalpemech and Development in the Northern Transversal

The location of my fieldsite, and the reasons why its residents came to live there, is rooted in the development of the Northern Transversal Strip [Franja Transversal del

Norte (FTN)], a somewhat arbitrary block of land that stretches across north-central

Guatemala, from the western altiplano to the small eastern Caribbean coast. This broad swath of land encompasses nearly 16,000 square kilometers, and contains some of

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Guatemala’s richest mineral, oil, and timber reserves. Not coincidentally, much of the worst violence of the civil war era occurred in the departments that intersect within this

Strip, including Huehuetenango, Quiche, Baja Verapaz, Alta Verapaz, and Izabal.

The area has long been a focus of domestic and international development, from the colonial era and into the present, and much of the land contained within the Strip was part of the land redistribution plans during the so-called Liberal Spring of the late

1940s and early 1950s. The land reform program advocated by Arbenz in 1952 sought to overhaul the existing inequities in land ownership throughout Guatemala. According to the United States Agency of International Development (USAID) (1972, 9), nearly

90% of the country’s farms were approximately 17 acres or less, and accounted for just less than 15% of all farm lands; to get a sense of the ownership disparity, nearly half the total farm land consisted of large farms (over 1,100 acres in size) that represented just

0.3% of the total number of farms. The Law of Agrarian Reform (Decree 900) mandated wide-ranging changes, including the expropriation of lands unused by national and international property owners, the redistribution of those lands to landless Guatemalans, and monetary policies to encourage better rural participation in the national marketplace.

The legality of these policies was suspect, and there was significant pushback from Guatemala’s political-economic stakeholders, but that became moot following the

1954 coup that deposed Arbenz, an action supported by the UFC and facilitated by the

CIA. The new government argued that land reforms were necessary but should be directed to maximizing the productive potential of unused lands, particularly in the

Northern and Southern regions, rather than by expropriating the already productive (and

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profitable) lands that were the focus of the Law of Agrarian Reform. To this end, throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the State enacted programs of land colonization, settlement, and infrastructural development, with the aim of tapping into the vast natural resources of this unused land.

During this period, there were two important government decrees that serve as the basis for restructuring Guatemala’s agrarian policies and goals in the second half of the twentieth century. The first of these—the Agrarian Statute (Decree 559)—was initiated in 1956, and was important for the development of the FTN for two reasons: the establishment of the General Division of Agrarian Affairs (later to become the National

Institute of Agrarian Transformation [INTA]) as the official governmental institution overseeing State agricultural policies, and the creation of Zones of Agrarian

Development (ZDA), consisting of underused or unused national lands and property purchased by the State from private owners. The second decree—the Law of Agrarian

Transformation (Decree 1551)—was issued in late 1962 as a broad replacement of

Decree 559, reinforcing most of the policies of the Agrarian Statute but placing greater emphasis on the colonization and settlement of virgin lands with difficult access.

Collectively, these policies underlie the broad package of agrarian policies called the

Rural Development Program, of which ZDAs were its administrative units (USAID

1972,40-42).

The lands that would be the focus of this Program were established by INTA in

1964, and the broad geography was formally designated as the FTN in 1970. However, in the sixteen years following the 1954 coup, there was substantial infrastructure development and international investment throughout the FTN. One of the Rural

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Development Program’s first major settlement and infrastructure projects was in Sebol,

Alta Verapaz, just east of my fieldwork site. The project was overseen by an Army captain named Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, whose family owned much of the land in the area; after he received the land in Sebol as an inheritance, he designated them for government development.1 By the time he began his presidential campaign in 1977,

Lucas Garcia, had become a general, the defense minister, and the coordinator of the entire FTN development project. He had also accumulated a substantial real estate profile throughout the FTN, which Schirmer (1999, 301) notes was reported to be over

40,000 hectares. One of the largest of these properties was in the Yalpemech development zone, which he acquired in 1975.

The location of my fieldsite was one of many developments at the center of these rural projects. The Yalpemech “zone” had long been the property of the Dieseldorf family, German immigrants whose financial and land holdings in Guatemala date back to the post-colonial nineteenth century and whose name is well-known throughout Alta

Verapaz for their coffee farms. The land in this area was a piece of the State’s long-term international aspirations, and exploring the mineral potential of the area had begun even before the widespread development of the FTN project.

1This is a pattern that occurred throughout the FTN, where high-ranking officials in the government and military sectors became principal beneficiaries of both domestic and international investment and the fruits of agricultural production on their farms. This is hardly surprising, as INTA was situated in the Office of the Presidency and overseen by the military, and the FTN included a long stretch of national borders with Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and the eastern coast.

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One such exploration, undertaken by the U.S.-based Ohio Oil Company, made news in the United States when, on July 21, 1959, the New York Times2 reported the

“very encouraging” discovery of oil in a well on the northern edge of the property, in the aldea of Chinaja. That site is an illustrative example of the various implicit and explicit agendas of the FTN agrarian project; the intertwining goals of developing rural economies, national infrastructure, international export, and the militarization of the

State coalesce in Chinaja, which is also notable for its historic role as a clandestine

United States training camp for exiled anti-Castro Cuban counterrevolutionaries in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion. This piece of trivia was not reported in the New

York Times.

Another project advanced the national plans for infrastructure development and investment into the highway and roads systems, in order to connect the isolated, but productive, areas of the FTN to the capital, to major department centers, and to the borders and ports of entry to Guatemala. In 1969, with international investment assistance, the government of Guatemala began a long-term project to expand and modernize the road and highway system in this region of the FTN, connecting the department capitals of Alta Verapaz (Coban) and Peten (Flores).3 These roads were crucial to the area, in part, because the FTN project viewed a network of rivers—

Cancuen, Santa Isabel, La Pasión, and Usumacinta—to be an important strategic focus.

2Source: New York Times: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive- free/pdf?res=9504E4D6153CE63BBC4951DFB1668382649EDE

3Several routes were accepted and construction began in the 1970s, although the entire lengths of those routes were not entirely paved with asphalt until the mid-1990s.

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Many of the community massacres of the late 1970s and early 1980s were not motivated by the army’s desire to eradicate or disrupt dangerous anti-government activities, although certainly many were; often, communities were simply in the way of the progress of the FTN development projects. One of the most famous, and notorious, examples involves the construction of the Chixoy Dam.4 it also required the forced relocation of 37 indigenous communities who had occupied the area since the age of the Classic Maya. Many refused to leave, or they returned after being forcibly removed to resettlement populations, and the response of the government, now headed by

General Lucas Garcia, was an escalation of violence against them: between 1980 and

1982, as many as 5,000 men, women, and children were kidnapped, raped, and murdered by paramilitary forces in the area, actions that are now commonly referred to as the Rio Negro massacres.

I am uncertain what, if any, kind of large displacement occurred during this period in the immediate vicinity of San Jose El Tesoro. I was told by several people, residents of both my fieldsite community and residents of neighboring villages, that there are mass graves in the area—a ravine here, a cave there, an old well “...they say”—but I never investigated any further that. However, large projects like the highway construction required massive human labor, and several informants reported laboring on

4The project cost nearly US$1bn dollars, and required massive foreign investments from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. The dam is a reinforced concrete hydroelectric plant on the Rio Negro (Chixoy River), which crosses the departments of Quiche, Alta Verapaz, and Baja Verapaz, north of Rabinal. The government had promised to provide land to those displaced by the project, which was located in military-controlled resettlement villages. Many moved to those villages, only to find the government and military had not followed through on that condition, and so subsequently returned to their former communities, even though construction had already begun; others refused to leave their ancestral communities altogether. One village community, Rio Negro, named after the river, refused to leave and was wiped out, killing nearly 450 Achi Maya.

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the road’s expansion. One of them described being grateful for the opportunity to work on the highway as a teenager during this period, as he and his family were landless after being displaced from his aldea near Coban and thus struggled for income. Another informant described being forced to work on the project, after he and some friends were pulled from La Pasion River and told they could work or be taken to the military base; they chose to work for food. I heard rumors that many of the communities on the northern edge of the Yalpemech zone, just inside of Peten, where sites like the well in

Chinaja held the promise of oil, were forcibly displaced, and one even massacred, but I was not able to verify this for myself.

Lucas Garcia was deposed in 1982 in a coup d’etat by army junior officers under the command of General Efrain Rios Montt, who subsequently took power, and shortly thereafter Lucas Garcia moved in exile to Venezuela, where he lived until his death in

2006. However, he was likely a millionaire many times over, and there is little reason to believe that he did not continue to earn monies from his vast property holdings in the

TFN, some of which he sold to the Guatemalan government after fleeing to Guatemala.

The war escalated under Rios Montt, before he was deposed, as well. By the end of the

1980s, all sides consolidated around the need to bring the war to a formal end, driven in large part by international pressures. The widespread violence, documented by domestic academics, activists like Rigoberta Menchu, and Guatemalan human rights organizations and international observers had increased global awareness about the atrocities committed by the government’s oppressive campaigns and violent methods.

However, neighboring countries like Honduras and Mexico, who for many years carried the burden of accounting for the thousands of refugees fleeing Central American

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violence, also exerted pressure upon the Guatemalan state. The government came to see the return of those refugees as an important political step that would impress upon the international community the State’s commitment to peace and, hopefully, international development investments. These disparate pressures coalesced into the first tentative steps toward formal peace negotiations but also into the first constructive actions with regard to the refugee issue.

The Origins of San Jose El Tesoro

In 1989, in collaboration with the Catholic Church of Guatemala, the United

Nations, and international human rights and refugee organizations, the government began the process of formulating a path for the repatriation and resettlement of thousands of uprooted Guatemalans. Years before the completion of the Resettlement

Accord, negotiations between the State, displaced refugees, and their advocates centered on three broad questions: (1) who would count as a refugee, (2) where would the refugees go, and (3) how their resettlement would be mobilized. The question of who “counts” as a refugee was unclear.

The report issued by the Catholic Church after the war estimates that over one million people were internally displaced as a result of State and guerrilla campaigns, with another estimated 400,000 people displaced to Belize, Canada, Costa Rica,

Honduras, Mexico, and the United States; in the highland regions where the worst violence occurred, an estimated 80 percent of the indigenous population was displaced from their communities (ODHAG 1999, 55-56). Obviously, the refugees living in camps in Mexico and Honduras were relatively simple to count, and accounting for those

Guatemalans living in military-controlled model villages was also a relatively easy process. But what about all those Guatemalans who migrated out of the country, or

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those who moved to new communities inside Guatemala, that did not live clustered with other refugees but were, nevertheless, similarly entitled to State assistance? A number of refugee advocacy groups were initiated in response to these questions and in response to attacks on returning refugees. Some of these groups had the support of the

Guatemalan government, but most remained independent of the State.

Much of the early progress on this front arose through the work of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Mexican government, who had spent much of the preceding decade attending to the massive waves of Guatemalans fleeing the war into Mexico. The tens of thousands who entered

Mexico posed many problems for the Mexican State; the refugees overwhelmed local resources and also initiated breaches of international sovereignty when the Guatemalan army crossed the border in pursuit. The Mexican government forcibly relocated nearly

20,000 refugees from the border area, to model camps like those set up in Campeche and Quintana Roo, but another 25,000 remained throughout Chiapas (Worby 2001, 2).

Similar pressures mounted in Honduras, which faced a refugee crisis of its own from three fronts. In addition to Guatemalan refugees, although in vastly smaller numbers than in Mexico, Honduras also received indigenous refugees fleeing from

State violence in El Salvador against the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front and mestizo refugees fleeing the Nicaraguan fight against Sandinistas. Many of these refugees became integrated into Salvadoran communities, but thousands more were placed into refugee camps throughout El Salvador. As in Mexico, the combined effect of national resource drains and pressure from foreign militaries and governments increased domestic calls to international governing bodies for a political solution.

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When the Guatemalan government began to seriously negotiate for the return of expatriated refugees, the UNHCR and designated agencies of the Guatemalan and

Mexican governments entered into a tripartite agreement to negotiate the conditions for the refugees’ voluntary return (Worby 2001). The Guatemalan government wanted to limit the role played by the refugees in these negotiations, and lobbied for their return to their previous communities, in piecemeal fashion rather than as a deliberative coordinated group. However, the refugees resisted this kind of plan; the civil war was ongoing and there was ample evidence, reported by both the news and the rumor mill, that returning refugees were the subject of harassment, attacks, and forced conscription into civil patrol units or military service. Further, they were being asked to voluntarily return to communities in an ongoing war zone that may not want them or to lands that were now occupied by other people.

These concerns also drove the fears and reticence of refugees living in the El

Tesoro camp in Honduras. They had all fled from some aspect of the war’s violence, driven by fear that they could be next. Even in the refugee camp, ostensibly protected by both the Honduran army and the United Nations, they were not safe from the

Guatemalan military, which entered on multiple occasions and were rumored to have agents watching for anyone who might leave or sneak out. But internally displaced refugees also faced similar problems, a fact not always reported in academic research about Guatemalan refugees. Whether they were forcibly removed, or escaped, or simply moved away from the chaos in favor of the promise of safer environments and more stable work environments, they were also received as strangers by their new communities, and many internally displaced informants described the accusations they

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heard about themselves, that they must be guerrillas if they had run away from their home and their community, that maybe they were in fact agents of the State, or agents of the guerrillas, now acting as spies in a community that also did not want violence.

When news spread that the Guatemalan government was going to assist the relocation and settlement of displaced refugees, promising land, promising security, promising government assistance, not in model villages but in virgin communities that offered a new and (mostly) autonomous beginning, they took the opportunity.

The story of San Jose El Tesoro really begins when General Lucas Garcia, the former President now living in exile in Venezuela, sold his holdings of the San Diego

Yalpemech finca to the Guatemalan government in 1989. At this point in time, much of the government’s continuing focus in regard to externally displaced refugees centered on the tens of thousands who had fled to Mexico; although the negotiations there had faced some problems coming to a diplomatic consensus, the negotiations with smaller refugee communities in Honduras and with domestic groups representing internally displaced Guatemalans found more success.5 San Jose El Tesoro is one of those early settlement projects, and the problems faced in the early years of the village would become important lessons for the ongoing peace agreement negotiations.

The land set aside for San Jose El Tesoro represents a small, but substantial, piece of the total area of the former Yalpemech plantation. Although some sections of the property had previously been cleared for farmwork, the majority of the area was

5The vast majority of resettlement and repatriation projects did not begin until the completion of the Repatriation Accord and the signing of “A Firm and Lasting Peace,” but the process had already started by the end of the 1980s and many individuals and communities were already resettled by the time the Repatriation Accord was signed.

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overgrown wild growth. By all accounts, it was a literal jungle, and I was told that there were many animals there that have long since left: monos (monkeys), tigres (tigers), and even the colorful national bird, the quetzal, which is more likely to be found in the cooler highland forests than the warmer rolling foothills and flatlands near the Peten border.

My interviews with older informants about the details of resettlement do not provide a consensus about who was told what and by whom. The returnees were promised that the community would be composed entirely of castellanos (Spanish speakers); that is, the village would be composed of Indians like themselves, people who do not claim ethnic Maya ties of language and culture, even if they do recognize their indigenous origins, but who neither claim to be ladino. While there were, indeed, some other non-expatriate castellano refugee families who settled in San Jose, roughly half of the village was to be composed of ethnic Maya refugees, whose pre- displacement origins were primarily from the departments of Alta Verapaz, Baja

Verapaz, Chiquimula, and Izabal. Informants from these groups told me that they, too, were promised a community of people who claimed not only similar ethnic heritage and culture, but who had originated from the same general region as their former communities. These various groups of uprooted citizens joined approximately ten families who already lived on the property; at the time, many of the new residents viewed these families to be aligned with General Lucas Garcia, the former owner of their new community and the man who oversaw their displacement in the first place.

The differences between these groups, and the widely held perception of having been

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lied to or exploited by the government, yet again, drove much of the tension between residents in the early years of the village.

Whether or not the different groups were deceived by the authorities that brought them to San Jose, it is clear that the planning and organization of the village was carried out with these differences in mind. San Jose was divided into five poligonos, which residents refer to as “sectors,” that broadly grouped the residents into neighborhoods reflecting a shared cultural and regional similarity. A survey6 of the village, carried out in

November 1991, cites four broad groups: “Cubuleros, Rarxuha, Cojaj, and Repatriados”

(ASDC 1991, 6-7). This survey describes the “Cubuleros” as the most heterogeneous group of new residents, consisting of 25 families: one from Escuintla, three from Quiche, nine from Alta Verapaz, and 12 from Baja Verapaz; seventeen of these families were originally displaced to the Chisec area, and had lived in the area in the years prior to the village’s settlement. The “Rarxuha” group consisted of 27 families, of which 26 originate in Alta Verapaz, primarily from the towns of Tactic and Chisec, before moving to the area. The “Cojaj” group was composed of 25 families from the municipality of San

Pedro Carcha, Alta Verapaz, with all but 6 coming from the aldea of Cojaj.

According to this report, the final group, “Los Repatriados,” consisted of 77 families whose pre-flight origins were in the departments of Chiquimula, Izabal, and

Zacapa. However, most of those families did not go to Honduras from their original

6I am unclear about who, precisely, was responsible for carrying out the survey, in practical or instrumental terms. The report is ascribed to the Asociacion de Salud y Desarrollo Comunitario (Association of Health and Community Development).but is otherwise authorless. My belief is that this was a community-organized report, overseen by the village council, which consisted of leaders of each of the four broad groups described here.

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communities but, rather, they relocated first to Izabal and then later to Honduras.

Informants described a dual motivation for the initial relocation to Izabal: a growing sense of impending communal violence and the possibility and promise of more stable and beneficial income that might come from labor at one of the many large fruit plantations in Izabal. The Repatriados group also includes a number of “Honduran”

Guatemalan families, as well, the result of long-standing labor and family ties between communities on either side of the border. These ties were, understandably, a factor in the decision made by many refugees to relocate across the border in Honduras.

From the start, there were antagonisms between the groups. The war was still ongoing, there was distrust about who belonged in the community and who did not, and language barriers—most of the castellanos did not know Q’eqchi’ and much of the

Q’eqchi’ did not understand Spanish—only exacerbated the suspicions about the different groups. Furthermore, the groups that arrived from El Tesoro brought much of the materials, and many of the supplies, for their house constructions in the camp; as a condition of the repatriation agreement, they were also to receive additional support— primarily food—from the UNHCR for the first three months after resettlement and then, in the nine months after that, from the Guatemalan government’s Special Commission for Assistance to Repatriates, Refugees and Displaced [Comisión Especial para la

Atención a Repatriados, Refugiados y Desplazados (CEAR)]. The internally displaced refugees were not provided with the same support, which compounded resentments in the Q’eqchi’ sectors.

The retornado groups, meanwhile, harbored resentments with their Q’eqchi’ neighbors, and not only because they were told it would be a “pure” castellano

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community. The presence of families who had lived in the area for years was viewed by many as a threat to their communal organization, safety, and livelihood. A comment I heard several times was that those families already living at the farm, as well as those who lived in the Raxruha area, had taken the best farmlands for themselves, rather than according to a map divided and mapped by the State, with preference given to the returnees. Many of the retornados believed that some of those families, whose patriarchs had participated in the civil patrols and army commissions, were allied with the army and, thus, were predisposed to discriminate against the refugees and even to consider them a security threat. I was told that this feeling was reinforced when the first village council was established, under the leadership of some of these men, in contradiction to the organizing principles and structures that had guided the councils in the refugee camp. When the army entered the village on several occasions, also in contradiction to the repatriation agreement, many of the retornados were fearful for their safety.

Little by little, the residents worked through these early problems, and focused on building the village. Leaders from each sector were elected to sit on the council, various committees (e.g., health, education, agriculture, etc.) were established to attend to the many concerns of a community that was starting with nothing, and people began working for the future by clearing their lands, building their homes, and planting their first harvests. As far as I can tell, nearly everyone who lived in the village at this time was hopeful about the community. They also seem to have been united with their frustration and growing skepticism about the State. Q’eqchi’ residents may have resented the government’s supplies to the refugees from Honduras, but the returnees

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resented that the State did not actually follow through on their mandates. Supplies were late or non-existent, materials for construction never arrived, and people worried consequently about access to water, the supplies necessary for planting crops, the lack of materials for building their homes and a school. The State’s failure to follow through on documentation was a great source of fear. People were afraid to leave the village boundaries and be caught without proper identification papers, and everyone in the community feared the consequences of not having official maps, titles, and tenure for their lands; in addition to the ongoing war, new communities were developing in the area, land squatters were becoming an increasing problem, and large landowners and cattle ranchers were expanding just across the border in Peten.

In the years leading up to A Firm and Lasting Peace, the war winded down and the people of San Jose El Tesoro began to work together to grow as a community. The process was not easy, early on, and my informants told me many stories about the problems and difficulties arising between residents during the community’s first few years. Following the end of the war, though, the village grew closer, and the residents increasingly focused their attention on maintaining a unified community in the face of outside forces, which many residents say continue to represent the greatest threat to the community’s future. For the most part, peace came to the area and the fears of violence greatly decreased. The village’s concerns then turned to the State’s responsibilities to the agrarian sector.

House, Home, and Field in San Jose El Tesoro

The road leading into San Jose from the highway cuts through the heart of the village, from which branches a grid-like system of roads large enough for two automobiles to pass one another, which serve as an unofficial and unpaved practical

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boundary delineating the space where the village’s domestic sectors meet the surrounding farmland. From these roads, a seemingly random system of footpaths is woven through each sector, worn into the terrain by daily use and the passage of time, reflecting the daily activities of the aldea’s residents, connecting sector to sector, neighbor to neighbor, and home to farm.

Villages in Guatemala are typically of two forms: residents’ homes are dispersed across the landscape and sit upon the occupants’ farm lands, or homes are organized around a village center from which radiate the residents’ individual milpas (corn fields).

San Jose El Tesoro is an example of the latter. Like all agrarian communities, the home is the heart of life the village, and the farm is a crucial extension of that heart. Not all homes in the village are exactly the same; some are nicer than others, with concrete floors and secure doors and windows, while others are more spartan. The typical home in San Jose El Tesoro consists of a single-story, multiroom concrete structure; most of the castellanos have roofs made of corrugated metal lamina while the Q’eqchi’ prefer a thatched roof made from dried palm leaves. Though many homes do have doors and windows that can be secured, these are almost always open to allow for more air to pass through the house than is otherwise possible from the open spaces between the wall and roof.

Most homes have a separate kitchen annex, which for a decade served as the home; although residents were promised that they would receive government assistance to build stable and sturdy homes, construction projects did not occur until a decade later in 2001 and 2002. Most homes also feature: a large open water tank, which collects rainwater redirected from the corrugated roof; an outside pila (a large

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multipurpose sink common to Guatemalan homes), for washing dishes, bathing, and food preparation; and a raised wooden outhouse. Many home compounds have additional areas for small gardens, pens for chickens, ducks or pigs, raised storage

“houses” for drying and storing corn, and lines for hang-drying clothes.

Daily Activities in San Jose

The rhythm of life, as in all agrarian communities, begins with the first signs of light and the incessant crowing of roosters. Women, and often their young daughters, carry plastic bowls filled with separated corn to mechanical grinders, where the corn is made more amenable for the creation of tortillas. At home, the wood fire in the kitchen has already started. Most kitchens consist of a makeshift but efficient wood stove, constructed of cinderblocks and stucco, in which firewood is placed below the stove top, which consists of at least one large metal skillet, cemented securely in place, and typically one or two additional grates over open holes, upon which standard pots, pans, and skillets receive direct heat. Once the corn has been ground, water and salt is applied to create a dough paste (masa) that is then worked over in the traditional Mayan stone grinder. Small pieces are ripped off the masa ball and formed into thin round forms that are shaped into larger thinner tortillas by a process of “clapping” the tortilla from one hand to the other, until it is ready to be placed upon the stove’s large skillet.

My breakfast typically consisted of eggs and beans, and the finished tortillas are stacked on a plate and wrapped in a handtowel to preserve their heat.

This work is usually performed by the matriarchs of the house and their daughters, but the men are also preparing for work at dawn. Their work begins following breakfast, and usually involves some aspect of attending to the fields or to the crops already harvested there. Fieldwork is performed by hand; depending on the season,

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some days are more arduous and tedious than others, but there is always work to be done. Agriculture occurs primarily by the slash-and-burn methods traditional to agrarian life in Guatemala, where blocks of land are left for a time to grow wild before being cleared and set alight with fire in advance of the rains to come. In this fashion, campesinos are able to return as much natural nutrients as possible to the soil.

Anyone traveling from the crossroads, looking out across the fields, will recognize immediately that corn is the dominant crop. From the crest of a hill on a clear day, one can see the breezes roll across the corn fields for miles. Amongst the corn rows, though, the fields also provide a variety of beans, squashes, and vegetables, like tomatoes and peppers. Corn is the dominant crop and the dominant food, but also the dominant source of extra income for farmers in the community. The arduous work required by the planting, harvesting, and preparation of corn for the market also represents the primary source of long-term health complaints in the village. The task of separating corn from its stalks, and kernels from their cores, is a family affair that occurs whenever there is downtime. Although much of that corn is set aside for family use, corn

“for the market” is gathered in large burlap sacks, which are carried to the village center where they are weighed on large hanging scales and stored for outside vendors who arrive periodically with flatbed trucks to purchase them.

Children in Guatemala are required by law to attend school, though the enforcement of those laws has been a difficult task, as evidenced by the country’s long- standing illiteracy rates in the countryside. However, the education conditions in the government’s social welfare programs have done much to change this historical problem. The school in San Jose is composed of two long one-story concrete buildings,

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divided into individual classrooms. Informants told me that the construction of the school and the provisioning of teachers was an early concern at the village’s founding, and was an ongoing source of frustration in its early years. In part due to the tradition of the

Sisters’ Franciscan order and in part due to the education role played by the Church in the refugee camp, the nuns played a prominent role in the early years; their advocacy in

San Jose has continued in the intervening years, and their affiliation with dioceses in the

United States has enabled additional support for the school, in the form of education materials, construction projects, and other resources. The school now has several teachers, most of whom are residents of the village, but many of them expressed to me that the State’s failure to maintain consistent lines of support to the community, particularly in regard to teacher salary, is not just a historical problem but a significant impediment to the community’s long-term success.

Classes take place over two blocks of time each weekday, before and after lunch.

After school, however, students typically assist with house work. Guatemala has a number of child labor laws, but those laws do not really exist in the countryside, where children have a number of responsibilities to the family. In Guatemala, the birth rate since the 1996 Peace Accords has slowly but steadily dropped; from 2000 to 2016, the national birth rate dropped from 35.05 to 24.5 births per 1,000 people.7 The average household size in Guatemala, at the time of this writing, is 5.9 people; I suspect that this number is low for San Jose, but an official survey has not been performed for many

7Source: CIA World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/geos/print_gt.html

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years. My own “host” family has six children ranging in age from 3 to 18 years, and this seems to be close to the norm for most families. With so many children, and the manual labor required to maintain both home and farm, older children take on many responsibilities. The boys are often required to work in the fields with their fathers, older brothers, and grandfathers; girls attend to much of the domestic duties, including washing clothes, fetching water, preparing tortillas and other food, and childcare of the younger children. Even the youngest children are included, running small errands or delivering messages.

By the late afternoon, just before the sun begins to fade and recede into twilight, the village center, and the streets and paths leading there, begins to fill with activity.

Men return from their parcelas, women line up at the corn grinder, smoke begins to billow from kitchens throughout the community as preparations for dinner commence, children play. People gather around the bodegas, perhaps grabbing a roll of bread, or a water or juice, often contained in sealed plastic bags, much cheaper than the bottles or cans of soda pop carried by some of the shops. Children run there, too, with a coin or two in hand to grab eggs, salt, beans, coffee, and other last minute supplies for their mothers. Many people simply loiter in conversation with friends, leaning against buildings or sitting on benches and walls.

Just before the sun begins to recede into twilight, the soccer field fills with young men playing futbol, and many other people sit around the edges or on the hill overlooking the field. The scene in many ways resembles the after-school practices that for years were central to my own life. However, the “game,” if it can even be called that, is more hectic, typically featuring far more players than the FIFA standard of eleven per

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team; on one particularly busy day just before the harvest season began in earnest, I counted 43 on the field at once. The community has some amazing talent, though, and the village has its own selección (team), which travels to nearby Raxruha on Sundays after church services to compete in formal all-day tourneys with other teams in the area.

Attending those games is a bit of a community event, and I often struggled to fight the desire to get away and join in on the fun.

However, I found that Sunday was typically the best day of the week for me to actually meet with people to do my interviews. Because there is so much work for men and women to do on a normal day, I often had trouble making contacts with potential informants. I also soon discovered that this work would usually prevent people from arriving on time, or at all, for pre-arranged meetings with me, a source of constant frustration throughout my stay. Sundays, the lone day of the week when people take some time, became an important work day for me. For everyone else, though, Sunday is reserved for two things: visiting with family members and attending Church services.

Religion and Spirituality in San Jose

Christianity is a central throughline in the culture of the community, although the belief systems are quite diverse. The vast majority of residents in San Jose are Catholic, the result of the Church’s long-standing influence in Guatemala. The village’s largest structure is its church, and Spanish-language and Q’eqchi’-language services occur each Sunday. Technically, these services are not proper “masses” because they are not presided over by an ordained priest, but instead by the Franciscan nuns and community catechists. On occasion, a priest does pass through, particularly for major events like weddings, funerals, and significant holy days, but the services are well attended nevertheless. Catholicism is not the only Christian belief system expressed in the

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community, however, and the explosive growth of evangelical Protestantism in

Guatemala over the last three decades is reflected by a small but not insubstantial segment of San Jose.

The U.S. State Department’s (2012) International Religious Freedom Report estimated that approximately 43% of the country now practice some brand of evangelical Christianity. There is little reason to doubt those estimates, as large megachurches have sprouted in the capital city and department centers of Guatemala, and foreign missionaries can be found throughout the country, including in Chisec,

Raxruha, and Sayaxche, the towns closest to San Jose. However, at my fieldsite, evangelicals represent a much smaller percentage of the population. At the time of my fieldwork, there were two evangelical churches, reflecting subtle differences in their respective belief systems; as far as I can tell, the larger group expresses a more mainstream version of neo-Pentecostalism, while the second smaller group is referred to by many of my informants as “charismatics” whose practices include snake-handling.

However, my conversations and interviews with evangelical residents share far more commonality on religious views than difference, with people citing their personal relationship with God, a rebirth in Christ, and often stories of personal redemption from the evils of alcoholism, drug use, and violence.

In San Jose, though, as in most indigenous communities throughout Guatemala, formal religion belief systems are infused with traditional Maya beliefs. The expression of Maya spirituality is, of course, more pronounced in the Q’eqchi’ community, and is driven by an ancient understanding of the fundamental connections between Maya,

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land, and the extrasensory.8 A century of research from Guatemala and the broader

Maya footprint in Central America, by both archaeologists and cultural anthropologists, provides great detail about the foundational bases of Maya cosmography and how ancient beliefs are expressed in a syncretic system of spirituality. My informants described to me that Maya understandings of the world are deeply connected to the land itself and to natural phenomena that reflect the ways in which land evolves and transforms over time; rivers, mountains, and caves are widely viewed as having cosmological significance, the sources and locations of spiritual energy and, in this community of displaced refugees, the promise of protection and safety when outside forces threaten the community. San Jose’s geographic proximity to the cave systems of

Cancuen and Candelaria, long a focus of archaeological interest in ancient religion in

Guatemala, is a source of pride to most of my informants, both castellano and Q’eqchi’,

Christian and otherwise.

Informants, at times, expressed to me that they felt there is some discrimination in the community between the religious groups: many Q’eqchi’ feel that their Maya costumbre is looked down upon by the castellanos, and many evangelicals described the Catholics as not respecting their own beliefs. And, truthfully, my interviews substantiate some of those beliefs, although I am not sure that disbelieving, or even disparaging, comments are actually translated into discriminatory actions against

8I say extrasensory because, on many occasions, I spoke with informants about the nature of existence, God, the supernatural, etcetera, and when I referred to ghosts, spirits, sorcery, and the like as “supernatural,” I was reminded that these things are absolutely natural, tied fundamentally to the land, and have existed in the area long before the Maya, just like their Christian God. “Would you call Diós supernatural, Brian?” The fact that these things exist in the world, even if they are not always visible to everyone, means that they are natural.

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members of the community on account of their religious beliefs. Neither, though, can I disprove this assertion. One thing I do know, however, is that important religious holidays, like Christmas and Easter, and important local “holidays” like the beginning of planting and, particularly, the beginning of harvest, are events in which the entire community seems to participate and celebrate in a most unified fashion.

The Catholic Church, and the Franciscan sisters, also represents an important central role for the dissemination of information and news to the community. A loud- speaker address system located in the Sisters’ house is used to make announcements, particularly for meetings of the village’s Asamblea or to announce visits from government officials or medical practitioners. Many times a week, “Atención! Atención!”, rings out, followed by relevant news, and then repeated one or two more times.

Although announcements may be made to spread the word that a specific person or group of people is needed at the Church, school, or town center, they are more often made to announce the news of an upcoming meeting about issues relevant to the community. Meeting occur for a wide variety of reasons, but almost never begin on time;

I often passed by large groups of people waiting around in the town center with little knowledge of what the meeting was about or when it was to begin. These meetings, announced several hours in advance so that word will travel across the sectors and into the milpas, could be a related to the primary village council, any one of the several community committees, or outsiders representing electoral campaigns or the State’s social programs.

The Issue of Landholding in San Jose

However, the most crowded meetings during my stay in San Jose related to the land tenure process. The legal security of residents’ land holdings, and the costs

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necessary for doing so, was the most pressing concern to residents during the course of my fieldwork. When the refugees settled in San Jose El Tesoro, each family was provided with two parcelas (land plots): one for their home within the village center, and one in the surrounding farmland. The domestic plots measure roughly 20 x 40 meters, while each farm measures ten manzanas9, slightly larger than 17 acres. Over time, though, the farm lots have diminished in size. The most common reason is related simply to the traditions of Guatemalan land inheritance in the countryside, where grown children, typically male, are provided with land upon marriage and the beginning of their own families. In San Jose, the formal boundaries of the village prevent the accumulation of new lands and the extension of a family’s property. This is a growing concern for many of my informants. Young men and women have children early in life, often before they are out of their teenage years; although the age of first childbirth is likely increasing in the present, some of my informants who were just teenagers when they arrived in

1991 are already grandparents, and one man I interviewed is a great-grandparent at the tender age of 65.

A significant consequence of diminishing land is that farmers are forced to overwork their soils in order to provide the sustenance required for the families’ nutritional needs as well as whatever additional income can be earned to pay for costs related to education, medicine, clothing, household supplies, taxes, and property titles.

9The term “manzana” is familiar to Spanish speakers as the word for “apple,” but it is also a unit of land measurement throughout Latin America. The precise conversions vary depending on the country; in some, a manzana is roughly equivalent to a hectare (10,000 square meters; 2.47 acres), but in Guatemala a manzana measures 7.056 square meters, approximately 1.74 acres (United Nations 1966).

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Most families try to get two harvest seasons out of their land over the course of a calendar year. Smaller land plots mean that farmers are in many cases foregoing the slash-and-burn tradition of leaving fallow sections of the parcela for, at minimum, a single harvest season before replanting seeds. Thus, the soils are both overworked and prevented from receiving the organic nutrients that provide stronger crops. Many farmers facing this situation put an additional tax on that soil, and their financial savings, by turning to chemical fertilizer, a short-term fix with dire long-term effects if used incorrectly. Consequently, many farmers in the village are stuck in an unending cycle where increasingly overworked soils lead to increasingly poorer harvests.

In part due to repeated poor harvests and in part due to overwhelming debt, perhaps from a medical emergency or the expense of land titles, some families have taken the desperate action of selling small portions of their land, usually in increments of half or full manzana. In most cases, they are able to sell, and on rare occasions rent, these parcels of land to other members of the community. More often, though, they are sold to outsiders, a pattern of land redistribution that has increased throughout

Guatemala in the post-war era. Between 1993 and 1998, nearly 10,000 people were returned to Guatemala in 25 communities across some 120,000 acres10; still other communities were constructed with internally displaced refugees. In general, where communities were located on less fertile or less desirable lands, families were typically given larger tracts than those families located to higher quality soils.

10Source: Latin American Network Information Center: lanic.utexas.edu/project/hemisphereinitiatives/promise.htm

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A MINUGUA report (2000, 59) notes that the unequal land distribution problem was not addressed in the immediate post-Accords era, despite the mandates of the

Accords: less than 1% of farmowners owned 75% of available farm land—and usually the high quality soils—but 96% of actual producers were concentrated on just 20% of the land. In the refugee communities which were granted land following the completion of the peace accords, an estimated 46% no longer own their land rights. The reasons why those lands were sold are likely quite varied, though undoubtedly related to endemic poverty, but the beneficiaries are commonly the State-supported international agro-economy and natural resource companies whose operations have expanded in the post-war era.

Throughout Alta Verapaz, agriculture companies have purchased large blocks of land to produce non-traditional crops for international export, including flowering ornamentals, baby vegetables, sugar cane, and increasingly African rubber trees. The expansion of cattle ranching and timber companies put an additional stress on land tenure in the areas around San Jose El Tesoro, in addition to ongoing mineral extraction projects. The highways from San Jose to Raxruha, Chisec, or Sayaxche are lined with rows of rubber trees and oil pipelines, astride large swaths of cleared fertile land dotted with grazing cattle, all of which are constant visual reminders of my informants’ tenuous grasp on their property holdings. The State’s institutional support for the expansion of these activities is viewed by many of my informants as an implicit sign that criminality is not the only future threat to the community’s security and integrity.

Security in the Post-War Era

As in many international airports in the modern age, the presence of armed security forces is not an uncommon sight. La Aurora International Airport in Guatemala

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City is no exception. However, once outside and on the streets of the capital, the ubiquity of armed civilian security guards, standing at storefronts, closed gates, and building doorways, might be a striking sight to many visitors. As of 2016, there are over

100 private security firms that are registered to legally operate in Guatemala, employing approximately 150,000 security guards.11 This represents a dramatic increase in the number of guards employed by such firms since a 2010 law regulating the training and certification of these private firms, which requires registration with the Ministry of

Interior’s Private Security Services Office. A 2014 report cited by InsightCrime12 notes that 99% of these private security firms have failed to comply with the regulatory conditions of the law and, thus, are operating illegally. This is an important, if little enforced, issue in Guatemala, where private security guards are frequently better paid, if perhaps less well trained, than police officers. They also outnumber the police four to one: over the last decade, Guatemala’s National Civil Police [Policía Nacional Civil

(PNC)] has counted between 25,000 and 30,000 officers to service the entire country, roughly one officer for every 530 Guatemalan citizens, most of whom operate in the capital and department centers.

The proliferation of private security forces does not reflect just a response to high rates of crime in Guatemala but also the comparative dearth of police in the country, in numbers, resources, and infrastructure more broadly. Analyses of the contemporary security situation in Guatemala consistently cite the miniscule police presence,

11Source: BBC News: www.bbc.com/news/business-36834477

12Source: InsightCrime: www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/just-one-percent-of-guatemala-private-security- guards-operate-legally

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especially in rural areas, the poor training of officers, and the low salaries that officers earn as contributory factors to increased rates of criminality in the post-war era. The

PNC’s limited budget is clearly a problem for an institution whose sole mandate is the investigation of crime and the protection of citizens victimized by that crime, but the

PNC’s resource deficits are also critical for understanding institutional corruption in public security. Over the course of my fieldwork, news stories frequently emerged that implicated PNC officers in a wide-range of crimes, from irresponsible use of force to broader participation in criminal conspiracies related to extortion, fraud, kidnapping, narcotrafficking, and extrajudicial killings, a pattern that has continued from the end of the war into the present.13

In early 2011, the Spanish newspaper El Pais published a series of stories, based upon leaked diplomatic cables and correspondences, about the staggering degree to which corruption is embedded in the branches of the government, including law enforcement agencies, and the broad infiltration of organized crime into State institutions. Many of the stories focused on the concerns of Carlos Castresana, the U.N.

Assistant Secretary General overseeing CICIG, who felt that both CICIG and the

Guatemalan government lacked the capacity to adequately prosecute, much less

13Many domestic and international reports describe the broad scope of these crimes, which typically implicate low-ranking officers but also have resulted in the arrests of detectives and even the highest- ranking officers of the PNC and other national law enforcement agencies. The PNC itself has an Office of Professional Responsibility whose mandate includes the investigation of citizen reports of officer malfeasance and accusations of criminal behavior; the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other international analyses also produce annual reports that include descriptions of police involvement in criminal activities.

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reform, the corruption plaguing State institutions. These leaks, however, expressed nothing new about the problems of embedded institutional criminality.

During my first summer in Guatemala, the director of the PNC was arrested on corruption charges, accused of running his own drug trafficking ring whose modus operandi was stealing the product and profits of traffickers and then redistributing the drugs. The various enforcement agencies responsible for anti-trafficking investigations have been implicated repeatedly in criminal conspiracies. In 2005, the head of the national anti-trafficking agency, his deputy, and several officers were arrested in a joint

Guatemalan-United States investigation of cocaine smuggling into the United States. In

2010, the same agency was again implicated in trafficking activities when five of its agents were assassinated during a supposed investigation at an industrial park in

Amatitlan; however, the investigation of these murders soon revealed that the agents were actually in the process of stealing and absconding with hundreds of kilos of cocaine and a huge cache of weapons that included landmines, heavy-caliber machine guns, and hundreds of grenades. Furthermore, their assassins turned out to be members of the PNC’s own anti-trafficking division, with their own trafficking operation.

The resulting investigation uncovered a hierarchical criminal network that ultimately brought down the national police chief, the director of the national antinarcotics division, and the director of the PNC’s port authority in Puerto Barrios, Izabal.

The influence of dirty money extends to the judicial branch, which has long been recognized by international observers for its low prosecution rate, for inexplicable acquittals and high rates of dismissals, and, not coincidentally, endemic corruption.

News reports frequently describe new revelations of bribery at all levels of the judiciary,

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but particularly in lower courts where low salaries and lack of State resources create a context that makes corruption more likely. Weak juridical institutions, and the proliferation of questionable monies into them, drive and reinforce a climate of impunity in which crime is able to thrive.

Before moving to my fieldsite, on one of my last nights in Coban, the city center of Alta Verapaz, I joined a friend to eat at a fast food chicken chain, Pollo Campero, after seeing a movie at the mall. Amongst the crowd of patrons sat a table of three national police officers and another table with four army soldiers, hardly an uncommon sight in Coban. However, standing in line in front of us was a man, I guessed in his late

50s or early 60s, with ostentatious Western-style cowboy clothes: decorated boots, polished with shiny metal tips, a fine leather cowboy hat, and one of the biggest and most garish belt buckles that I have ever seen, attached to a bright white belt emblazoned with the words “Confianza en Dios” (Confidence in God). He also wore a second larger belt, slung loosely around his hips, from which was attached a large and conspicuous semi-automatic handgun that my friend and I later speculated, with the help of the internet, was a closed-bolt Uzi pistol. To be clear, this kind of weapon is not allowed in Guatemala. To be clear, this man and this weapon were obvious to everyone in the room, including the police and military. To be clear, this man had no fear that anyone would say anything to him about this gun. My friend asserted that he was obviously a narco boss of some kind, and I had little reason to dispute that assessment.

Shortly after returning home to the United States, diplomatic cables from the U.S.

Embassy in Guatemala were leaked on the internet, with American officials describing how areas of Guatemala were now under the near-complete control of drug cartels. In

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December 2010, President Colom ordered a state of siege in Alta Verapaz, a rare invocation that allowed him to unilaterally and temporarily increase the number of police in the department, which at the time numbered only 343 officers14, but also to enlist the

Guatemalan military into domestic operations against the gangs and cartels. The state of siege only lasted three months, but the escalation of the army’s presence in Alta

Verapaz was already clear, obvious, and well-known long before Colom’s executive decree. Their patrol units sat at the entrances and exits of the major towns along the national highways leading into and out of Coban and leading into and out of the Peten region. Over the course of my fieldwork, their presence in nearby Raxruha also increased, and both standard patrol units and Special Forces units became a more common site. On one occasion I even saw a group of Americans that, in my non-expert opinion, were clearly members of the DEA, FBI, U.S. military, or one of the intelligence agencies, all of whom were reported to be operating in anti-drug operations in the region; the boots and haircuts always give them away.

And this makes sense, the towns of Chisec, Raxruha, and Sayaxche, and the crossroads to my fieldsite, all sit along one of the most traveled drug trafficking routes in

Central America. There was then, and now, an ongoing war between the Mexican Zetas and Sinaloan cartels, a battle for geographic control that sometimes erupted in grotesque displays of cruelty, including decapitations and disembowelments, and shocking acts of mass murder. When one of Guatemala’s powerful drug kingpins was

14Source: Insight Crime: www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/guatemala-declares-state-of-siege-in-alta- verapaz

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murdered in 2008, an act rumored to have been the work of the Zetas, a rash of retributive murders followed; a few years later, at a coconut farm in Peten owned by his brother, a group of men reported to be the Zetas tortured and killed 27 farm workers over the course of two days in one of the worst massacres since the civil war. It was not uncommon to hear small planes flying low over the village, headed north into Peten, without lights under the cover of night. Everyone said they were drug runners, which might be true given that clandestine airfields in the remote jungle and flat farmlands of

Peten have been a major focus of anti-trafficking operations in Guatemala for the last decade. Closer to the village, there are prominent families, and properties, in the area that my informants seem to understand are either narco bosses or at least affiliated with trafficking operations, although I had little reason and even less desire to verify those rumors for myself.

Yet these are not the kinds of criminals that people at my fieldsite seem to be most concerned. Certainly, they recognize the scourge of drug violence in contemporary

Guatemala, and they lament the reputation that the country now has as a result of cartel-related violence. Instead, they are more concerned with the encroachment of street gangs into neighboring towns and villages, and they fear that the petty criminality of assaults, robberies, and theft will escalate into more systematic, organized, and violent networks of criminal enterprise. And there is reason to believe that is already happening.

The news media often reported on the problem of gang-affiliated extortion rings and protection rackets in the larger urban areas, particularly impacting the bus

“companies,” but robberies of buses on the routes in the areas near San Jose also

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increased over the course of my fieldwork, and several residents expressed to me growing fears about traveling outside of the community. On several occasions, gang graffiti appeared on the bridges entering San Jose; they were cleaned, but then graffiti appeared on structures within the village, too. Some residents with whom I spoke dismissed the vandalism as the work of bored teenagers trying to disrupt the village in a foolish pretension of gang affiliation; many others felt the appearance of this graffiti represented an existential crisis for the community, and meetings were called to discuss what actions were necessary to protect the village from the danger associated with these gangs. Shortly after a giant tag for the 18th Street gang appeared across the front of the clinic, a member of the village council broke down in tears in conversation with me as he wondered whether it was the work of a neighboring village or if the community’s own young men were responsible, and whether San Jose needed to establish a committee for patrolling the community’s borders at night.

Much has been written in recent scholarly research on Guatemala about how, in the years since the ratification of the Peace Accords, some of the same forms of authoritarian violence used by the State against rural and indigenous populations during the war have been incorporated by vulnerable communities as a method of justice via collective vigilantism (Fernandez Garcia 2004; Giron 2007; Godoy 2002; Handy 2004).

Perhaps an argument can be made that the legacy of war-era violence is the root of thispost-war violence, but I a case might also be made that this vigilantism is a simply a desperate attempt to enact security in contexts where the State, and its juridical institutions, are viewed as absent, inept, or dismissive of the security needs in those communities. Perhaps these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive.

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News stories and academic researchers tend to focus on vigilante killings— linchamientos (lynchings)15—in periurban and rural communities, in which supposed, alleged, or perceived delinquents and more hardened criminals are rounded up by the citizenry, and sometimes by community committees that exist solely for that purpose, and then tried, prosecuted, and sometimes executed at the hands of the community. In news reporting of these events, a common theme in interviews with community members and other bystanders is a frustration with the police, and/or local judges, and their inability, for whatever reason, to effectively adjudicate crimes.

I came to better understand this frustration shortly after my arrival in San Jose El

Tesoro. One of the first “meetings” I attended there occurred in the dark one night in the hours following dinner. I knew that something unusual was going on when I happened upon a particularly large crowd collecting in the village center, which was not normal for the time of day. Looking out to the hills of the village’s northern sector, flashlight beams danced through the paths amongst the houses and trees. Residents were gathering around an empty building that often served as the site of the village’s political and community-wide meetings, but I passed through them in order to find out from the

15Reading about Guatemalan lynchings before I arrived in country, I imagined something akin to the images and media portrayals of lynchings that occurred during the eras of slavery and civil rights struggles in the United States South, where typically a person was hanged by their neck from a tree branch and left for all to see. Certainly, the lynchings that are commonly reported in Guatemala share some similarities and they are just as brutal. Typically, the supposed criminal is captured by a group of men, tied up with rope, beaten, and sometimes doused in gasoline before being set on fire. The full page accounts of lynchings that frequently appear in the more sensational populist newspapers in Guatemala usually present a series of photos in which an alleged delinquent is shown—dirty, bedraggled, and often bloodied—being led by a group of men, surrounded by crowds of onlookers watching the proceedings. The papers also commonly display pictures of delinquents who have been saved from the mob, clearly having received at least some extrajudicial punishment before being photographed in the truck bed of a national police vehicle.

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Sisters what was happening. They stood outside their house, with some of the local catechists of the village’s Catholic congregation, looking out across the street at the developing crowd. I learned that a young man had been caught in the act of crime, and that the residents were negotiating about what to do with him and his partner, who was now the subject of a search in the area around the dancing lights. “Apparently, they are thieves who have been stealing chickens,” I was told, “And now they are going to murder them. Que lastima...”

Because I was still concerned about my own safety in the village, having only arrived in the preceding weeks and still worried about the residents’ perceptions of me and my intentions so soon after my arrival, I was unsure whether I could safely join the crowd to see what would happen. The Sisters had already tasked someone with closing and locking the front gates to the compound, for fear that violence might somehow spread and perhaps even enter their compound, just a few hundred feet from the crowd.

I was told simply, “You are an adult. You can do what you want. But be careful.” So I went.

As I walked up to the edge of the crowd, now numbering at least 100 people, a mix of Q’eqchi’ and Castellano, old and young, men and women, I noticed the crowd jostling one another to look inside the building, where the captive was contained and, I was told, tied up and being interrogated. Several men stood outside the door, assuring the crowd that everything would be sorted out and to be patient. Scanning the crowd, I could see that some of the men carried machetes, even though the sky had fallen dark hours ago and there was little chance that they were now returning from the fields with their tools. I noticed some younger men, barely out of their teenagers, had

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handkerchiefs tied loosely around their necks, and I wondered if these were local fashion or perhaps, if the time came, for turning cloth into masks. A large number of older women were present, too, many more than was typical at normal community meetings and certainly more than would be found outside their homes at a late hour.

A small group of young men, many of whom I had already met and was already joining to play futbol in the late afternoons, saw me lurking in the shadows on the fringes of the group and they pulled me aside. “Wow, Brian, you really do want to be a part of this community, don’t you,” one of them joked. In hushed whispers, they continued to joke with me about how much I wanted to see a murder, and about how I might react when the supposed chicken thief was brought out to meet the mob. With a laugh, one of them noted, “That poor bitch isn’t even a thief, he was just smoking marijuana in the

[soccer] field. Probably failed to seduce some chiquita (young woman). These people are ignorant and crazy.”

I asked what he meant, wondering why he would say that. He replied simply that

“no human being should be treated like an animal, even if he steals chickens like a dog,” and especially if he is just minding his own business and not hurting anyone.

“Look, Professor, they will soon get impatient, and then they will start demanding action.”

Sure enough, as the hours wore on, as more people arrived to watch the spectacle, as several more smaller groups of people formed to the side of the larger crows of people, hushed murmurs grew louder that the community should “clean itself, once and for all.” I asked my new friends why the police were not called; bystanders who overheard my question gave a mix of responses reflecting the same themes: the

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police do nothing; the police do not care about campesinos; the police are too lazy to drive so far so late at night; the police are probably drinking anyway. Although the crowd was assured that the police had been called, and were supposedly on the way from

Chisec, a 45 minute drive, it was clear to me at this point that the police were simply not an option that people gave much weight or confidence.

My friends began mocking the whole process—“Where is the gasoline? I forgot my machete! I need something to hide my face! Isn’t that what we want?”—which did not sit well with one nearby woman who came over to scold us. She glared at me as she did so. Some of the older women soon pushed their way to the front of the crowd.

“We are a Christian village,” one of them pleaded. “We do not kill people. We must call the police. We must keep them safe until the police arrive. God is watching us.”

In the end, as the night turned into the early morning hours, the crowd eventually dissipated; no lynching occurred that night and, I heard, in the morning hours, after the police never arrived, that the suspected delinquent was transported by local truck to the police station in, first, Raxruha, and then later to Chisec, where he was brought before a judge and, it was rumored, ultimately freed without consequence. I heard in the months that followed that this person had moved to Coban, or that he had gone to Peten or

Mexico or Belize to work, or that he had moved to Izabal with a girl from the next village over to work in a factory making cinder blocks. I have no idea if any of this is true. I have no idea if this person was a thief, a pot smoker, or anything else. I do not even know if he was a member of the village, though I was told he was not. I know only that everyone else said that he was a delincuente (delinquent), a threat to the peace, safety, and unity of the community.

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I hesitate to include this story in the dissertation, at the risk of potentially portraying a community that was so kind and generous to me, that was generally peaceful and safe, that was protective of me when real danger threatened, as a village filled with people inherently prone to violence and even murder. The community is nothing like that, and I know the residents of San Jose to be a gentle and caring people who genuinely believe that love and compassion will always defeat fear, hate, and violence. Yet this event, like the attempted and successful lynchings that appear in news reports from elsewhere in Guatemala, does reflect the problematic intersections of criminality, an unresponsive or ineffective justice system, and a lack of recourse. More important, though, the story also reinforces the consequences of a broader general distrust and lack of confidence in the State and the unfortunate understanding that the mandates of the Peace Accords are unlikely to be realized.

Whose Family Progresses?

Over and over again, the restrictions of poverty, and particularly lack of income and financial savings, created a context in which residents of San Jose El Tesoro literally were forced to make decisions that were a matter of life and death, and this was never more evident than when people were forced to choose paying for expensive healthcare or saving the money for land payments and necessary supplies for fieldwork, like seeds, fertilizer, or other tools. The vast majority of occasions in which I was asked for money related to these concerns, so I was not surprised to hear from informants that the election of Alvaro Colom was viewed with tentative hope that he might follow through on his campaign’s rhetoric for social welfare in agrarian communities.

Shortly after the 2007 election, the Coloms founded the Council for Social

Cohesion, overseen by the First Lady, and a wide range of far-reaching social

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programs, including: Bolsa Solidarias (Food Bags) and Comedores Solidarias (Shared

Dining Rooms), both of which provided food relief to the poor; Escuelas Abiertas (Open

Schools), an education program to open hundreds of schools on the weekends to activities and classes that might deter juvenile delinquency and increase employment opportunities; Programa del Alfabetizacion (Literacy Program), to fight high rates of illiteracy around the country; and, perhaps the most far-reaching and ambitious program, Mi Familia Progresa (My Family Progresses), a Conditional Cash Transfer

(CCT) program that provisioned government subsidies to poor families in support of alleviating the financial costs of education and healthcare. The Mi Familia Progresa

(MIFAPRO) program also required the most substantial allocation of funding; in the fiscal year before I arrived (2008-2009), over one billion quetzales (approximately USD

$135 million) were invested into cash transfers for over 900,000 families throughout

Guatemala, covering approximately 2.5 million children between the ages of 0-15 years.16

However, families were required to satisfy certain conditions in order to receive monthly payments from MIFAPRO. First, to even become part of the program, families had to establish that they did, in fact, live within the parameters of poverty identified by the program; this “proof” included not only an establishment of regular income (or lack of it), but also a survey of household belongings to verify if individual homes did (or did not) have certain “big ticket” items, like televisions, large appliances, or automobiles.

Families also had to verify the number of children supported by each home, as well as

16 Source: http://mifamiliaprogresa.gob.gt/joomla/

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document that the children are enrolled in school and receive State health care visits. If these conditions are not met, then the transfers would end.

The social welfare programs established by Colom are widely viewed by my informants as beneficial to those who receive subsidies. However, informants also recognized that the lack of central organization, necessary infrastructure, validation procedures, and personnel leaves the entire program open to corruption, from the top levels of government to the most remote agrarian communities. During my fieldwork, meetings with municipal officials about MIFAPRO generated great interest, and attendance, because of the economic support it brought to families in San Jose but also because of the strong feelings engendered by many residents who felt that the program, the distribution of its resources, and the representatives responsible for overseeing the program in the community were ineffective and perhaps even corrupt. These concerns were hardly unique to the residents at my fieldsite, and MIFAPRO’s critics justifiably called attention to the fault lines within the program’s distribution network that could lead to financial malfeasance.

My understanding from residents, and confirmed in the accounts of other researchers who have examined MIFAPRO (e.g., Dotson 2014; Gaia 2010), is that the incorporation of rural communities into the program began with a community survey carried out by each municipality, which then (presumably) transferred its findings to the

State. Formally, the survey began in the offices of the First Lady and the administrators in the Technical Committee of MIFAPRO, but the National Institute of Statistics was responsible for carrying out the census collection in each community. The survey in San

Jose El Tesoro, I was told, lasted no more than a few days, although some claimed it

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occurred over one afternoon. Many residents described that they never even knew about the survey, or what was required of them; others said they were not home when the survey occurred, and others said they were but no one visited. Two of my Q’eqchi’ informants claimed that a Q’eqchi’ community designate was to accompany any homes where Spanish is not the primary language but that this too did not occur, and thus the family was left wondering what was the process, what were their survey process, and what was required of them going forward.

One of the concerns of MIFAPRO critics in government was that surveyors would be prone to corruption—not government employees but municipal residents hired locally to carry out the survey, with little training and no effective mechanisms of oversight or transparency. Given that context, critics to the initial survey process were justified in their fears or even expectation of potential corruption. I am not willing to state outright that criminal fraud occurred during the survey in San Jose, but I did see some glaring problems with the way the program was enacted during my fieldwork. One of the common complaints I heard from residents is that the survey evaluated household belongings as a measure of relative poverty, and many described how the presence of an old television was grounds for being rejected from the program; yet several families in the community, including several who owned not just televisions but refrigerators, businesses, and even automobiles, nevertheless received monthly disbursements from

MIFAPRO. Similarly, the survey was to account for the number of school-aged children living in each house, but many informants described to me how their own house was under-reported because children were working or playing, and many suggested that other houses claimed more children than lived there.

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Furthermore, the program was to regularly reevaluate each home, as a mechanism for ensuring that the situation of each house did not change substantially from the initial survey. Yet I am not aware that this ever happened; in fact, there was little recourse for appealing any problems, mistakes, or apparent administrative errors relating to participation in the program or, more important, with the disbursements themselves. On at least two occasions, money was not delivered, which created a panic in the community when municipal officials did not provide information about what was going on or if and when the money would even be received.

The problem of lack of engagement with, and understanding of, State and municipal officials was one of the most important reasons why there was so much confusion around the land tenure process, which was by far the most pressing concern of residents in San Jose during my fieldwork. Few residents, including probably most of all myself, completely understood the processes or what was expected of them, and many informants expressed their uncertainty to me as well as their fears that perhaps they were being exploited. That feeling was not an irrational paranoia but an altogether rational assessment based on the individual histories of San Jose’s residents.

Obviously, their collective experience of displacement during the civil war, despite the uniqueness of their individual stories of flight, is a unifying shared experience that underlies much of the fears about the community’s security. However, older residents also remember the difficulties with the State’s program officials and contractors in the earliest years of the village’s settlement. The agreements that brought residents to

Yalpemech also involved the planning, organization, and mapping of both house and farm plots for the entire community. Informants’ descriptions of that time depict a

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disorganized and rather chaotic process that left many residents feeling powerless to even ask questions much less appeal any contradictory information or perceived injustices. Informants told me that they knew the officials and contractors were corrupt when they demanded food from residents despite having already been paid per diem from the government, so they were only right to expect that they were getting tricked or exploited on something as important and expensive as land.

Twenty years later, during the course of my fieldwork, the land tenure process was still continuing but in the last stages. The final steps included a flurry of activity: municipal officials verifying who owned which lands, engineering surveys and maps, signing (and receiving) a variety of official documents from State and municipal representatives. The process for each step, and their associated costs, were not well understood by many residents. Although a variety of meetings were held in the community by officials, and then passed along to each sector by its respective council leaders, informants often complained to me that they were unclear about what was expected of them at each step. Some residents, perhaps, were not paying attention.

Perhaps others simply missed meetings, having not heard about the gatherings or too busy at work, or maybe the details were slightly changed passing from person to person. On at least two occasions, the officials who came to San Jose did not speak

Q’eqchi’ or bring a translator, which could always be the source of confusion. The problem of illiteracy in the community was a particularly distressing concern during the stages that required document verification and residents’ signature confirmations.

The fear of not having the money necessary in this final stage drove many residents to make decisions out of desperation. Some of my informants had sold, or

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were considering the sale, of parts of their farmland. Others were foregoing their own nutritional needs by limiting the amount of food consumed, leaving more of their harvest for market. Many dispensed with medicine or healthcare. The desperation felt by some members of the community turned to false hope when a few of the wealthier members of the village took an active role in the spread of an investment scheme that combined a

Ponzi-like pyramidal structure with the religious devotion of the community. Like similar frauds, participants were asked to invest their money, and expected to recruit other investors, with the promise that the return would be substantial, and progressively larger, sums of money in the future; the key to this particular scheme was the incorporation of Maximón, or San Simón, a Maya deity of folk legend. Based on the stories told to me, Maximón is a complicated and somewhat mysterious figure, a bit of a trickster, neither benevolent nor malevolent, requiring the sacrifice of money, food, cigarettes, and a vigilant devotion to maintain his favor. If those sacrifices are made, and Maximón’s will appeased, then the devoted will be blessed and their desires granted. The tragic genius of this fraud, thus, was that the success (or inevitable failure) of the investment was tied to the participants’ own success (or inevitable failure) to pray enough or sacrifice enough. Many residents were taken in by this scheme, despite the condemnation of the Church, which only exacerbated their already dire economic fortunes. For one of my informants, the combined effect of Maximón investment, payments for land tenure, and ongoing problems with MIFAPRO enrollment and payment disbursements were evident when a life-threatening health emergency developed in his home.

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Shortly after returning from a brief getaway trip to Belize, I discovered that the daughter of a key informant was deathly ill. I immediately went to the house, where I found a crowd of people gathered outside the house, a typical sight whenever a sudden medical emergency struck a household in the community. I asked the first person whose face I recognized, a neighbor of the family, about the current status of the little girl. “She is not eating. She is not drinking. She may not last through the night.” I mingled amongst the group for some time, conversing in hushed tones, until the girl’s father came outside and invited me in the house. The front room, which normally served as both a sitting room and bedroom for members of the family, featured on the far wall a makeshift shrine, a small homemade table draped in colorful Q’eqchi’ textile, upon which sat a few small candles of varying height and several large candles whose glass containers depicted Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Amongst the candles were a picture of the girl, a picture of the girl with her siblings and parents, a few of the girl’s toys and trinkets, a plastic cup containing a bundle of flowers, and two tamales wrapped and tied in palm leaves on a wooden plate.

My friend motioned me to sit on one of the beds, a wood frame around which strong cords are tied into a criss-cross matrix that will support the combined weight of the bed’s thin mattress and, perhaps, multiple people. He offered me a cup of cacao, which I accepted, and then began to describe what was happening to the girl. His daughter, indeed, had stopped eating, complaining of stomach pains, and had been unable to hold down fluids. She was completely sapped of energy and could not even sit up; she was running a bad fever, and she had not had a bowel movement in at least several days. From the bed where I sat, I could see that women were gathered in the

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next room, though I could not see the girl myself. I asked if I might take a look at her myself, a request that I probably did not have the right to make, particularly since I have no real medical training, but I was quite fond of the girl and wanted to get a look at her.

She was barely conscious, and the color and any apparent energy had indeed vanquished from her body. I checked her forehead and chest, which made clear she was running a dangerous fever, and gently pulled back her eyelids to see her eyes were rolled back. Her mother, who was holding the girl in her arms, was terrified; I gently placed my hand on hers, and then joined the women in saying the Lord’s Prayer.

I excused myself to speak with the girl’s father, and I asked him about the medical care she was, or was not, receiving. He told me that one of the community health workers was regularly checking in on his daughter, and that she had received some sort of liquid medicine to help her with her stomach pain when she was stricken and then later some fluids by intravenous injection. I asked him what he thought was happening, what might have caused her condition. He said he first thought it was

“parasites” but now had no idea, noting only that she was at the mercy of God’s will. I suggested that she needed a medical doctor and, thus, needed to be taken out of the village. He responded that this would not be possible, for a variety of reasons. First, he and his wife did not trust the hospitals because too many people have gone there and never come back. Second, even if she were to go there, the combined costs of the trip, especially if by ambulance, and hospital care would destroy his family, leaving him completely penniless and unable to pay for the land tenure fees. He told me he would have to sell his land and maybe his house. I returned to my own house to collect money and my identification documents, intent on telling my friend that I would cover the costs

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associated with her treatment and transportation, and that I would accompany him and his wife to make sure that they are not exploited.

One of my neighbors stopped me on the road back to the girl’s house, asking what I was up to. I explained my intentions, but was advised it was not my place to interfere, or to force the family into a situation that they did not want. I listened patiently for ten minutes, before continuing on my way. When I returned to the house, I found the community health worker and the girl’s father standing in the front room, deep in conversation. The worker had called an ambulance while I was away, telling the father that this was necessary because there was nothing more that could be done and that the community will figure out how to pay for the costs. About an hour later, I was sitting in the small garden on the other side of the house with the health worker, the girl’s father, his best friend, his brother, and his wife’s brother, drinking cacao and smoking cigarettes. I told the health worker and the father, in secret, that I would help cover the costs and to not let that be a consideration going forward. The ambulance had not yet arrived.

A wail arose from the house, becoming a chorus of wails, and we all rushed inside. The women were crying and holding one another, and the girl’s mother, still holding her daughter, was lightly smacking her face and shaking her, but the girl had passed her last breath. The health worker immediately took the girl from her mother and laid her on the hard ground and the two of us began cardiopulmonary resuscitation in a feeble attempt to bring her back. After several minutes, maybe five minutes but it felt a lot longer, the health worker whispered, “Give her back to her mother.” The mourning

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that erupted the moment he did so notified the crowd outside and any neighbors or passersby that the girl had died.

The same financial concerns that drove decisions about the girl’s healthcare also shaped decisions about her funeral. There was little question about whether a coffin would be purchased—that did not happen—but there was some discussion about how the girl would be interred. The village’s cemetery is easily identified by the gray concrete boxes sitting atop a small hill overlooking the road into San Jose. The concrete is not an aesthetic choice but a rather a practical consideration for the area’s climate and shifting topography; however, the materials, though not as expensive as a hospital stay, are nevertheless high for many poor families. Many of the community’s deceased are buried rather than interred, but in this case the community did provide materials for building the girl a tomb. Her coffin, however, was constructed out of pieces of wood and tree branches bound together with string and palm leaves.

After the requisite three days of mourning, and an additional day for the concrete tomb to be completed due to inclement weather, a priest arrived at the church for a special funeral mass. The girl’s coffin sat atop a table in the front of the church, which was more crowded than a typical Sunday service. I had to step outside midway through the service, because the stifling heat and the smell of decomposition were overwhelming and I thought I might vomit. After the service, her family members carried her coffin out of the Church, leading a procession that traveled from the village to the cemetery. As they walked down the aisle, bodily fluids dripped from her makeshift coffin, causing one of the pallbearers to slip and one of the girl’s arms to break through the coffin, leading many of the attendees, including myself, to gasp aloud.

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Following the interment ceremony, on the walk back to the village, I talked with a friend about what had occurred in the church, and I expressed how sad I felt for the family to have gone through the experience. My friend told me it was lamentable, yes, but a normal part of the cycle of life. I suggested that perhaps I could have purchased a proper coffin had I known what was going to happen, but he told me, “This is just how things are done.” He also said that it was a waste of my money, when what they really needed was to use money for purchasing of food or seeds, or for paying the land taxes and title fees. The coffin, he said, would have been nice and might have prevented some of the sorrow experienced by the family, but the one-time purchase was a frivolous and irresponsible one for most of the residents.

My fieldnotes about the service, the family, and the girl’s death are tinged with feelings of anger, frustration, and sadness, about the shoddy coffiin, certainly, but more so about the context of the girl’s death. My writing from that night then turns to a discussion about the ways in which the support provided by State social program have benefitted residents of San Jose, but also how the administration of those programs may represent a kind of structural violence that fails many people in the community. The security of the village, and in many communities like my fieldsite, is dependent upon far more than just secure borders, a reliable police force, or faith in the judiciary to prosecute crimes against Guatemalans. In places like San Jose El Tesoro, domestic security may be shaped more strongly by the State’s ineffective efforts to improve the plight of the poor, rural campesino.

Conclusion

My informants were clear that positive change most assuredly has occurred throughout Guatemala since the completion of the Peace Accords in 1996. Greater

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opportunities for participation in the political process and increased access to government programs and the rights of equal citizenship have led to substantive improvements for poor, rural, and indigenous Guatemalans. Political participation is growing and access to the State’s education, healthcare, and social programs have increased. Since the war ended, average income has risen steadily, education and literacy rates are higher, non-traditional agricultural export enterprises provide more labor options, and indigenous populations enjoy, little by little, greater access to political power as a result of multicultural and indigenous rights movements.

The progress is perhaps best exemplified by a speech given by the Secretary

General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, on March 16, 2011, wherein he pledged

USD $10 million to Guatemala from the UN Peacekeeping Fund, commending the country’s peacekeeping efforts and its commitment to enacting the 1996 Peace

Accords. However, while the committed UN funds were said to assist in accounting for ongoing human rights issues and in strengthening the juridical infrastructure, in the midst of writing a dissertation manuscript that is in large part about the long-term effects of Guatemala’s failure to enact those accords, Ban Ki-Moon’s speech created in me a fog of cognitive dissonance, for even a cursory glance of post-war Guatemalan history illustrates that there has been little, if any obvious, commitment to enacting the mandates of the peace agreements.

From the initial drafting of the peace agreements, and into the present, the country has largely failed to implement or even address the most important reforms outlined and mandated by the formal Accords. The inability, or unwillingness, of the nation’s government to recognize or formally legislate the various recommendations of

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the peace accords, the international economic and human rights communities, or the reconciliation reports has left much of the population in Guatemala on the outside looking in, continuing to struggle to overcome societal conditions that limit the majority’s participation in both the political and economic spheres that the peace agreements were meant to reform.

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CHAPTER 6 SEMISTRUCTURED INTERVIEWS AND NARRATIVES OF SUFFERING

This chapter describes the first phase of ethnographic data collection for this research project: the elicitation, analysis, and interpretation of informant narratives in

San Jose El Tesoro. The chapter is organized into four broad sections. In the first section, I describe the development of the semistructured interview protocol. The questions I ultimately included in the final draft of the protocol covered a range of topics—from the story of the civil war, to tales of displacement, dispossession, and repatriation, to descriptions of daily life in contemporary rural Guatemala. The initial framework of my interview protocol was based on a review of previous ethnographic case studies from war-ravaged communities around the globe, with special attention given to displaced refugees, but I build primarily from the wealth of ethnographic materials from Guatemala documenting the civil war and the post-Peace Accords era.

In the chapter's second section, I describe the details of data collection during this phase of research, including the logic of sampling and informant selection, informed consent, and the administration of the interview protocol.

In the chapter's third section, I turn to the data analyses I used to explore the semistructured interviews. I present a brief theoretical and methodological background on the systematic analysis of interview transcripts, and I describe how text analysis codes were used to identify common themes across informants' narratives.

Finally, in the last section, I describe the themes that, collectively, help me to present my own narrative of Guatemalan life through the stories of the residents at my fieldsite, San Jose El Tesoro.

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Thinking about the Semistructured Interview Protocol

My analysis of informants’ narratives served three primary goals. The first goal was simply to learn about the life experiences of informants, the history of my fieldsite—

San Jose El Tesoro—and residents’ views about life in post-conflict Guatemala. The second goal was relatively straightforward: the identification of specific life experiences and problems commonly cited as the sources of distress by my informants. This data, described in more detail in the next chapter, assisted my test of researchers’ assertions that post-conflict stressors may be viewed by people in recovering communities as factors more consequential for suffering than the experiences of the past. Thus, analyses in pursuit of this goal simply required the notation of those sources of distress that I learned about from participant-observation, casual conversations with residents, and specific prompts from the semistructured interview protocol.

The third goal, and the focus of this chapter, was more complicated: to describe some of the ways in which the war era continues to resonate in the post-conflict era.

Although I did not begin to create the formal protocol until I had been living in the village for several months, the conceptual development of the protocol began before I arrived in Guatemala, if only in a skeletal form. I knew that I needed to ask informants about a wide-range of topics, across a long period of time. These topics included: the decades- long civil war; the experiences of refugee displacement, flight, and resettlement; the early history of San Jose El Tesoro; the routines of daily life in the community; and the ongoing problems that cause residents distress in contemporary Guatemala.

My questions relating to the first of these topics—the Guatemalan civil war and the refugee experience—developed primarily from my broad literature review of ethnographic research in context of ongoing war and violence. One unfortunate

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consequence of ongoing global conflict during the last fifty years is that war and violence have received significant attention in anthropological literature. This research ranges from contributions to theorizations of violence (Balandier 1986; Das 2007;

Hinton 2002; Riches 1986; Schmidt and Schröder 2001), ethnographic studies of warzones (e.g., Daniel 1996; Kinzer 2007; Nordstrom 1997; Thiranagama 2011; Todd

2010) as well as war-displaced refugee communities (e.g., Allan 2013; Ballinger 2003;

Malkki 1995; Mertus et al. 1997; Ong 2003; Peteet 2009). The Guatemalan civil war itself has been the subject of significant ethnographic research (e.g., Carmack 1992;

Falla 1994; Stoll 1993, 2008; Wilkinson 2004; Zur 1998), and I was particularly influenced by ethnographies of Guatemalan refugee communities (Burns 1993; Manz

1988; North and Simmons 2000; Taylor 1998; Vlach 1992).

Because the Guatemalan civil war is so well-documented, ethnographic research set in post-conflict communities was particularly important to the development of my understanding of ethnographic context in Guatemala during the intervening years before my fieldwork began. A number of edited volumes describe the routines and struggles of life in post-war Guatemala (Little and Smith 2009; McAllister and Nelson 2013; O’Neill and Thomas 2011; Sieder 1999), and anthropological ethnographies continue to contribute to this literature with descriptions of impacted communities (Burrell 2013;

Carlsen 2011; Manz 2004; Stølen 2007). The work of Linda Green (1994, 1999) deserves particular mention because her scholarship was critical to the early development of this project. Collectively, this research contributes to a larger body of ethnographic literature about the reconstruction of community and nation in post-conflict

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Latin America, which was the location of many instances of late-20th century State violence (e.g., Babb 2001; DeLugan 2005; Gonzalez 2011; Nash 2001; Silber 2004).

Qualitative research by medical anthropologists working in post-conflict settings also provided insights into the kinds of problems I might need to consider in my interview protocol. Medical anthropologists have been at the forefront of contemporary research exploring the consequences of violence, war, and displacement throughout the world. Their work has commonly incorporated narrative approaches to examine communal well-being who face the consequences of political violence (Mattingly,

Lawlor, and Jacobs-Huey 2002; Pitcher 1998; Weine 2006), refugee displacement and exile (Becker, Beyene, and Ken 2000; Coker 2004; Miller et al. 2002; Rechtman 2000), and development in the post-war era (Abramowitz 2005, 2010; Babb 2001; Padilla

2008).

In Guatemala, much of the narrative research published about the civil war era is presented in the form of witness testimonios (testimonials) about the war era (Afflitto and Jesilow 2007; Burgos 1999; Menchu 1984; Montejo 1999; ODHAG 1998;

Zimmerman 1991). Anthropological research in the post-war era includes narrative methods for exploring the long-term impacts of conflict on war survivors (Green 1999;

Zur 1998), refugee women (Foxen 2000) and children (Miller 1996), and recovering communities (Benson 2004; Hutcheson 2009; Millar 2005; Ruano et al. 2011). Taken together, this broad research provided a strong foundation from which I could begin exploring my research topics in informal conversations and begin creating the formal semistructured interview protocol.

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Data Collection

Like most ethnographic work, the semistructured interview protocol I developed for this phase of research started from a base of social theory and previous research but evolved over the course of my fieldwork. As my research progressed, I increasingly relied upon my own ethnographic observations in San Jose, informal conversations, and unstructured interviews to identify important subjects related to the war-era past and the post-conflict present. The final interview protocol covered three broad topics relating to the histories of San Jose’s residents during the civil war:

 the civil war, including questions related to life in Guatemala during the war, experiences with the army or guerrilla forces, the nature of violence, and informants’ beliefs about the cause(s) of the civil war;

 the refugee experience, including questions about the context of displacement, refugee flight, and the conditions of life in the communities where informants resettled; and,

 the early history of San Jose El Tesoro, including questions about the process of resettlement, problems in the community at its founding, and interactions with the State while the war continued.

The protocol also addressed topics about life in contemporary Guatemala relating to:

 the community’s engagement with State institutions, including healthcare, social welfare programs, and security and juridical institutions, as well as questions about political-economic conditions in Guatemala and the problems of institutional corruption and criminality;

 the sociocultural context of San Jose, including questions about the social life of the village, cultural differences between Castellano and Q’eqchi’, the importance of religion to the community, and the problems of crime, delinquency, and justice; and,

 the domestic sphere, including questions about education, work, and health, but also including questions about the types of problems that most impact families living in San Jose.

These six categories served as the focal points of my initial data collection and incipient data analysis, beginning with the newspapers I carried up to my hotel room on

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my first night in Guatemala. However, during my stay in Coban for intensive language study, reading the newspapers each day, I came to realize the importance of current events related to the land, environment, natural resources, and the impact of government actions aimed at improving both indigenous agrarian production and international resource exports. In retrospect, these topics obviously should have been an additional primary focus of my current events research before I arrived in country.

Consequently, I added a seventh line of questions:

 environmental security, covering topics related to food, water, and land insecurity.

Sampling

Through a combination of luck, fortuitous timing, and persistence, most of the ethnographic data collection that contributed to the development of the semistructured interview protocol was purely opportunistic—I essentially pestered anyone who showed the slightest feigning interest in my work. However, the collection of formal semistructured interviews requires a more purposive type of sampling. These interviews were meant to collect data that might provide evidence for potential points of systematic overlap and variation between informants’ narratives, so my sample in this stage was designed to maximize heterogeneity in informants’ life experiences. I operated under the assumption that most of the variation in informants’ responses to my interview protocol would result from three primary attributes: sex, age, and refugee status.1 The sample

1Measures of educational attainment, income, or some other aspect of socioeconomic status are typically included in this kind of research. After several months in the village, though, I decided that my pre-field assumptions about sampling were justified: demographic variables related to education and income would not explain much variation between individuals because the majority of people in San Jose (1) have obtained roughly the same level of basic education and (2) are, for the most part, experiencing the same level of poverty, lack of regular income, and access to subsistence resources. In an attempt to find a balance between the competing factors of time, finances, and feasibility, I precluded these

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distribution, as shown in Table 6-1, was systematically drawn to maximize heterogeneity across those attributes.

Table 6-1. Sample distribution for semistructured interviews Internally-Displaced Refugees Externally-Displaced Refugees Male Female Male Female Age 18-30 4 4 4 4 Age 31-50 4 4 4 4 Age 51+ 4 4 4 4

The ways in which sex might result in variation are relatively straightforward, but age and refugee status require more explanation. Because a principal concern of research in this stage was an exploration of the ways in which memories of the civil war continue to resonate in the present, the sample design was structured to account for (1) those people who were adults during the worst years of the war, (2) those people who grew of age and were children during the war, and (3) those people who did not remember or experience the war but who were born or came of age in the closing years of the war after the settlement of San Jose El Tesoro. Consequently, my sample included age groupings of 18-30 years old, 31-50 years old, and 51 years or older.

Because roughly half of the village residents are castellanos who arrived from the El

Tesoro refugee camp and roughly half are Q’eqchi’ who were internally displaced from other Guatemalan communities, I used refugee status as a kind of proxy variable that accounted for both self-ascribed ethnic identity and the two different kinds of broad

socioeconomic variables from consideration when choosing demographic variables to organize my sample. However, I do believe that there are varying levels of poverty in the community, and that the disparities between the poorest and richest members of the village are likely to be a source of additional variation in the content of their interviews. Given more time, this is a variable that I hope to explore again in the future.

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refugee displacement experience. In sum, I interviewed 48 people with the semistructured interview protocol.

Informed Consent

In all cases, I obtained verbal informed consent, which was critical in this context for several reasons: (1) many informants at my fieldsite are illiterate; (2) asking participants to sign a written consent form would likely be viewed as suspicious, inappropriate, or even dangerous; and, (3) the interviews covered many sensitive topics that may have heightened suspicion about the reasons a signed form was necessary.

All interviews were held in a comfortable location where participants felt that they could speak comfortably and in confidence (e.g., a personal residence, a workplace).

When people were invited to participate, I explained the purposes of my research, the kinds of topics I wanted to discuss, the ways in which I would use their responses to interview questions, and the strict confidentiality that I would maintain about our interview. I also explained to participants that they had the right to withdraw from the study and to refuse to answer any questions, at any time and for any reason, without repercussion.

Administering the Semistructured Interview

Because of the difficulties I experienced when broaching the civil war in earlier conversations, I started each interview by focusing instead on the conditions of rural life in the present before transitioning to questions about how life has changed since the time of La Guerra. The interviews began with questions about the informant’s typical daily routines of work and leisure, before asking broad questions about the nature of life in the village. I eased into discussion of the early history of the village, the war-time displacement of residents and how they came to settle in San Jose, and then concluded

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with conversation about the war era. Though my technique allowed for flexibility if conversation turned to stories about the war earlier in the interview, I found that this strategy allowed informants to grow accustomed to the interview process by talking about less sensitive questions relating to normal everyday activities. Informants generally found these questions easy to discuss—the kind that Spradley (1979) refers to as “grand tour questions”—and people often transitioned, unprompted, to other topics from my interview protocol because I gave them the relative freedom to speak freely. I tended to consider data collection in this phase to be a collaboration between the informant and me, such that I allowed the order of my questioning to change if the informant independently directed the conversation toward a topic of importance that I expected to address later in the interview session.

The interviews typically lasted 90-120 minutes and, though I tried my best to interview with each informant one-on-one, the interviews were typically interrupted by family members, passers-by, and the normal responsibilities of the informants’ workdays.2 The vast majority of interviews occurred in Spanish, even with members of the village for whom Spanish is not their first or most proficient tongue, but a handful of interviews took place in a combination of Spanish and Q’eqchi’, facilitated by an assistant who is fluent in both languages. After each of these interviews, I convened

2This is true, particularly, with women. There is not a single interview with a woman that does not ring out with the sounds of crying babies, children playing and shouting, or the sounds of tortillas being prepared for meals. Because most informants are always busy working and additionally have responsibilities to large families, I learned quickly that interview recordings were in some cases going to be extremely difficult to transcribe. Thus, I tried to find a balance between note-taking during the interview and being attentive to the conversation. I tried to transcribe the interviews soon after recording them, when they were still fresh in my mind.

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with my assistant to review the interview, to clarify the informant’s responses, and to discuss the assistant’s feelings about the interview and the informant’s comments.

Data Analysis

After each interview, I tried to find somewhere quiet and private where I could take notes about the setting of the interview, the people in attendance at the interview, the types of questions discussed, the informant’s answers, and my opinion about how I thought the interview had gone and what I had learned. Typically, this writing occurred in my private room, but I also enjoyed writing in my notebook while sitting at the edge of the village to look out at the beautiful landscape. These moments sitting in the grass against a tree often gave me a sense of peace after hearing upsetting, and sometimes horrifying, stories from the people I had known previously only from passing in the street or from idle casual conversation. In addition, sitting alone often led to new social invitations and research opportunities as people stopped to talk with me. Unfortunately, the analysis of informant’s interviews required me to spend more time indoors in front of my computer screen.

Preparing the Data

Analysis of semistructured interviews began with the transfer to my fieldwork computer of all data relevant from each interview, including interview recordings, handwritten notes, and any photos taken. All of these digital files were entered into a file logbook (Bernard 2011, 296-297). Next, I transcribed the interviews, entering the text directly into a text analysis software package called MAXQDA.3 Though there are a

3 www.maxqda.com

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number of software applications commonly used in anthropological qualitative research

(e.g., ATLAS.ti, NVivo), I found MAXQDA to be sufficiently versatile for the management, organization, and preliminary analyses of my various fieldwork documents.

These documents included verbatim text from relevant stories from newspapers and internet sources (when I was able to access the internet), my daily fieldnotes, notes from and about individual interviews, transcripts of each interview’s audio recording, and archival documents about the village. I tagged each interview transcript with the demographic information (i.e., age, sex, refugee status) associated with the informant who gave the interview. MAXQDA served as the central digital repository and organizational tool for the variety of ethnographic data I accumulated during the course of my fieldwork, but the true value of the software package is its capacity as a tool for the analysis of interview transcripts and other supplemental textual materials.

Developing Codes and Identifying Themes

I suspect that expert practitioners might claim text analysis to be an art form, requiring extensive practice and the knowledge that comes from repeated trial and error across many projects; if so, I am not ashamed to admit that my own skills progressed from color-by-numbers to, at best, still life sketches in graphite. Wutich, Ryan, and

Bernard (2015) provide a useful historical review of the different traditions of text analysis that anthropologists might draw upon to explore informant narratives, and a number of instructional guides describe the general process of qualitative text analysis

(e.g., Gibbs 2007; Huberman and Miles 2002; Flick 2014; Richards and Morse 2007).

These various guides may incorporate different terms for similar concepts or analytical procedures, but they all make the critical point that a researcher’s methodological

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choices are dependent upon the kind of research questions that the texts are meant to provide answers.

My methods of analysis in this stage were driven by the specific goals I outlined above. The first goal—to learn about the life experiences of informants and the story of

San Jose El Tesoro—did not require a formal method of analysis, as the conversations I had with residents of the community provided much of the ethnographic data that informs my view of agrarian life in post-conflict Guatemala. The identification of specific problems and sources of distress in the community—my second broad goal—also did not necessarily require a formal method of qualitative analysis, but I did use the

MAXQDA software to tag excerpts from interview transcripts with an indexing marker when informants mentioned such problems.

However, a more formal and systematic method of analysis was required to pursue my third goal: an exploration of the ways in which informants connect the post- conflict present to the war-era past. Here, I was not concerned with the analysis of conversational discourse or with ethnopoetics and performance; rather, I wanted to identify themes from informants’ narratives about life in contemporary Guatemala that overlap with themes in stories about the community’s experiences during the civil war.

To facilitate my identification of themes, I developed over the course of my fieldwork an iterative process of coding text documents. Different types of codes serve different functions, and qualitative researchers often assign different terms to code types, but

Saldaña (2009, 3) broadly defines a code as any “word or short phrase that symbolically assigns a summative, salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data.”

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In addition to identifying specific community problems that might be incorporated into the final structured interview questionnaire, I intended to use codes in this stage for three additional tasks: to index types of texts, to identify informants’ demographic details, and to explore narrative themes. The first two tasks were fairly simple. Each of the document types—news reports, archival materials, fieldnotes, informal interviews, semistructured interviews, pilot tests, and structured interviews—received their own indexing codes to allow for easy searches within each document type. Once I began collecting interviews, interview transcripts were coded with a second set of indexing codes to associate each interview transcript with its informant: the informant’s secret identification4 and the demographic attributes of age, sex, and refugee status. These kinds of organizing codes are unlikely to change over the course of a project, or multiple projects. They also can be used for rudimentary types of analyses; for instance, the researcher may want to filter out all interviews save for those with female informants or some other case attribute. However, the identification of common themes from long interviews and large texts, covering multiple topics across many informants, is a more complicated iterative process that requires different types of codes at finer levels of detail.

My strategy for exploring informants’ narratives was guided by Ryan and

Bernard’s (2003, 88) review of techniques for identifying themes, which notes that themes usually arise from some combination of a priori, deductive, and inductive

4On occasion, some informants expressed concern, and most often after the interview was completed, that someone in the community might find out what they told me. I assured informants that I would not divulge either our conversation or that we even interviewed, but I also noted that their identity in my notes and in any future writing would be masked and known only to me.

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approaches. My own strategy was no different. My first pass at coding was based on an a priori approach, as I tagged sections of interview transcripts with one of the seven broad topics5 organizing the interview protocol: the civil war, the refugee experience, the early history of San Jose El Tesoro, State institutions, community context, the domestic sphere, and environmental security. This initial round of coding—what Saldaña (2009) refers to as the “First Cycle”—provides both a basic inventory of interview content and the tools for a preliminary analysis of interview content across informants.

As an inventory, these codes allowed me to isolate transcript excerpts for each topic category, even with only a handful of interviews, and to begin piecing together a larger story about San Jose’s residents. I found that writing summaries about each category, which I could amend and revise as subsequent interviews provided new information, was a profoundly useful exercise. With these codes serving as an initial skeletal framework for early analyses, I developed over time additional codes—in a sense, sub-codes within each of the broad topical categories—when new topics or themes repeatedly emerged in conversations with informants and in news reporting. For instance, sub-codes related to government institutions included politicians, army, police, and healthcare, as well as more abstract codes related to social programs and infrastructure.

My next cycle of coding identified any situation or experience described by informants that I might classify as a problem or a source of distress, ranging from torture and other forms of extreme violence to more mundane problems like a headache or

5 Richards (2009) calls these “topic” codes while Saldaña (2009) calls them “descriptive” codes.

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weather conditions. I consider this line of codes to be a deductive approach; I examined the different types of problems associated with each topic category, the problems that occurred across topic categories, and the problems that overlapped with one another.

Over the course of analysis, some of these codes were expanded and others were narrowed. For instance, a broad category of “corruption” was refined to include related sub-codes like “bribes,” “embezzlement,” “fraud,” and “impunity.” Similarly, “violence” was broadened with sub-codes to differentiate political and non-political violence, each of which had their own sub-codes. By contrast, codes related to “land tenure,” “land appropriation,” “property rights,” etc., were later grouped into a broader category of

“land ownership.”

One of the most difficult aspects of the coding process for me, though, was the development of “analytical codes” (Richards 2009, 96). These analytical codes are where the ethnographer begins to identify themes related to the research questions, formulating incipient hypotheses about relationships between interview topics and between informants. This type of coding is more of an inductive approach, and requires a constant reexamination of the transcripts, with multiple combinations of different code sorts. Many of the analytical codes that evolved over the course of my analyses have changed as I have developed new ideas about the stories told to me and as I have started article manuscripts about different aspects of my research.

In the following section, I attempt to distill the 48 semistructured interviews into my own broad narrative about the story of San Jose El Tesoro, the problems my informants have faced and continue to face, and the common themes linking the post- conflict present and the war-era past. A handful of themes, and common turns of

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phrase, appeared often in conversations with my informants, suggesting similar understandings about the nature of violence during the civil war, the history of the community, and the most important factors impacting the prosperity and security of its residents.

Discussion of Narratives

I believe that the collective stories of San Jose’s residents reflect a larger story about Guatemalan campesinos’ historical relationship with the State. However, constructing that narrative out of my informants’ stories was difficult for me, and I struggled for a long time with the best form to present their voices. First, unlike much of the ethnographic work from Guatemala that I have read, San Jose El Tesoro did not exist until the final years of the war. Many of the residents knew each other in the El

Tesoro camp, and smaller groups were familiar with one another in their respective communities before resettlement in San Jose, but the current residents did not, for the most part, experience the war era together as a collective group. They originate from different communities in different areas of the country, from diverse sociocultural and regional backgrounds, and their experiences with displacement and resettlement are varied.

At times, I also manufactured competing self-imposed roadblocks that didn't help me to make sense of the interview data: a nagging careerist pressure to situate my work within the tremendous range of ethnographic literature that influenced my own work, but also a slightly less selfish pressure related to the sense of responsibility and debt that I feel I owe to the community of San Jose El Tesoro. Though many residents may not have understood why I lived there for so long, or what my work entailed and what my intentions might be, many others embraced me as a member of the community, as a

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friend, and even as an honorary family member. I came to care deeply about the people of San Jose, and many of its residents shared with me intimate stories of violence, fear, and death, as well as their hopes and desires for their children’s future. I often worried, and still do, that I cannot do justice to the task of giving voice to a community of people who often feel as though their voices are not heard.

I found a direction forward in a phone call with a friend from my fieldsite, who reminded me of advice he once gave to me when I expressed to him similar doubts during my fieldwork: “Everyone knows what happened during the war. The story of San

Jose is like the story of many communities, but we need for people to see what is happening to us now.” I overcame my writer’s block by heeding my friend’s advice, to focus on informants’ stories about the village in the present. Looking backward into the past, I found, made the process of narrative analysis an easier one.

Uncertainty about an Unwanted War

During the civil war, the Guatemalan government enacted a wide range of legislative and military actions, in both urban and rural environments, as a reaction to what the state described as a growing guerrilla insurgent movement dangerous to national stability. The government used its legislative authority to undermine rural development at the expense of indigenous communities, enacting a scorched-earth policy of military intervention throughout the country. Voices of political dissent and populist organization were systematically removed, and anyone suspected or accused of aiding, abetting, or sympathizing against the State was in danger of being killed or disappeared under the auspices of stopping the spread of communism; in many rural areas, entire communities were razed and wide swaths of viable lands were destroyed.

The bloodiest years of the war in the countryside—an era common referred to in

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academic literature as La Violencia or La Situacion—created a refugee crisis that displaced millions.

The story of the Guatemalan civil war is well-documented, and writers and researchers, far more experienced and eloquent than me, have described the heartbreaking stories of Guatemalans impacted by the violence and social upheaval created in the wake of violence. My thinking about the violence of the war era was helped by simply focusing on the broad human toll of the civil war, as outlined by the

ODHAG (1999) and official CEH (1998) reports.

The violence described in the broad findings of these two reports is staggering.

However, the totals they report are likely dramatically low. The mandates for the government’s commission left little time and few resources available for an investigation. The report from the Catholic Church of Guatemala, although compiled over a slightly longer period of time, was also faced with resource deficits that likely resulted in under-reporting of murders and disappearances. I suspect, as well, based on discussions with older residents at my fieldsite, both the castellano refugees from

Honduras and the internally-displaced Q’ekchi’ members of the village, that rates were likely under-reported for two additional reasons.

First, people justifiably felt insecure or simply scared about reporting harassment, assaults, and acts of violence. Pedro, who was a teenager in 1979, described a roadside assault by a soldier when he took too long to pull his identification papers from his bag:

Pedro: That guy, he had no reason to do that. He just wanted to hurt someone and I had the bad luck to be there.

Brian: Did you tell anyone about it?

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Pedro: Of course! My family, my friends. My mother knew immediately because I had a big mark on my face. [Motions a line across his right cheek] Obviously, something happened to me.

Brian: No, I mean did you report the attack to anyone? Like some type of official?

Pedro: An official? Who was there to tell? His commander? [Laughs] No, there was no one to tell. The Church, maybe. But what could they do? The last thing you want to do is bring more attention to yourself, be a cause of problems. Right?

This sense of having had nowhere to turn to report crimes, or problems in general, is a common theme amongst the refugees who were repatriated to Guatemala from Honduras. Gabriela, 18 years old when she arrived in 1991, described how uncertainty about the conditions in Guatemala—fears of military violence, discrimination, reprisals with impunity—was one of the main reasons that the group considered not returning. When they did, five years before the war ended, there was much doubt that the assurances of safety and accountability given to them by the government, the Catholic Church, and the United Nations were sincere.

Before we left the camp, they told us that we would be safe, that there was no reason to worry. I had much fear, and those of us who lived the war, they were afraid. Very nervous. I remember the trip, you know, and we passed the military, the soldiers standing in trucks with their guns. They looked at us, like they were angry, and there were people who shouted at us, too. I suppose they knew that we were returnees. It was good to be out of the camp, for sure, to return to Guatemala. I was only a little girl when we left. But the seniors were very nervous, so I had no trust that the government will keep us safe if something happens. – Joanna, 28 years old.

Many informants identified a second source of uncertainty that might have contributed to under-reported totals in the two reconciliation reports: the source of threats or violence was typically not visible and the authors not perfectly clear. ODHAG

(1999, 153) reports that threats made against individuals and families, particularly in

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response to accusations of insurgent sympathizing, were often delivered anonymously or under the name of paramilitary units known by the community to be operating in the region.

This theme of uncertainty about what was happening just outside of their community is one that cuts across the demographic categories that structure the study sample, even amongst those who were too young to experience or remember the civil war. Melinda, a 22 year old Q’eqchi’ woman, whose family moved to Chisec when the war pushed into their remote community west of Coban, wondered about how difficult that uncertainty must have been:

In those days, there were many rumors, and people did not know the truth about what was happening. The army was around, for sure. Coban was near to their community. The military said there were bands of guerrillas, too, but I am not certain [my family] ever saw them. But I know that every time the patrols came around, everyone would get nervous. There was a lot of tension during this time. My grandmother said that there was a lot of tension, anxiety, that [the army] could say, “There are guerrillas here,” but maybe there were none.

In many cases, even if they did not experience the kinds of large-scale offensives against communities that were common in the Ixil Triangle, the ugly violence of the war often made its presence known on the outskirts of the community. Much of the killing witnessed by people was against individuals whose bodies were left to find but whose death left no discernible motivation or authorship. Ball, Kobrak, and Spirer (1999, 71) note that a common feature of violence on selected individuals was the practice of

“overkill,” in which additional dignities were perpetrated in order to augment the impact of the murder on the community. This practice often incorporated clear signs of physical abuse and torture, including the burning and mutilation of a corpse, decapitation, and lynching. But many of my informants described how murders in the community often

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simply appeared to be the result of robbery rather than military action, which just increased the uncertainty that people had about what was happening around their communities.

We went a long time, years, without any problems. I mean to say about the war. No problems in relation to the war. The army arrived occasionally, but more like visitors than occupiers. I know that was not the case in other parts of Guatemala. But for us? Never problems. But....one day, there was a dead guy on the path to the village. Nobody knew him. He was a stranger. I think they killed him with a machete attack? I’m not sure. But someone reported it. I assume a patroller or maybe a soldier on the road to Chisec. Some officers from the army arrived really fast, and they called a meeting. They said, “This person is a guerrilla! And he is found in your community!” Pshh...we don’t know this person, no one recognizes this person, but if you say he is a guerrilla then we are going to say he is a guerrilla. But listen to me...some time later—six months maybe, less than a year for certain—another man gets murdered, at the same place on the road, and also a machete attack. But...listen...this man is from our community! This man we know. The officers come again, and they say, “This man is a guerrilla.” He was no guerrilla, but they said he is so I suppose he is. This is when I understood that Guatemala had serious psychological problems. – Marco, 52 years old.

Another man, Jonathan, who was only 11 years old in 1980, told me a story about how the people knew something bad was coming to their community. They knew that guerrilla units were operating in the area, the military was a fairly regular presence, and the village council wanted nothing to do with either of them. His community had organized a patrol unit of their own, made up of civilians, to keep an eye on the outskirts of the village, particularly along the three main paths into the community. They had seen helicopters, they had heard rumors about people in neighboring villages going missing after dark, and they knew that community organizing, even when about something innocuous, could be perceived negatively.

These men...maybe ten...men and boys. Each night they would go out. There was a rotation so a different group would go out each night. My father, my two grandfathers, my older brother, some of my cousins, they all did that. I was too young, so I was the security for my mother and my

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sisters. [Laughs] It was not for security, truly. They were watching for activity, so the community would know if there were forces there. Then, a member of the committee was killed one night. He was assaulted, and the murderer cut his throat. After that, each patrol required two men. Later, some time later, two more patrollers were murdered. The same cause: assaulted and murdered with a knife. At some point, I cannot remember, the comandante came, and he said he knows that the community has its own patrols, and he blamed the guerrillas. Who knows. I remember my family talked about leaving Guatemala for Honduras after that, because my brothers knew some people there after working in the farms.

When residents did not know how, or why, someone in their community met their death, to be explained only by rumors, suspicions, or unsupported suppositions, people were not just uncertain about who was responsible, or if the murder was even related to the war, they were also left with uncertainty about the community’s safety and with distrust of their neighbors. Wickham-Crowley (1990) describes this kind of activity as a more subtle, though no less damaging, form of community destruction. However, even if those murders could be attributed to the army, or for that matter the guerrillas, these anonymous acts reinforced the undermining of community trust that was part of the

State’s strategy in the countryside.

The murder or disappearance of community members, and the distrust and confusion born of uncertainty that followed these violent acts, disrupted social organization but also usurped local forms of morality, governance, and traditional justice

(ODHAG 1999, 42). The combined effect was a loss of social solidarity and the breakdown of the political organization and autonomy that long characterized campesino communities (Watanabe and Fischer 2004). The comments of Sandra, age

63, are tinged with a sense of incredulity that often appeared in informants' war-era stories about people suspected of subversion due to their prominent presence as a community organizer:

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There was a teacher from our community in Chiquimula. [The teacher] went to one of the universities with the help of the Church to learn about agriculture science, farming techniques, this type of engineering. When he returned, he was a teacher in the school but he was the president of our agroeconomy committee, too. He taught us how to protect the soil better, so it would last longer. And it helped! Really smart man, and he was from the community. One of us. But the comandante, he had suspicions about the professor. I think he thought [the teacher] to be insurgent or communist or...I don’t know. Because he was teaching people about their own land? He did more for us than they did! And, of course, [he] left because in those days you did not want the comandante to ask questions about you. At least, I think he left.

Stefan, a 58 year old Q’eqchi’ informant, described that this undermining of community cohesion was also an aim of the guerrillas, whose stated goals included broad changes to the State’s interactions with indigenous communities:

Representatives of the guerrillas came to our junta directiva (town council) because they hoped to call the people to a meeting. They said, “We are fighting for the campesinos, for the rights of the campesinos!” They said they want to protect our farms, to give us more opportunities. Like a political campaign, if you want my opinion. [Laughs] They wanted our votes in an election. They asked, “Who in this beautiful aldea supports those goals?” Of course, this sounds good, in principle. But no one would dare raise their voice to support them. Some did speak to ask why they would put us in danger by calling a meeting like that, if they care so much about our community. They said we must trust them. Some did, maybe, but I did not. They were not our people, and they were not from Guatemala. They wanted us to go against the military, and we only cared to be apart from that war. For them to ask us for support... they made us a part of the war. After they arrived, there was distrust in the community.

Historical records of the State's war-era campaigns show that this undermining of trust was, in fact, a feature of its strategy for disrupting community cohesion, and my informants often described the negative impact of gossip and innuendo throughout the war era. This deterioration of trust was only exacerbated as the numbers of displaced individuals and communities increased, throwing people into an even larger and more treacherous climate of uncertainty, a feeling that the first residents of San Jose also experienced in the early years of the village's settlement.

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“Where Was There To Go?”: Land, Displacement, and Repatriation

My informants who are old enough to remember leaving their homes and communities because of the war told me a wide variety of stories about the context of their refugee flight. Fear and threats of violence drove individuals, families, community groups, and sometimes entire communities to flee, sometimes across international borders but many more simply moved to communities and areas located farther from the immediate war-zones. Though the circumstances of my informants' displacement might be different, the sentiments they shared with me about leaving their communities are remarkably similar, and frequently call attention to feelings of being exploited by the

Guatemalan government and institutions of the State.

A common view of residents at my fieldsite is that the histories of the war diminish the true reasons for the violence they experienced. While the older residents are more explicit in making that point, the sentiment is also expressed by younger residents who did not experience the war directly, as exemplified by a 20 year old man named Elmer, who told me that he has always been taught that the war was about the freedom to control their land.

The books about the war, the history of the war, they describe the violence and it was a bad time. My grandparents can tell you about those years. And it was truly bad. The official reports after the war? It was genocide, no one doubts that. Except the people who are on trial. But all of those histories talk about a war against communism, a country against communists. But I think most of the people here, and most Guatemalans, they will tell you that this is only an excuse. Like when I tell my mother I was late from Raxruha because the driver was drinking, when the truth is that I was late because I was talking to a woman and missed the bus with the evangelical driver.

When I asked him to explain, Elmer continued:

In reality, the reason was the land but the fight against communism was the explanation for the violence. Look, everyone in San Jose is here now

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because their parents, their grandparents, their families, all of them they had to leave from somewhere else, right? Why? Because of the war. But the people here, they were not in the war. They did not want the war. No one wanted the war. But they did want families, and they did want to work for their communities, make some money, make a nicer home, maybe a larger parcela. To want these things is not bad. It is the desire of everyone! A prosperity, right? The problem is that they made people to choose one side or another in an argument that the community did not have.

My Pocket Progresses: Criminality, Political Corruption, and Social Justice

Time and again, when I asked residents about the problem of crime, I was told that poverty drives street crimes and general delinquency but that corruption drives the more sensational (and enriching) crimes seen on the nightly news. Informants make clear links between elected politicians and high-ranking officials in the police, military, and judicial sectors, citing the individualistic pursuit of money from shadowy sources.

Informants also widely agree that this corruption, and the greed at its foundation, has repercussions that ripple down into the rest of society, reinforcing the structural conditions that keep impoverished people poor and widening opportunities for the criminality that they are more likely to experience as a part of daily life.

Look, the little motherfuckers around here, the delinquents who might try to rob you in Chisec or Raxruja, Sayaxche? They are little bitches. [Laughs] Only playing like they are a mara (gang). They paint graffiti on the walls and pretend they are strong. But they are not in a mara. They are lazy, and they don’t want to work, or maybe they can’t find a job. That’s it. But, yes, they are a problem, because they will take your money, or your work, and that can hurt you more than a beating. And you don’t know what [weapons] they have. Seriously. Now, with the maras in Coban? Shit. Maybe they are in a gang, I don’t know. But if the police are worthless, they become a really big problem.

However, this criminality was a prominent part of Guatemalan political posturing about security and justice. During my stay in San Jose El Tesoro, I witnessed on three occasions visits of representatives from political parties who came to speak with village residents, all of whom represented Otto Perez Molina’s long-running presidential

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aspirations. And all three times, domestic security and high rates of crime in Guatemala were the primary focus of their political pitches. Considering that everyone in the village were once displaced as a result of the war, I had figured that perhaps Molina’s hardline approaches to fighting violence (and his well-known association with the war’s countryside campaigns) might put off residents.

The people with whom I spoke about his campaign and the range of solutions available to the State revealed a conflicted view of Molina. After one campaign visit, I spoke with several men about Molina’s proposals and the security needs of the village.

Each of them recognized that Molina, as a candidate, has a complicated history driven by the war-era role he played as the head of State security.

[Molina] does not have my support. But, clearly, there is a problem in Guatemala with violence and robbers and delinquency, in general. The police should be the answer, but in Guatemala they are not. What is the answer? Maybe the army, maybe not. But there is a problem, and the rest of the world sees the violence and thinks that Guatemalans are animals. We send the military to Africa to preserve peace, but we need peace here. Molina says Guatemala needs a hard hand, but he does not say how the hand will be used. That is what I would like to know.

Another man, a Molina supporter, followed by saying that the military is already being used:

Go to Raxruja, to Chisec, to Sayaxche, they are there now. There are Kaibiles in Raxruja, you know. What are they doing there? They are not fighting delinquency. They are fighting drugs. That is important, truly, but what will they do about thieves and extortionists and bandas (groups of delinquents)? For them we need more police, honest police, and I think that he will make them better.

I asked if they had concerns about his role in the civil war.

Of course. He has been accused of crimes for many years but no one has proved them. But who is going to make the police better? If Colom does

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not, do you think his wife will? 6 The real problem is corruption. If the corruption is not fixed, nothing will change the crime on the streets. Not Colom. Not Molina. Not anyone.

This concern with corruption was on the minds of many of the people who met with Molina’s representatives. While the campaign was focused on the message of establishing a more secure and lawful domestic situation, the residents were overwhelmingly concerned with the ways in which Molina, were he to win, would change the social programs that, for the most part, were popular in the village. During one visit, a woman asked about the Mi Familia Progresa program, unhappy with problems about how state resources have been distributed in the community. I later asked her about her concerns and what she had said to the representatives:

What will you do to make sure that we receive the money that has been promised to us? We have not received it. Some have, some have not. Some receive more, others less. Where is that money? It is in the pockets of people like him, people like Molina, people like Colom. Crime is a problem in Guatemala, yes, but what crime do we have here in the community? We have some delinquents maybe, but not like in the capital. The crime we deal with is a crime of government corruption. Once the money leaves the capital, gets to Coban, gets to Chisec and Raxruja, by the time it gets here, there is nothing. And then there are those here in the community who get more than others. This is a good program, because it is for the people. But the campesinos only receive what is left at the end.

This sentiment characterized many of the residents’ perceptions about the government and, particularly, its elected representatives. When municipal officials visited the village, usually with regard to the land tenure process, dialogue invariably turned to issues related to misunderstanding and/or distrust of the motives and actions

6President Colom’s wife, Sandra Colom, was widely viewed in Guatemala to have presidential ambitions. However, there are laws in place to prevent spouses from running. When the Coloms announced they would be getting divorced, most of my informants viewed the act as simply an expedient way to get around that law.

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of the government with regard to the community. And for good reason. Indigenous

Guatemalans are well aware of the country’s history with forced relocations of rural communities, and they continue to worry about international corporations and the role they play in the continuing violation of land rights and natural resource extraction. The theme of the being exploited for natural resources runs through many of my interviews, from the war-era past to the post-conflict present.

During the war, many communities uprooted by the military were forced to move to reconstituted villages that offered less ideal environmental conditions for crops but better visibility for the military. Families that for generations had relied upon community- run or family-owned plots were forced to grow their crops on much smaller pieces of land that they had previously used, and some of my Q’eqchi’ informants described how those lands were often characterized by less fertile and productive soils. One of my informants, in his early 50s, whose community had been moved to one such military-run village, suggested that the move was not about protecting the village from guerrillas or even about keeping a suspicious eye on this people:

At first, [the army] came to us to tell us about the communists. They asked us questions. Have you seen them? Have you helped them? Given them food? Things like that. Later, they would ask us for food. Sometimes they gave us money, but usually they just took our corn and our beans. From the parcela. After a few months, they told my father and my padrino (uncle) that they needed part of our land to build a new base. After five, six months, they told us that we all had to move across the river, because we would not be safe. They had another base there, a bigger base. And we had to register our names. There were no fences, but we were not free. We did not have nice houses. And the land that they had was not as good as my father’s. The corn did not grow strong and the beans were brittle. There were no fruit trees like we had. And what happened next? They said that we had to go back to our own land, the land they took from us, to grow our corn for them. Can you believe that? They gave us seeds, we planted them in our earth, and then most of it withered, because they would not let us have too much.

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I asked Ingrid, an older Q'eqchi' woman, about the effectiveness of State social programs like Mi Familia Progresa for local families.

They help, yes, but only for some. The money goes from politician, to the governor, to the mayor, to the municipio, to the representative, and then to the coordinators of the programs here in the community. Every time money is moved, there is a little bit less. So whatever money remains, we must fight like dogs for scraps. That is how you make sure there is progress only for some but not for others. This is life here in Guatemala.

“Que Dura La Vida”: A Dog's Life at the Margins of the State

Over the course of my fieldwork, I often heard the phrase “la vida es muy dura”

(life is very hard). I heard it when there was too little rain, when supplies were needed but could not be purchased, when children were sick or dying, when domestic violence and other problems occurred in the home, when people went hungry. People consoled me with the phrase when I was homesick for my family and friends, when a relationship

I left behind in the United States dissolved during my fieldwork, and when I was assaulted and cut up in an attack outside of Chisec. After a while, particularly when I was too tired to explain to others why I looked so tired, or when I felt too overwhelmed by the stories I heard or with the research tasks still yet to finish, I often found myself also saying, “Que dura, la vida.” However, my interviews with informants highlight that the phrase most commonly appears in relation to residents' engagements with State institutions, which are not favored with confidence.

For instance, researchers in Guatemala, and elsewhere in Latin America, have described the difficulties of doing health research in indigenous communities. Often, however, that literature has framed the issues in terms of indigenous beliefs about blood. My sense is that people are less concerned with the consequences of loss of bodily fluids and more concerned with the motivations underlying that kind of medical

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evaluation. Despite an obvious need for medicine in the community, and more frequent and comprehensive attention from the health sector, and despite the common complaints of residents about a need for doctors, nurses, and health programs, many of my informants expressed a distrust of State medical institutions that stretches back into the war era.

One woman described how the government had offered trained medical doctors to evaluate the health of the village. She says they were told that the doctors were part of a campaign to increase health awareness in the countryside, but seemed to think there were ulterior motives.

They measured our temperatures, examined our ears, shined light in our mouths. You know, like a doctor. But then they asked questions about our community. ‘What is happening in the aldea? Have you seen any strangers? What happened at the last [community meeting]?’ Questions like that. And it was scary. I never visited a real doctor before, so already I had fears. But there was a soldier there, too. He had this big gun, and the doctor said to take off my clothes, in front of them. And I was just a girl. I did not want that.

I asked her if she thought, perhaps, that he was not a real doctor:

I don’t know. My mother, she was upset, and when we left she told the other women that they only want to look at nude girls and ask about the guerrillas. My father got very angry. He asked me what the doctor did and where his hands touched me. I think this must have happened with the other doctors, too, because then people, they gathered in the center [of town] and people were saying not to talk to the doctors. For the women and girls to return home.

It was not long after that the army made its presence more visible in the area, she said, with increased patrols and soldiers appearing anytime there was a community meeting. “Who knows if they were real doctors. I never met another one after that, until the nurse in the camp [El Tesoro]. She had my trust.” Other refugees who spent years in the refugee camp affectionately described how this nurse, a young Dutch woman

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affiliated with the United Nations, was a great value to the residents in El Tesoro, and that they were wary of other doctors who visited.

We did not trust the Salvadoran doctors. They came at times, but I do not believe that people trusted them. Because there were two armies: one from Salvador and one from Guatemala. And they both entered the camp. But we had confidence in her. She lived with us, ate with us. In fact, we trusted the United Nations and the missionaries. But...take caution for the others, because we did not know who they worked for.

This distrust of State representatives of health institutions continues to resonate in the post-conflict present, a reality that was dramatically introduced to me when I got into a row with my close friends and sponsor family about the mystery illness that had befallen the youngest daughter of the family, Elena. Seemingly overnight, she had grown weak, unable to drink any liquids, unable to hold down any foods, and, as her color started to turn from healthy to pallid, her eyelids grew heavier and her body more limp. Thought by no means wealthy, the family had enough resources to travel to town to visit a doctor, and even to afford the antibiotics or other medications that I was certain would clear up whatever was ailing the girl. I learned through the village grapevine that she had been visited by a resident nurse practitioner, as well as grandmother, a practicing midwife, and I knew from talking to one of the shopowners that a man trained in traditional healing and natural medicines was visiting her daily to give prepared drinks. I stopped by each day to visit, and to see how she was doing, but she had only grown worse and, as far as I could tell, there had been no visit to the doctor. During the course of my work, I often asked myself about the lines between dispassionate objective researcher, observant participant, and passionate subjective neighbor and friend, and whether any of those are even realistic for the immersed ethnographer.

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Those questions went out the window on the morning of the third day, when I stopped in and, over coffee, voiced my displeasure that she had not yet visited a medical doctor.

A few hours later, I returned from an interview to find Elena’s older brother and three cousins waiting for me outside my house. They began explaining that they needed my help to secure the funds necessary to hire a curandero from outside the village to come heal Elena. I learned at that moment that I now lived in a world of sorcery, and that curses, like the evil eye, were a regular part of San Jose's social life. My fieldnotes of this conversation and this story speak to my fascination, my incredulity and disbelieve, as well as my anger that something that could probably be cleared up in not time by a “real” doctor was now endangering the life of one of my favorite people in the village. Whatever my face said, the cousin continued, “You see, Brian, you don’t come from this world. You come from a place where this sorcery is not used.” When I told them that I do not believe in magic, I was promptly scolded that “magic is for television and making little kids laugh...it is not real.” Sorcery, however, is very real, I was informed, and medical doctors, even in Guatemala, are not trained to handle the kind of illness killing Elena. Furthermore, I was advised, “They would rather see an indigenous girl die anyway.” I did end up helping them procure the services of the curandero, and

Elena did end up recuperating in, frankly, a miraculous fashion; however, that comment forcefully opened my eyes to the reality that many residents continue to have a deep distrust, and sometimes outright fear, about the State's possible intentions in the countryside.

After State representatives arrived in the community to drop chemical treatments into residents' water tanks to kill the mosquito eggs that would give rise to malaria and

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dengue, many residents told me that they would not allow the health officials to do their work, fearing that the chemicals harbored a poison to humans rather than mosquitoes.

Wilfred, 28 years old, told me:

Chico, some people here will tell you that they are placing poison into the water, to make us sterile, so there are fewer children here. But that is just ignorance. But I understand. There are so many chemicals in the water already, and this is the only fresh clean water we can get, that which comes from the rain. You see the girls carrying water back from the river? That water is bad, bad, bad, brother. Filled with chemicals because it comes from the parcelas. When there is no rain, and the water is low? THAT will make you sick. But what can you do? If [the government] really wanted us to have good water, they would help us build a big pump to get the water from underground. People here in the community are not going to spend quetzales on that pure water you buy in Raxruha.

The sentiment that the State's engagements with the community were premised on the exploitation of the residents repeatedly arose in context with the ongoing tenure process for villagers' lands. Informants were confused about the fees required to complete the process, and many residents claimed ignorance of owing them. Whenever representatives of the State arrived, residents expressed their frustrations at the State and the contractors brought in to do the work.

For years they could have told us to prepare this money. Now they come here and say, “We need money to draw the map of your house. We need money to write the title. We need to money to sign it. We need money to make it official.” Without question they will demand more when we want additional copies of our documents. Many people in the community don’t know where that money will come from. Some are selling blocks of their land in order to buy their land! Some only give their children two tortillas and some chiles for food! Meanwhile, there are those at the borders [of the village] who wait like a snake for its meal. They would rather we die than have official documents. – Juanita, 45 years old.

The feeling of marginalization from the State, and dehumanization at its hands, is no better expressed than by informants' references to the dirty, mangy, skeletal mutts wandering the village streets. At first, I accepted these remarks as timely narrative

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flourishes—after all, the dogs are omnipresent, nothing like the dogs I have been around my whole life, and they really are a nuisance—and an easy reference to make when both the interviewer and the interviewee are literally shooing away the street pests during a conversation. However, thinking about those conversations and transcribing interviews in my tiny room at night, I realized that villagers’ comments about street dogs are just as ubiquitous, not only in reference to their status as both a social nuisance and a possible threat to house and home, but also as a way of drawing attention to their own beliefs about being viewed as second-class citizens by institutions of the State.

Some of the most vivid and upsetting experiences of my research occurred while listening to stories of the brutality brought upon members of the community during the war, which came from both castellano and Q’eqchi’ informants. In one of the most upsetting interviews during my research, a woman who as a teenager witnessed the massacre of her home village at the hands of the Guatemalan army described to me the details of her pregnant sister’s death, which she witnessed from the relative safety of the forest treeline encircling her village:

They beat her about the head and back, with large sticks and one with the back of his rifle, and then another one took his knife and cut her across the stomach. He pulled out the baby and threw it against the tree, like it was worse than a dog.

Another woman, now in her late 60s, recalled the night that her husband was kidnapped in front of her:

They tied him to a tree like a dog while they took things from the house. They always took things, you know. Food, plates, chickens. They took everything they could carry. And then they took him away. That was the last time I saw him. I heard he was tied to other men in a line, ropes around their necks, and pulled by a horse. We didn’t know what to do and my father said we had to go, that we had to leave. I didn’t want to. I had small children and I didn’t want to leave him, of course, but what else could I do? I knew what they did to him.

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The Guatemalan government and the army justifiably receive most of the blame for this kind of dehumanizing treatment—the respective reports of the government’s clarification commission and the Catholic Church make that abundantly clear—but the guerrilla forces were also capable of similar brutality. In one story I was told, during the time between the formation of the village and the end of the war, a handful of men were kidnapped by guerrillas and led into the forest hills. Several of them were civil patrollers and, thus, viewed as being not only sympathetic to the army but as de facto State spies reporting the goings-on of the repatriated refugees from Honduras. I spoke to two of those men, who described being tied to trees, beaten, and interrogated about their activities, loyalties, and sympathies.

I had a rope around my neck, tied to the tree like this. [He motions with his hand]. I tried to bite at him, like a dog, and he hit me with his rifle. My hands were free, but what could I do? I could not untie myself and I could not cut the rope. I could throw sticks at them, and stones, you know, but then they would just kick us. Hit us. They said they would kill us if we did not tell them what we knew about the army’s movements.

This loss of freedom, the sense of being without control or even free will, was expressed by many of my informants when they described the war era. A Q’eqchi’ man, who was 10 years old when his family left their home village in 1982 to escape the war zone, talked about being afraid as a child due to the cloud of uncertainty that hung over his house and his community when the war started encroaching upon his village.

There were rumors, you see. People knew. The radio talked about the military’s victories. And there was a lot of talk about the bad things happening. The violence. The death. I don’t remember much from that time but of course I knew there was a war. I don’t think I ever saw any soldiers, but I saw the helicopters at times, you could hear them too. But I just thought they were going far away. But, yes, about the war. But...then there would be strangers passing through, right? Groups of people. Families. My parents, they would argue. There were all these meetings in town. They told us, the children, to go home, to play somewhere else. Look, I was only a child, but I was smart, and we knew that something was

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happening. There is an instinct, like when a dog is surrounded, and I knew. My brothers and sisters...we knew.

Another informant, who told me his family lived in one of the villages near

Rabinal that was forced to move as a result of the Chixoy Dam project, explained to me that the mere presence of the army, not to mention the paramilitary groups that were rumored to be active in the region around communities affected by the Dam project, was enough to make a person feel caged:

They moved us to a location higher up, not close to the river like before. It was a small aldea of Q’eqchi’, but they weren’t familiar to us. Basically, the army told them, “This community will join you.” They didn’t have a choice, nor did we. The land was not as good or as plentiful, but the people were gracious and generous. A very kind community. The army, though, they were always around us. They did not let us take all of our belongings with us, and we couldn’t return to get them. So, even though this new community was not like some of the army villages from that time, essentially we had no freedom. They told us what we could do, where we could go. Like a prison, but without a cage.

The feelings about being trapped, and at the mercy of institutions outside of their control, are particularly prominent in the narratives of informants who lived for many years in the refugee camp. In all of my interviews with retornados, I was told about the difficulty of life in a cramped and highly supervised environment that was not their own.

They were behind walls and barbed wire, not permitted to leave without an approved permit. They were overseen by the Honduran military and, it seems, watched from the outside by agents of the Guatemalan military, effectively caged in behind literal and figurative barriers to freedom.

One man, who came of age in the camp, described what it was like to constantly be surrounded by people and to always wonder what was on the outside. He described that there were rules about leaving the camp, and he told anecdotal stories he had heard about other refugees who had secreted themselves from the confines of the

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camp but never returned. Although not entirely certain that those people were

“disappeared,” he remembers well that the strict warnings of a fearful and protective mother were no match for a young man’s curiosity about the fruit and fishing rumored to be found on the outside.

When they treat you like a dog, you get angry, mijo. And there was nowhere to escape. Now, as a man, I know it was dumb, and I was beaten badly when my mother found out. But it was worth it, because the limones (lemons) were so big! I only did it a few times, and truly we were scared, but ... for years, chico, there was nowhere to go to escape. Just ... people everywhere. Sometimes...you need to find some peace.

Alison, a woman who similarly grew of age in the El Tesoro camp, described a feeling of immense relief when they finally arrived in Guatemala.

I really only remember my life in the camp. We were there for a decade! My memory of leaving Guatemala is...dark. I have problems remembering. But I do remember the camp, and I remember coming to Guatemala like it happened yesterday. People were nervous, and a lot of us didn’t want to come back. But I was excited! I remember being very happy. I felt free for the first time. No more walls. No more rules...for the most part. Look, the camp...it really was a type of prison, and I felt like we were liberated.

As Alison mentioned, though, many of the other returnees did not share precisely the same overwhelming sense of freedom. One of the leaders of the retornado group remembered well what they had escaped from in the first place and, as a key figure in the return to Guatemala, he was also well aware of the potential danger they faced upon returning. I explained to him that in many of my previous interviews with returnees, informants had described a range of feelings: uncertainty, happiness, excitement, abject fear.

I was hopeful and excited, and we had worked for some years to leave the camp, whether to stay in Honduras or to return to Guatemala. Remember, the war was not over, and it was still dangerous. I knew...I knew and some others knew exactly what was happening here to retornados. Some of the other retornados—not those from our group, but from the camp—they were killed when they came back. One guy, I knew of him, he was

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butchered like an animal. Now, was this the army? Was it someone else? Was it because he was a returnee? I don’t know. But I knew it wasn’t safe for refugees here in Guatemala. We had a good group of people, a peaceful community, and I didn’t want them to be treated like animals, too, after finally getting out of that damn camp. Yes, I worried a lot... [Pauses] But it did feel good to get out of that camp.

Potential Limitations of Results

The most significant limitations of my analysis lies with the construction and administration of the semistructured interview protocol, both of which undermine strength of my claims to systematicity in future publications. First, a couple issues arise from the interview process itself. Unfortunately, the final form of the semistructured interview protocol was quite long and, for a variety of reasons, informants did not always address the entire list of questions. Sometimes, time or work constraints cut the interview short; on at least two occasions, informants were visibly uncomfortable answering some of my questions and I did not force them to do so. Similarly, I made a choice to not heed the advice of Bernard (2011, 158), who argues that semistructured interview guides should be followed in a specific order in each interview; I allowed myself a greater degree of flexibility about the types of questions I asked and when certain subjects were first broached, and I tried to allow each informant the freedom to answer my questions in whatever way that they felt comfortable. I believe now as I did in the field that (1) the comfort of informants was more important than the collection of data and (2) the primary goal of research in this stage—to explore some of the ways in which people connect the present with the past—would be better achieved by allowing informants greater control over the direction of the interview. The tradeoff, though, is that the 48 interviews transcripts from which I based my analyses do not all cover the

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same specific questions, although they all cover the seven broad topics outlined at the beginning of this chapter.

A second related potential limitation arose from my inability to understand a small handful of the interviews. Certainly, my inability to understand the Q’eqchi’ language poses an analytical problem. There were only three interviews with Q’eqchi informants who did not speak, or feel comfortable speaking, primarily in Spanish; in these interviews, I was reliant upon my assistant to translate informants’ comments for me, trusting that my initial question was translated correctly and that my assistant was translating as close to verbatim as possible. I later tasked the assistant to sit with me as

I transcribed, so I am confident that the themes and salient opinions expressed by

Q’eqchi’ respondents were accurately transcribed.

Furthermore, in several cases, the quality of the interview recording is sometimes spotty. Sections of interviews that took place outside are sometimes drowned out by ambient noise, and interviews that took place in the home are almost always interrupted in spots by the sounds of family members, television, or music. On one occasion, nearly

30 minutes had passed before I realized that my device had stopped recording. These issues were relatively minor concerns for my analysis, but they nevertheless undermined later data analyses.

Finally, my interpretations might have benefitted from combining a wider range of narrative approaches or by incorporating a more formal and systematic strategy to guide my analysis, like word counts (Ryan and Weisner 1998) or semantic network analysis (Doerfel 1998; Jang and Barnett 1994). My hope for the future is to spend more

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time with this narrative data, across various approaches, to see how my current thinking about these interview results might evolve with different types of analytic data.

Conclusion

An abundance of research about life in post-conflict settings proves that the analysis of informant narratives can enhance trauma research. The stories that people tell about their experiences in those settings can provide insights into the cultural norms and beliefs of a community, the ways in which difficult, distressing, or traumatic life experiences disrupt that community’s social world, and the unique historical and political settings within which those experiences occur. The stories told by my informants confirm much of the contemporary social theory about life in rural Guatemala, reinforce social suffering theory more broadly, and provide support to the conclusions of a growing body of public health and social epidemiology research about the limitations of clinical evaluations of stress-related health in post-conflict settings.

The interviews I carried out with residents of San Jose El Tesoro suggest that the people living there – across demographic categories of age, sex, and refugee status – do indeed talk in similar ways about the hardships they face and the distress that they feel, and in terms of a much broader suite of distressing life experiences than are conventionally evaluated by researchers following the cessation of war-time violence.

As I expected, the narratives of informants reinforce the notion that the chronic concerns related to endemic poverty, social marginalization, and unattainable resources resonate more often in the daily lives of rural Guatemalans than do the memories and experiences of the civil war. However, this finding should not in any way detract from the reality that the events and memories of the civil war continue to shape how community members interact with one another and, especially, with institutions of the State.

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The use of informant narratives as a tool to describe individual well-being after war can provide important information about how culture shapes community responses to distress, but there is also a need for anthropological research to empirically evaluate how competing narratives, and the divergent cultural models they might represent, influence the interpretation of traumatic experience, at both an individual and collective level. Kleinman and Kleinman (1997, 2) write, “Cultural representations, authorized by a moral community and its institutions, elaborate different modes of suffering. Yet, local differences – in age group, class, ethnicity, and, of course, subjectivity – as well as the penetration of global processes into local worlds make this social influence partial and complex.”

Though there seems to me much overlap in the feelings and stories described by my informants, there was also some diversity in the content of narratives that suggested differences related to age, sex, and the circumstances of war-era displacement, differences that I suspected might also reflect important, if subtle, sources of variation in individual cultural models about the sources of distress in rural Guatemala. Recent advances in social theory and ethnographic methods from cognitive anthropology offer the potential to extend the usefulness of cultural narratives as an analytical tool to test whether those local differences really do elaborate different modes of suffering. In the following chapter, I describe how I incorporated the content of informant narratives into a structured questionnaire interview protocol that would allow me to actually test the hypothesis that war-time experiences are viewed as the most severe and traumatic life experiences in post-conflict settings.

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CHAPTER 7 STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS AND CULTURAL MODELS OF SUFFERING

A primary goal of the semistructured interview phase of research was to generate discussions with informants about the wide range of life experiences that cause, and have caused, strain and suffering in the lives of the residents of San Jose El Tesoro.

Many of my informants' stories support the assertions of researchers across the medical and social sciences that the unstable political-economic and sociocultural conditions characterizing many post-conflict communities not only exacerbate traumatic experiences of violence but may themselves be distressing sources of traumatic exposure (Almedom and Summerfield 2004; Bar-On 1999; Becker 1997; Bracken 2002;

Das 2007; Farmer 2004; Fassin 2011; Good et al. 2008; Nordstrom and Robben 1994;

Robben and Suarez-Orozco 2000; Sluka 2000). This is a critically important consideration for researchers studying the long-term health consequences of exposure to violence and war.

In the final phase of ethnographic research, I continue to explore this idea by moving beyond ethnographic narratives about life in rural post-conflict Guatemala to explore how residents in one post-conflict community appraise the comparative difficulty of these stressors. I integrate a structured interview questionnaire, purposive sampling, and a variety of statistical analyses of survey data in order to empirically test whether informants really do believe that the ongoing distress resulting from post-conflict life is comparable to the acute trauma of war-related stressors.

In this second round of ethnographic interviews, my research had three goals:

 To collect ratings about the severity of distressing life experiences;

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 To identify whether respondents agree or disagree in their evaluation of those life experiences; and, if informants agree,

 To describe how informants systematically converge and diverge in their ratings.

Informants continued to contribute valuable narrative data during the course of these structured interviews, but my ethnographic focus in this stage was collecting the data necessary for identifying individual and group variation in beliefs about distress in contemporary rural Guatemala.

Domain Analysis and Cultural Consensus

My test of informants' beliefs about distress in post-conflict settings was guided by cultural modeling theory in the social sciences and the systematic ethnographic research methods of cognitive anthropology. The quantitative analysis of qualitative data has a prominent history in ethnographic research, and my analysis draws from one such paradigmatic analytic framework—cultural consensus—to analyze how informants rate the relative severity of stressors and how that knowledge is distributed across informants.

Cultural consensus developed as both a culture theory and a formal method of analysis to explain how people systematically agree or disagree about those interpretations. The theoretical basis of cultural consensus is that culture exists in the mind, not a monolithic thing existing apart from individual experience but a mental abstraction based on socially learned and shared beliefs about object relationships in the world (Bloch 2012; D’Andrade 1995b; Romney et al. 1996; Ross 2004; Shore 1999).

As a formal method of analysis, cultural consensus is a statistical technique that estimates the degree to which people share agreement about those cognitive

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relationships (Romney 1999; Romney, Batchelder, and Weller 1987; Romney, Weller, and Batchelder 1986; Weller 2007).

An illustrative example for explaining the usefulness of cultural consensus is the domain of “best college football programs in the United States.” Before each new academic year, pre-season rankings of the nation's best teams are compiled by sportswriters, analysts, and fans of college football, all of whom are guided by their own idiosyncratic methodologies that have been shaped by history, personal bias, and some version of conventional wisdom. While those “experts” may share widespread agreement about the best team, or even the top five teams, that agreement will diminish as the experts' lists expand to include the rankings for the top 10, 25, and 50 teams. If I need to know which teams are the best, I could randomly choose one expert's rankings and trust that my choice was a reliable one. But identifying the top teams is a more complicated process if I want to base my own ranks on some kind of aggregation of the experts' lists.

One strategy could be to identify the modal teams that appear the most often across all ratings systems, and then rank the teams in chronological order from most list appearances to least. I might get a better sense of rank order, though, if I average each team's respective rankings from across all of the experts' lists. I might even consider favoring those experts whose pre-season rankings in previous years were most similar to the end of season rankings. But these methods all assume that every ranking system is created equally. The reality is that some experts have a more extensive knowledge of college football than others, some give more weight to specific variables (e.g., college conference or strength of schedule), and some are just lucky. Cultural consensus

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analysis (CCA) allows us to overcome these issues by measuring the amount of aggregate agreement between the various football experts and then statistically estimating the “consensus” ranks based upon that agreement.

There are two “versions” of consensus analysis—a formal model and an informal model—that differ slightly in their respective statistical processes but which produce the same types of results. The formal model of consensus analysis was described by

Romney, Weller, and Batchelder (1986, 313) as “an attempt to make objective the criteria by which we might measure our confidence in inferring correct answers to cultural questions.” In technical terms, the formal model of CCA is a minimum residual factor analysis of the similarity between informants' categorical responses to dichotomous (yes/no, true/false), multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blank survey questions.

Patterns of agreement between informants' responses are expressed as factor eigenvalues: the first eigenvalue explains the majority of variance underlying those responses and is commonly referred to as a measure of “cultural competency.” The informal model of CCA (Romney, Batchelder, and Weller 1987) accommodates interval and rank/rate response data but produces the same statistical measure of informants' relative agreement with one another.

These quantitative methods developed as an extension of the empirical ethnographic research pursued by early cognitive scientists in anthropology—linguists and ethnoscientists—and many of the formative papers incorporating CCA address similar cognitive domains associated with the natural world, including botany, zoology, and illness (Baer et al. 2003; Boster, Johnson, and Weller 1987; Chavez 1995; Lopez et al. 1999). However, since the framework's initial formalization, the use of CCA in

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ethnographic research has expanded to explore a more diverse range of cognitive domains.

Some examples of this research include the domain analysis of ethnicity (Gravlee

2005), food choice (Groves 2012; Szurek 2011), Pentecostalism (Dengah 2013), and lifestyle and economic success (Dressler et al. 1998; McDade 2001). And health researchers have continued to use CCA for insights into how sociocultural context shapes differential understandings about the causes, symptoms, and treatments of a wide range of illnesses: AIDS (Trotter et al. 1999), asthma (Pachter et al. 2002), cancer

(Claus 2011; Luque 2013), diabetes (Weller et al. 1999), hypertension (Dressler et al.

2004; Garcia et al. 2012), and malaria (Ruebush et al. 1992; Winch et al. 1994).

Conceptualizing a Domain of Post-Conflict Stress

The identification of a research domain to be explored with CCA is not as straightforward as it might seem, and researchers must take care to precisely delineate the domain's abstract boundaries. For instance, the domain of “baseball” is an imprecise and open domain. Are we talking about the rules of play, or baseball history, or the names of professional ballclubs? If we change the domain of interest to “professional baseball teams in the United States,” our domain is better specified; however, the domain's conceptual boundaries could include knowledge about the name and host city of every team in Major League Baseball as well as knowledge about each team's mascot, active starting lineup, and minor league organizations.

Nevertheless, the hard boundaries of cognitive domains like “professional baseball teams” are easily delineated because the domain's content can be confirmed with an hour's worth of online research. But most of the cognitive models that we use to

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navigate the world have conceptual boundaries that are not so easily identified. For instance, a wealthy Wall Street banker in New York City, a blue-collar construction worker in India, and a poor Mayan farmer may agree on some core aspects of knowledge domains like “sandwich ingredients,” “wedding customs,” or “homemade remedies for the common cold,” but the finer details of the personal cognitive models associated with those domains are informed by each person's unique sociocultural context.

However, when ethnographers incorporate domain analysis into their research, they are less concerned with whether people know about all of the possible sandwich ingredients, all of the possible wedding customs, or all of the treatments for a headcold.

Instead, the focus of domain analysis is (1) the salient aspects of a domain that people actually know, and (2) the ways in which people systematically agree and disagree about that core knowledge. If informants seem to share a common understanding about some cultural domain, then we can begin thinking about the explanatory logic underlying that agreement and how that logic informs broader models of cultural life.

My development of the domain “stressors in post-conflict settings” was guided by the primary goal of this research stage: a test of whether the ongoing chronic stressors of everyday life in recovering communities are considered by informants to be as difficult as the acute traumatic stressors associated with warfare and violence. Thus, I needed to consider a wide range of potential distressing life experiences, and I constructed a survey instrument from two comparably sized lists of stressors: one characterizing the stressors of the Guatemalan civil war experience and one characterizing the stressors of rural life in the post-war era.

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Developing the Ratings Questionnaire

Developing a list of war-related stressors was relatively straightforward. Health researchers working in zones of conflict, or with communities of displaced refugees, have commonly relied upon conventional diagnostic instruments for the clinical evaluation of trauma-related mental health. Because I was unable to obtain a checklist of traumatic stressors that had been previously adapted and validated for psychometric accuracy within Guatemalan refugee communities, I contacted representatives of the

Harvard Trauma Center who provided me with a Spanish-language version of the

Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ) that has been validated for use in Peru. The adapted-HTQ checklist I received included 45 items, but not all of these were relevant to residents at my field site because they were not necessarily common types of experiences during the Guatemalan civil war. I developed my own adapted version of this questionnaire during a pilot testing stage after completing the initial draft of my full questionnaire, which I describe in the next subsection below.

The second phase of questionnaire development centered on developing a list of common problems that characterize everyday life in contemporary rural Guatemala.

However, conceptualizing which of the post-war stressors to include was less straightforward. My logic was guided by the theoretical perspectives on embodiment outlined by Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1986) and Krieger and Smith (2004), which describe how an individual’s engagements with different aspects of society intersect to shape the worldview (and bodily complaints) of people living in a political-economic and social world. Consequently, I conceived of three sub-domains to reflect types of stressors resulting from informants’ engagements with the nation-state, the community,

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and the family, and a fourth sub-domain, poverty, that cuts across each of the other three.

The questionnaire “items” populating each of these four subdomains are types of stressors that I identified through participant-observation, daily conversations, and informant narratives in the preceding stage of ethnographic interviews. The first three sub-domains roughly correspond to the broad categories that organized the semistructured interview protocol: (1) the nation-state, including beliefs about government institutions and access to political resources; (2) the community, including environmental degradation, job insecurity, and social interactions within the village; and

(3) the domestic sphere, including stressors related to home life, marital relationships, and work roles. The fourth additional sub-domain arose quite by accident but, in retrospect, should have been obvious to me.

As I noted in Chapter 6, obtaining interviews about the civil war was difficult at times, and many informants expressed some reluctance at my early requests to discuss their personal experiences during the war era. I attempted to get around the issue by asking instead what I thought to be a relatively simple and straight-forward question:

“What have been the most difficult life experiences for people living in this village?” In addition, I incorporated a freelist1 exercise with this question, thinking this might

1The collection of freelists is often used in ethnographic research as an indirect means of broaching a subject but also as a way to quickly and easily obtain a list of potential topics from which future interview questions might emerge. The activity typically begins with the researcher asking informants to list as many responses as possible to a given question about some domain of knowledge. Previous research has used a similar strategy as a starting point for eliciting informant understandings about trauma in post-war contexts. For instance, in his study of psychological trauma in Nepal after the Maoist civil war, Kohrt and Hruschka (2010) asked informants about three categories of traumatic events: “(i) the worst events that happen in people’s lives, (ii) the worst events they have heard through conversation with others, television, radio, news and other media, and (iii) other events that

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facilitate a discussion about the war without asking directly about violence, which I had found to be a difficult subject to broach.

Informants had no problem with this activity when I asked them to list the types of food people in the community prefer to eat, or the most important qualities for having a good house, or the most important items to purchase with available income. But those same informants seemed to be unable to comprehend the process when I asked what they thought were the most difficult life experiences for rural Guatemalans, no matter how many times I clarified and rephrased the question. Instead, most informants repeatedly talked in general terms about la pobreza (“poverty”), not seeming to understand what I was asking of them.

Fortuitously, in one of my last interviews before finalizing the first draft of the structured interview protocol, I met with one of the leaders of the community, a man who was in the first wave of immigration to the village from the refugee camp in Honduras.

My frustration must have been visible, because he said, “Mira (Look), you want to know the root of our problems? The root of our suffering? Poverty. Poverty is why we suffer.”

Following that interview, I added a fifth sub-domain to the structured interview questionnaire: the problems and limitations resulting from endemic poverty.

In addition to my own prior work, my early thinking about post-conflict stressors was guided by the kind of contemporary ethnographic work that frames war and other

dramatically alter a person’s life in negative ways.” Because I was interested in eliciting a wider-range of problems related to life in Guatemala than just the traumas related to war-time exposures, I fruitlessly tried a variety of freelist prompts in much the same way, asking informants about “the hardest,” “the most difficult,” “the most severe,” “the worst,” and “the most upsetting” life experiences.

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humanitarian crises within a larger consideration of State and global connections. My thinking about distress related to national institutions, before and after my fieldwork, is influenced by ethnographic accounts from Guatemala (Fischer and Benson 2006; Little

2004; Nelson 2009), Latin America (Auyero, Bourgois, and Scheper-Hughes 2015;

Robben 2007; Smith-Nonini 2010; Theidon 2013), and elsewhere (Comaroff and

Comaroff 2006; James 2010; Ochs 2011; Petryna 2013). My initial thinking about the sub-domains related to community and domestic contexts were informed by ethnographic research about post-conflict communities broadly (Chatterji and Mehta

2007; Lubkemann 2008; Moodie 2010), but with a particular concern for recent research in Guatemalan communities (Carlsen 2011; Fischer and Hendrickson 2003; Godoy

2006; Menjivar 2011; Remijnse 2002). After returning from the field, critical research by the likes of Biehl (2013), Bourdieu et al. (1999), Bourgois and Schonberg (2009),

Farmer (2005), Fassin (2011) and Scheper-Hughes (1992) helped me to think more broadly about the ways in which the consequences of poverty and economic marginalization ripple throughout society.

Finalizing the Ratings Questionnaire

Pilot testing of the structured questionnaire occurred in two stages. In the first stage, I did two rounds of pilot testing on the HTQ version of the questionnaire, with three goals in mind: (1) to verify which of the HTQ “traumatic” stressors were, or were not, experienced by members of the community, (2) to discover which distressing events should not be included on the questionnaire, and (3) to confirm that the Spanish language translation of the stressors would be understood by prospective informants.

The first round of pilot testing involved a conversation about each stressor from the

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HTQ with four key informants. Following these four interviews, I dropped some stressors (e.g., landmines) and I occasionally altered the phrasing of a stressor to better fit the local version of Spanish used by residents at my fieldsite. Once completed, I then performed a second pilot test, this time with a mixed group of eight men and women, across a wide age range, including both internally and externally displaced refugees.

This group discussion led to a few additional minor changes to the phrasing of the questionnaire “items.”

Pilot testing of the second half of the questionnaire—the post-conflict stressors— proceeded in much the same way. I interviewed separately four new key informants about stressors from each of the four post-conflict sub-domains, amending the questionnaire based on these discussions before then carrying out a second focus group pilot test with a new group of eight informants.

The final draft of the questionnaire included 43 stressors adapted from the HTQ and 60 stressors related to post-conflict life in rural Guatemala, for a total of 113 questionnaire items. I carried out one last informal pilot test of the entire structured questionnaire with my host family (and their neighbors) over a pizza dinner one stormy

Friday night after the electricity had gone out. They were a captive audience.

Data Collection

Romney, Weller, and Batchelder (1986, 317-318) describe three “ground rules” for the development and application of the ethnographic prompts to be used for collecting cultural consensus data: (1) each informant comes from a “common culture”;

(2) each informant’s answers are provided alone, independent of other informants; and,

(3) questions posed to informants are of equal difficulty and, thus, each informant can

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be presumed to have a fixed “cultural competence” over all questions. If any of these assumptions are violated, the cultural consensus model will not apply. These three basic ground rules reflect interview design concerns with, respectively, sampling strategy, interview setting, and the types of questions on the survey instrument. The third rule was a consideration during the development of the ratings questionnaire; however, the first two are concerned with aspects of the interview process itself.

Sampling

If culture is indeed something that exists in the mind, less a concrete thing than a cognitive abstraction constructed at the level of both individuals and social collectives, then the exploration of whether people share beliefs about any given cultural phenomena should take heed of Handwerker’s advice regarding purposive sampling and the “construct validity of cultures” (Handwerker 2002).

[E]veryone constitutes a cultural expert in what she or he knows, feels, and does[...]. These starting points make the question of who agrees with whom about what and to what degree bear directly on the empirical problem of identifying many possible cultures and the boundaries between one culture and another” (Handwerker 2001, 19).

Handwerker argues that ethnographers should consider that informants are likely to be similar or different in relation to how they have experienced their shared world in overlapping aspects of time and space.2

2Handwerker (2001, 19) elaborates: “[D]esign sampling frames that encompass regionally and historically situated life experiences that may influence the patterns of social interaction through which people construct culture. In ethnography, you randomly select informants only when you want to estimate the frequency with which different cultures occur in a population. Ordinarily, random selection of informants constitutes a superfluous and wasteful activity for ethnographers. In ethnography, select cultural informants for their cultural expertise. For many if not most purposes, everyone you meet will constitute a cultural expert.”

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For this reason, the purposive sampling strategy I used for identifying informants during this stage was based on the exact same rationale used during the semistructured interview phase: maximizing heterogeneity in life experiences based on sex (male and female), refugee status (internally-displaced and externally displaced refugees), and age groups (18-30 years, 31-50 years, and 51 years and older). After pilot testing of the questionnaire was complete, a second purposive sample of 38 villagers3 was asked to rate the perceived severity of each of the 113 questionnaire items. The youngest informant was 18 years old and the oldest 68 years old (mean age = 40.37 years

±15.59).

Table 7-1. Sample distribution for structured interviews Internally-Displaced Refugees Externally-Displaced Refugees Male Female Male Female Age 18-30 3 3 3 3 Age 31-50 3 4 3 3 Age 51+ 3 3 3 4

Once I was sufficiently confident that the questionnaire was understandable, if somewhat atypically long compared to the length of structured interviews usually used for consensus analysis, I created 38 unique questionnaires by randomizing the order in which stressors would be presented to individual informants. This ensured that no two informants responded to the exact same questionnaire, although everyone evaluated the same stressors with the same phrasing.

3The research proposals that I wrote to obtain project funding stipulated that I would interview 48 informants, just as I had in the semistructured interview phase. Constraints of time, money, and personal well-being prevented me from completing the last ten interviews, which I regret.

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Informed Consent

In all cases, I obtained verbal informed consent, as with interviews during the semistructured interview phase. Although informants were less likely to present narratives about people or problems in the community during this phase, I wanted each informant—many of whom I did not know well personally—to understand that I valued their contributions to my work and, especially, their right to privacy. All interviews were held in a comfortable location where participants felt that they could speak comfortably and in confidence (e.g., a personal residence, a workplace).

When informants were invited to participate, I explained the purposes of my research project (and this questionnaire, in particular), the kinds of questions I wanted to discuss, the ways in which I would use their responses to those questions, and the strict confidentiality that I would maintain about our interview. I also explained to participants that they had the right of refusal to answer any questions, or to withdraw from the study altogether, at any time and for any reason, without repercussion.

Fortunately, none of my informants withdrew their participation from this study.

Administering the Interview Questionnaire

The questionnaire itself was developed for the Spanish language, which was sufficient enough for this task, as even the informants for whom Q’eqchi’ is their first or primary language understood enough Spanish for this interview. Nevertheless, on several occasions I did bring an assistant fluent in both Q’eqchi’ and Spanish. His attendance at those interviews was mostly unnecessary for the purposes of translation, but his contribution in these cases helped to allay some confusion and occasional

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skepticism, particularly with older Q’eqchi’ informants who I did not already know personally.

Instead of requiring informants to read a long list of questions in Spanish, I chose to read the questionnaire items aloud and then asked informants to use a picture of a seven-step ladder to “rate" each item.

Figure 7-1. Ladder scale for ratings

I was vexed for some time about the precise phrasing of the ratings prompt I would use, but I finally chose a phrase I commonly heard in association with all manner of personal difficulties: “La vida es muy dura” (Life is very hard). I asked each informant,

“Using this picture of the ladder, tell me how hard it is for members of this community to have this experience,” with the lowest step being the least difficult to experience and the seventh step at the top of the ladder being the most difficult.

The interviews typically lasted between 90-120 minutes and, though I tried my best to interview each informant one-on-one, the interviews were usually interrupted by family members, passers-by, and the informants' normal daily responsibilities. For a task like this—exercises involving rating or ranking, pile sorts, paired comparisons,

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etcetera—the long length of the interview is not ideal. The task itself can become somewhat boring and tiresome in its monotony, a sentiment expressed by a few of my informants during this stage4, which could potentially lead to some informants providing less than accurate answers in order to complete the exercise more quickly. The randomization of questionnaires helps to minimize the consequences of that possibility.

At all times, I attempted to audio record interviews for later transcription and analysis. In most cases, the audio resulted in little to transcribe, but some informants tended to take the questionnaire items as a prompt to tell stories. As much as I wanted to hear these stories, and as much as I knew these conversational tangents would lead to important information about the questionnaire items, I often had to cut short the storytelling in order to ensure that the informant actually responded to each stressor before the interview came to a close. Although some informants expressed that the interview took a long time, and some were not sure they understood the point of the exercise, there were more people—mainly those with whom I had developed a friendly personal relationship—who pestered me about why they were not asked “to do the test.”5

Data Analysis, Stage One: Measuring Consensus

The analysis of questionnaire responses occurred in two stages. The first stage involved running cultural consensus analysis with the questionnaire's full suite of 113

4One of my informants said, “Really, chico? This is like a test at school. I hated school.” I laughed and told him that, fortunately for him, there are no wrong answers on this kind of “test.” I also promised not to tell his mother how he performed.

5One of my key informants who had developed into a personal friend wanted to use the length of the interview as an excuse to spend the day going fishing, “Give us the reason. Give my wife the reason.”

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stressors. My interest here was (1) to establish whether or not the sampled informants are in consensus about the relative severity of the stressors and (2) to test the hypothesis that the stressors of post-conflict daily life can be appraised as more severe than the traumatic stressors associated with warfare.

The first step for cultural consensus analysis is to process the questionnaire data so that it is amenable for running the CCA procedure in the ANTHROPAC software package. This involves transferring informant responses from each randomized questionnaire into a single text file, producing 38 vectors (informants) of 113 numbers

(stressor ratings), which is then “un-randomized” so that the response data processed by ANTHROPAC, across all informants, is ordered according to the form of the primary questionnaire. Once this step is completed, informants' responses are ready for cultural consensus analysis, which produces three important statistical outputs: (1) a statistical

“consensus” model that maximizes variation in informants' responses, (2) a list of informant “competency” scores, and (3) the model's best estimate of the aggregate consensus response for each questionnaire item.

The first analytical step is to look at the measure of agreement between informants, displayed in the form of factor eigenvalues. In practice, the researcher should look for two main statistics: a first factor eigenvalue that explains most of the variation in individual responses, and a ratio between the first and second factor

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eigenvalues that is greater than 3:1.6 The consensus eigenvalues are displayed in Table

7-2, which reveals a large amount of variance explained by the first factor (88.27%) and a high eigenvalue ratio between the first and second consensus factor loadings

(11.61:1).

Table 7-2. Consensus eigenvalues, full questionnaire Eigenvalue Cumulative % Ratio 1 21.6825 88.27 11.61 2 1.8672 95.88 1.84 3 1.0132 100.00

The second analytical step is to examine the knowledge score for each informant. These appear in a second section of the consensus results as loadings on the first factor, and can range from -1.0 to +1.0, with loadings closer to +1.0 reflecting a positive linear correlation. The initial formulations of CCA describe these loadings in terms of “competence” scores, or as measures of “cultural knowledge.” However, Weller

(2007, 347) makes clear that these knowledge scores should not be interpreted as a measure of what a person knows about the study topic; instead, they are statistical estimates of how much each respondent’s answers to particular questions compare to those of the larger group.

Thus, a higher score does not necessarily mean that the informant has more knowledge than anyone else, or that the informant understands the topic better than

6Gatewood (personal communication) argues that 3.5 is a “safer” threshold, and Bernard (personal communication) has suggested that a ratio of 3:1 should not be considered a rigid threshold (e.g., should we disregard a ratio of 2.9:1?). However, the 3:1 ratio is widely accepted as evidence that the group’s responses represent a single underlying construct.

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anyone else. Rather, a high competency score simply reflects that a particular informant’s respective responses are more widely shared within the study's sample than the responses of informants with low competency scores; that is, the responses of informants with high knowledge scores are most representative of the sample group’s diverse responses.7 Informants' knowledge scores are listed in Table 7-3 below, ranging from -0.18 to 0.94 with an average of 0.719 (SD = ±0.228).

Conventional practice holds that three principal conditions must be satisfied if we are to state with any confidence that informants share a consensus in their responses: (1) the ratio of the first factor eigenvalue to the second factor eigenvalue should be greater than

3:1; (2) the first factor eigenvalue should explain a high degree of statistical variance in the full model; and, (3) the average knowledge score of the respondents is also high.

The results described above reveal an eigenvalue ratio of nearly 12:1, just over 88% of variation explained by the first factor, and a relatively high average informant competency of 0.72. Thus, I can state with confidence that the 38 respondents in my sample are in consensus—that is, they share a high level of agreement—about the relative difficulty of the questionnaire’s 113 stressors.

When these three conditions are met, we can then turn our attention to the third important statistical output of cultural consensus analysis: the cultural “answer key.” I use quotation marks here for a couple reasons. The output is literally an answer key: a

7Perhaps the informants with high competency scores can be considered “experts” and we would be justified in identifying these people as key informants for future interviews, but we would be wise to keep in mind the broad critiques of CCA by tempering both the degree to which we label these informants as expert or novice and the degree to which we claim that high competency scores reflect understanding of a cohesive “cultural model.”

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Table 7-3. Informant “cultural competency” scores Informant Knowledge Score Informant Knowledge Score 1 0.81 20 0.70 2 0.27 21 0.92 3 -0.18 22 0.75 4 0.49 23 0.83 5 0.86 24 0.81 6 0.83 25 0.94 7 0.33 26 0.86 8 0.89 27 0.79 9 0.49 28 0.80 10 0.30 29 0.88 11 0.70 30 0.88 12 0.88 31 0.87 13 0.76 32 0.70 14 0.88 33 0.90 15 0.80 34 0.87 16 0.74 35 0.63 17 0.83 36 0.69 18 0.80 37 0.44 19 0.88 38 0.72 best estimate of the informants’ aggregated responses for each question, an average that is adjusted to give more weight to those informants with higher competency scores.

But this answer key may not (and likely will not) perfectly match the responses of any one respondent in the sample—the key is simply a statistical approximation of the consensus agreement. However, this answer key is one of the most important products of the consensus procedure.

A cursory glance at the consensus answers illustrates that the war-related stressors appear to cluster at the high end of the ratings scale in comparison to stressors in the other four post-conflict sub-domains. This should probably be expected; nevertheless, there are many post-conflict stressors that also received high ratings. This

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finding is more clearly expressed by a visual comparison of the spread in consensus ratings within each of the five constituent sub-domains, as shown in Figure 7-2 below. In this scatterplot of the consensus answer key, each column represents one of the sub- domains, with the consensus answers plotted along the Y-axis. This perspective reveals that a large number of the post-conflict stressors are rated as being more difficult to experience than many of the traumatic stressors associated with exposure to warfare.

The finding of consensus agreement here is important by itself, for the data confirms the assertions of health researchers across the medical and social sciences: people living in post-conflict settings do evaluate distress in terms of a much larger suite of life experiences than just the traumatic stressors associated with exposure to warfare. Furthermore, the consensus answer key provides empirical evidence that informants in one community recovering from war does, in fact, evaluate some of the chronic stressors of everyday life to be just as damaging as many of the acute stressors of war.

Figure 7-2. Consensus answer key, sorted by sub-domain

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However, the real benefit of CCA is not in finding whether or not there is consensus agreement between informants but in using the statistical outputs from CCA to further explore both conceptual relationships between questionnaire items and patterns of systematic variation in informants' responses. In the next stage of analysis, I incorporated additional statistical methods to analyze these basic consensus results in more detail, providing insights into the larger cultural model that underlies informants' consensus agreement.

Data Analysis, Stage Two: Intracultural Variation and Residual Agreement

In much of the published literature incorporating cultural consensus analysis, researchers stop with the identification of “consensus.” However, these initial cultural consensus results can be explored in finer detail, using a combination of statistical tests and visual representations of the primary CCA results. In this second stage of data analysis, I examined each of the questionnaire's five constituent sub-domains, focusing on two main concerns. First, I used principal component factor analysis (PCA) to explore possible themes revealed by informants’ ratings of stressors. Second, I incorporated multiple regression analysis (MRA) and a combination of statistical and visual representations of the CCA results to examine relationships between informants, exploring whether demographic variables shape patterns of systematic variation within the consensus model.

Analyzing Relationships Between Sub-Domain Items

I began my examination of the questionnaire’s constituent sub-domains by first verifying that consensus exists for each sub-domain by itself. This step was largely driven by my own curiosity, a kind of additional check of the consensus model, rather

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than by a desire to isolate and use the resulting statistical data. The statistical conditions for consensus were satisfied in each of the five sub-domains.

Returning to the answer key from the full consensus model, I next examined the highest (and lowest) rated stressors in each sub-domain, identifying the types of stressors that informants tend to rate as most difficult (and least difficult) to experience in life. During my preliminary analysis of these results, I wrote summaries of these findings for each sub-domain, a practice I found useful for hypothesizing potential links between the consensus results, informants' narratives, and my own ethnographic experience in the community.

This process included a statistical check of each sub-domain’s internal consistency using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. In technical terms, Chronbach’s alpha is a measure of inter-item correlations; it is not a test, per se, but rather an estimate of reliability that the questionnaire items are measuring the same latent variable. Put more simply, this statistic suggests a reinforcing confirmation that my ethnographically- informed judgment was not misplaced when I grouped these stressors together. If there is no correlation between the items, then alpha (α) = 0.0; conversely, as item intercorrelations increase, the alpha coefficient will also increase toward +1.0. Thus, a higher Cronbach’s alpha statistic means that more items share covariance and likely are related to the same underlying construct. Although the coefficient is far more important for tasks like scale construction, a high value nevertheless provides some useful evidence that the stressors in each sub-domain are connected by some aspect of informants’ conceptual thinking.

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However, Cronbach’s alpha is not a measure of dimensionality and does not provide data for identifying what that underlying construct might be. For this task, I turned to a statistical procedure called principal components analysis (PCA). In technical terms, PCA reduces the variance between potentially correlated variables by creating a smaller set of uncorrelated variables; independent variable data is transformed into a new coordinate matrix that projects as much variance as possible onto the first component factor, and then projects as much of the remaining variance as possible onto the second factor, and so on. The resulting statistical output, ideally, is a smaller subset of predictive variables—principal components—created from the larger suite of survey items.

In practice, this kind of analysis is often employed by social scientists as an exploratory method for thinking about the conceptual constructs underlying informants' responses. For example, imagine a survey in which candidates for foreign service positions are evaluated on the basis of individual tests related to intelligence, foreign language comprehension, and physical fitness. In this scenario, measures of physical fitness may include a doctor's medical evaluation as well as the results of individual physical tasks. A factor analysis of the collective survey results of 50 potential candidates might suggest that separate, seemingly independent, measures of physical performance—e.g., throwing distance, running speed, swimming speed, weight lifting— can be reduced into a single component factor.

Unfortunately, even though the statistics produced by PCA may suggest that those particular measures group together, the statistics alone do not explain why they group together. Instead, the researcher must interpret, from intuition or from

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ethnographic knowledge, the logic that connects those measures; to extend the example, perhaps the component grouping measures of physical performance might be called “generalized athletic ability.”

Identifying which of the survey items group together on each component factor is a fairly straightforward process. For this analysis, I used the STATA software package8, which produces a statistical table wherein the retained principal components are columns and the rows are each of the survey questions. Here, loadings in each factor column—which range from -1.0 to +1.0—explain the relative contribution of each stressor to each principal component. To interpret these factor loadings, I followed generally accepted guidelines to identify which components are most important to discuss and which questionnaire items to consider for each component. My identification of the components to consider for each sub-domain began by noting which factors had eigenvalues greater than 1.0 and which factors combined to explain 75-85% of the total cumulative variance. I supplemented this evaluation of principal components with an examination of scree plots, a visual depiction of each of the retained components’ explained variance.

Next, for each retained component, I noted all of the stressors with large factor loadings, using 0.55 as an initial cutoff.9 In those cases where a single stressor did not

8All of the statistical procedures described in this chapter were performed with STATA, a common software package similar to other programs like SPSS and R.

9Based on the literature I have seen, there is some disagreement about what should be the minimum threshold for considering a given variable within a given component. I was taught that a range of 0.60 to 0.8 is a suitable minimum threshold, but the researcher's decision is largely an arbitrary one dependent upon the number of variables, the size of the sample, and the primary goals of the researcher. My use of PCA here was an exercise in exploring possible themes within each sub-

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meet that threshold on any one component, or in cases where a single stressor had high loadings on more than one component, I removed that stressor from my analysis; similarly, if a single component did not feature high loadings from three or more stressors, I removed that component from consideration. After these preliminary steps, the stressors and factor components that remained were used to think about the logic that might structure informants' conceptual groupings of specific stressors.

There are a couple reasons why this kind of analysis can be beneficial. First, although there are a number of practical reasons for this kind of analysis in social science research (e.g., scale development), we also can think about PCA as an exercise in exploratory data analysis. Interpretations about the connections between clustered survey items—stressors, in this case—can be applied backward to previous ethnographic stages, potentially revealing themes present in the narrative data that were not yet considered by the ethnographer. I probably would not attempt to publish an academic paper on the “components” described here, but this small and relatively simple statistical step has the potential to provide valuable supplemental data that usually goes unreported in research incorporating consensus analysis.

Analyzing Relationships Between Informants

After examining the relationships between the stressors in each sub-domain, I shifted my analysis to an examination of the statistical relationships between informants.

The full consensus model suggests that my informants generally agree about the relative difficulty of the stressors included on the structured questionnaire, but those

domain; thus, I considered 0.55 to be a flexible, if somewhat generous, minimum threshold.

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results do little to identify how informants agree or, more important, how informants disagree. The analyses that follow allowed me to examine the specific stressors that underlay patterns of agreement in informants’ ratings.

In recent years, researchers using CCA have incorporated a variety of statistical strategies in an attempt to identify patterns of systematic variation within the main consensus model. Hubert and Golledge (1981) proposed using each informant’s first factor competency scores to create an inter-informant agreement matrix that can be compared to the original matrix of informants’ responses, with the difference between the two representing a third matrix that can itself be tested for correlations that might suggest systematic sharing. More recently, Keller and Lowenstein (2011) and Hruschka et al. (2008) explored systematic variation by constructing consensus models for each study sample subgroup to compare differences between demographic variables. Ross and Medin (2005) used a strategy of examining the first and second factors for each informant, one at a time.

However, none of these methods examine the variation that remains after most of the variance has already been maximized on the first consensus factor. Remember, in the informal model of CCA, the first factor accounts for as much of the shared variance in the correlation matrix as possible (Dressler 2012); the second factor, then, explains the majority of whatever variation that remains “left over.” Researchers in cognitive anthropology increasingly refer to consensus loadings on the second factor as measures of intracultural variation; however, they are perhaps best considered as measures of residual agreement (Ross 2004).

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Returning to Table 7-2, the consensus eigenvalues for the entire questionnaire, we see that the majority of variation is explained by the first factor (88.4%), a precondition for an assessment of informant consensus. However, an additional 11.6% of the total variation in the consensus model remains unexplained; that is, there is some amount of agreement between the informants that is not explained by the first consensus factor. Table 7-2 shows that 64.6% of that remaining variation (and 7.5% of the model's total variation) loads on the second factor. So how do we explore this residual agreement?

Boster and Johnson (1989) proposed a method for visually examining residual agreement with scatterplots of informants’ first and second consensus factor loadings. If there is apparent clustering of informants along the second factor axis of the scatterplot, then we can use additional analyses to explore the characteristics of informants that may be responsible for that clustering. One method is to adjust the visualization of datapoints on the scatterplot to reflect aspects of the informants’ demographic profile. In this study, the sample was drawn according to three main variables: sex (male or female), age (18-30, 31-50, 51+), and refugee status (IDP or EDP), each of which I predicted would be the main sources of informant variation before the research began.

This is purely an exploratory exercise, because it required me to examine a variety of scatterplots for each sub-domain, adjusting the visualization to look at, for instance, only differences between men and women, or only IDP versus EDP refugees, until a pattern emerged that suggested systematic agreement.

However, as a counterpart to this exercise, I also incorporated the statistical method of multiple regression analysis (MRA) to explore more precisely whether or not

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those three demographic variables might partially explain the variation remaining in the full consensus model. In technical terms, MRA aims to predict the value of dependent variable outcomes based on the values of multiple independent variables. The procedure forces all of the variables into a statistical line of best fit for the regression model, producing a table that identifies whether or not a change in each independent variable would have an effect on each dependent variable. In my analysis here, I tested whether age, sex, and refugee status (the independent variables) have a statistically significant influence on the first two factors in the consensus model (the dependent variables).

These two methods—scatterplot visualizations and regression analysis—can be performed with the simple statistics produced by CCA, and the procedural steps are not terribly complicated. Used in combination, they can provide reinforcing evidence that within the primary consensus model there exist subtle differences in informants' responses that may be explained by, in this case, each informant's age, sex, or refugee status. This evidence by itself is valuable ethnographic data, extending the usefulness of CCA results but also potentially providing guidance for future ethnographic data collection. Unfortunately, though, these methods alone do not allow researchers to identify what aspects of the main consensus model—or, in this case, what specific stressors—may be the source of the variation in informants' responses.

William Dressler has developed a novel approach to more precisely explore that question. Over the course of many years of ethnographic research based in Brazil,

Dressler has incorporated CCA to describe cultural models associated with family life, lifestyle, national identity, and social support (Dressler 1996; Dressler, Balieiro, and

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Ernesto Dos Santos 1998; Dressler et al. 2008). Recently, Dressler (2012, 2015) has sought to identify how those cultural models have changed over time by comparing the consensus results from his early research to those in his current work. Evaluating models of “the good life,” Dressler discovered that the basic consensus model he identified in his earlier work has generally remained consistent over time; however, evidence from scatterplots and multiple regression results from old and new consensus models revealed subtle differences in residual agreement. Something about the relative value of lifestyle items in the domain of “the good life” had changed for informants during the intervening years.

Dressler's idea10 was to compare how the two groups collectively deviate from the ratings of the consensus model. I followed his approach to study each of the five constituent sub-domains of the questionnaire whenever evidence suggested systematic patterning. First, I calculated a deviation score for each informant by subtracting the weighted average rating of the consensus answer key from the informant’s personal rating for each stressor on the questionnaire. Then, for each sub-domain, I grouped the informants according to relevant comparison groups (e.g., female informants versus male informants) and calculated a mean deviation score for every stressor in the sub- domain. These scores, in turn, can be used as coordinates to plot the sub-domain’s

10I also was guided in this method by Dengah (2013; personal communication), one of Dressler's former students, who adapted Dressler's approach using ranking data about the most important features characterizing religious models of a “good evangelical life” in Brazilian Pentecostal communities. Although Dengah found that informants share a similar model of what constitutes an ideal spiritual life, his use of this method to examine residual agreement revealed that different church communities nevertheless diverge in their agreement about the value of specific qualities important to that life.

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stressors on a scatterplot to visualize how similarly the two demographic compare in their ratings of each stressor.

In the remainder of this chapter, I provide the combined results of these complementary methods of data analysis for each of the questionnaire’s five constituent sub-domains.

Stressors related to the civil war

As noted above in Figure 7-2, the stressors adapted from the Harvard Trauma

Questionnaire are collectively rated as being more difficult to experience than stressors from the other four post-conflict sub-domains. I expected this result, as these stressors are among the most serious traumatic exposures common to the civilian experience of warfare and refugee flight. The consensus answer key for the stressors adapted from the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire is provided in Table 7-4 below, ordered from most difficult to least difficult.

All of the 43 questionnaire items are rated higher than 3.5 on the seven-step ladder scale—except for one, imprisonment (3.04)—and the items are spread fairly evenly across the three highest ratings (ladder steps 4-7). The most severe stressors, the hardest to experience according to informants, are related to (1) the violent death of a child or spouse, (2) the kidnapping or disappearance of spouse, child, or other family member or friend, (3) torture, and (4) sexual abuse. These are followed in severity by injury to self or injury to family and friends, and displacement stressors related to lack of food, water, and medical care.

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Table 7-4. Cultural consensus answer key, war stressors Answer Stressors from Adapted Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ) Key 6.92 Murder or death of child, due to violence 6.86 Murder or death of spouse, due to violence 6.84 Disappearance or kidnapping of a child 6.72 Kidnapped or disappeared 6.66 Murder or death of another family member or friend, due to violence 6.65 Torture 6.64 Disappearance or kidnapping of a spouse 6.58 Disappearance or kidnapping of another family member or friend 6.44 Rape or other type of sexual abuse 6.10 Lack of food 6.05 Ill health without access to medical care 5.97 Serious physical injury from a combat situation or landmine 5.88 Serious physical injury of a family member or friend due to combat situation or landmine 5.79 Lack of water 5.77 Forced to betray a family member or friend, placing them at risk of injury or death 5.63 Forced to physically harm family members or friends 5.55 Forced to desecrate or destroy the bodies or graves of deceased persons 5.54 Witness to death or assassination from violence 5.52 Physically beaten to the head or body 5.32 Witness to torture 5.31 Witness to rape or other sexual abuse 5.24 Serious physical damage during an accident 5.06 Someone was forced to betray you and place you at risk of death or injury 5.05 Forced separation from family members 4.97 Forced to find and bury bodies 4.93 Forced to betray someone who is not a family member or friend, placing them at risk of injury or death 4.90 Lack of shelter 4.88 Forced evacuation under dangerous conditions 4.80 Forced labor, like an animal or slave 4.80 Extortion or robbery 4.79 Forced to physically harm someone who is not a family member or friend 4.69 Witness to the situation of war and combat 4.60 Forced to hide 4.59 Forced isolation from others 4.55 Slashed or cut 4.49 Prevented from burying someone 4.45 Forced to destroy someone else's property or possessions 4.35 Confiscation or destruction of personal property 4.11 Confined to the house because of danger outside 3.98 Witness someone search for people or things in your house

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Table 7-4. Continued Answer Stressors from Adapted Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ) Key 3.96 Bombs thrown from planes 3.90 Witness to beatings of the head or body 3.04 Imprisonment

An examination of Cronbach’s alpha, and principal components, for the stressors in this sub-domain was perhaps an unnecessary exercise. After all, the items included on the HTQ were developed over many years of fieldwork and psychometric testing; we should expect that these stressors scale well together. This is reflected by an analysis of

Cronbach’s alpha, which finds that the 43 stressors I included in the structured questionnaire are highly reliable (α = .98).

Principal components analysis produced seven retained factors. After excluding the components that did not include three or more stressors with loadings greater than

0.55, I was left with only the first three components and 36 stressors remaining of the 43 total in this sub-domain. I next removed three stressors that featured loadings of 0.55 or greater on more than one component: present while home searched, serious physical damage from combat, and witness to torture. I also excluded four stressors that did not feature loadings of 0.55 or greater on any component: confiscation or destruction of personal property, extortion/robbery by military, forced evacuation in dangerous conditions, and put in risky situation due to betrayal.

These initial steps left a grand total of 29 stressors across the first three principal components: fourteen stressors on the first factor, nine on the second factor, and six on the third. These stressors, and how they statistically cluster on each component factor, are displayed in Table 7-5.

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Table 7-5. Principal components analysis, war stressors Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Witness to Slashed or cut Torture combat Bombs from planes Sexual violation/abuse Physical beating Forced separation from Kidnap/disappearance of family self Imprisonment Death of spouse from Forced to find, bury bodies violence Forced to escape Confined to Forced isolation from others Death of child from violence house Prevented from burying Kidnap/disappearance of Witness to someone spouse beatings Kidnap/disappearance of Forced to destroy corpses child Kidnap/disappearance of Death of other family other member family member/friend from violence Violence, physical harm to Witness to murder/death family Witness to sexual violation Physical harm from accident Forced to physically harm stranger Forced to betray friend/family, putting them in danger Forced to betray stranger, putting them in danger

I am uncertain about how to explain these three clusters of stressors, particularly for those on the first component. The second component, though, may be easier to explain. My belief is that these stressors represent the most severe war-related stressors actually experienced by members of the community; for instance, bombs thrown from planes (or helicopters) was a feature of the Guatemalan civil war, but none of my informants actually reported seeing this happen. I believe my interpretation here is reinforced by the consensus answer key for these stressors, eight of which received

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the eight highest ratings for the sub-domain11 and are among the 15 highest ratings for the entire questionnaire. By contrast, I believe the stressors grouped on the third factor, though among the most common war-related experiences of informants at my fieldsite, are viewed as less damaging by comparison.

In light of these interpretations, a return to the first component reveals a mix of stressors that my informants did commonly experience (e.g., witness to murder, forced separation from family) and some stressors that were not common to my informants’ experiences (e.g., forced to destroy corpses, slashed or cut). However, I notice that one of the common traits of these stressors is the word “forced,” which appears in half of the stressors loading on the first factor. While I do not expect that informants would choose to live through any of the experiences clustering on the second and third components, perhaps the word “forced” was privileged in informants’ minds when they rated these particular stressors more so than the action that was being forced.

My subsequent analysis of informants’ ratings in this sub-domain turned to an examination of residual agreement, the remaining variation in the full consensus model after maximizing variation on the first consensus factor. As seen in Table 7-6, multiple regression analysis revealed that age is significant (P = 0.003) on the first consensus factor (cultural competency), and both age (P = 0.044) and refugee status (P = 0.021) are significant on the second factor (residual agreement).

11 “Serious physical harm to a friend or family member due to situation of combat” is the 13th highest rated stressor in the sub-domain, and 25th highest rated for the full questionnaire.

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These variables are visualized in Figure 7-3, a scatterplot in which each datapoint represents a single informant, with each dot increasing in size in association with increasing age. The datapoints are also color coded, with blue representing externally-displaced refugees and red representing internally-displaced refugees. The

X-axis refers to the consensus first factor eigenvalues (cultural competency) and the Y- axis the consensus second factor eigenvalues (residual agreement).

Table 7-6. Multiple regression analysis, war stressors Dependent Variable = Dependent Variable = Independent Variables Cultural Competence Residual Agreement Age 0.007** -0.005* Sex 0.090 -0.056 Refugee Status 0.082 0.169* R² 0.292** 0.238* *P < 0.05 **P < 0.01

The significance of age for variation in cultural competency is clear from the plot, with the oldest informants tending to cluster together far more than younger informants along the X-axis. However, the significance of age to the remaining residual agreement is also evident: although there is some spread, the older informants generally cluster below the zero line on the Y-axis, with the youngest informants in the sample all found above the horizontal. Furthermore, using the colors as a guide, we see a distinct difference between externally-displaced and internally-displaced refugees. This visualization of regression analysis results reinforces the interpretation that there is systematic variation between informants beyond the main consensus model.

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Figure 7-3. Consensus factor loadings, war stressors

However, there remains a question about which war-related stressors informants are valuating differently. For this, I next turned to an examination ofinformants’ deviations from the consensus answer key. In Figure 7-4, I provide a second scatterplot, this time comparing the ratings of internally- and externally-displaced refugees, with each datapoint representing a single stressor from the HTQ questionnaire. Those stressors that are highly rated by IDP refugees but low rated by EDP refugees are far to the right on the X-axis; conversely, stressors rated highly by the EDP group but rated low by the IDP group are found higher on the Y-axis.

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Figure 7-4. Consensus answer key deviations, war stressors

The most striking finding from this plot is that internally-displaced refugees have collectively rated the war-related stressors lower than informants who were displaced to

Honduras. This is evident by an examination of the zero point reference lines. IDP refugees rated only one stressor—lack of food—higher than the consensus model rating; by contrast, EDP refugees collectively rated nearly 75% of the HTQ stressors higher than the weighted average ratings of the consensus model. How do we interpret these results? At the risk of seeming to devalue the wartime traumas experienced by internally-displaced refugees, I believe that these results reflect a closer, or perhaps

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more acute, association with the savagery of the civil war than was experienced by many of the other IDP refugees.

While many of my IDP informants described being forced by the government to leave their communities, or because they felt they must leave to protect themselves from encroaching warfare, most of the EDP informants described their displacement as a direct consequence of violence having been visited upon their communities. While perhaps a gross overgeneralization, the particular circumstances that led to EDP informants leaving their communities, and Guatemala altogether, was far less controlled, planned, or organized than those of many IDP informants who I interviewed.

Whether or not this is a valid interpretation, I also believe that, in many ways, the decade spent in the Honduran refugee camp, where they were prevented from building their own homes, cultivating their own land, and experiencing freedom apart from the watchful eyes of military guards, was a daily reminder of the violence that they had experienced, witnessed, and escaped.

It is important to reiterate here that this plot reflects very small deviations from the consensus answer key. Nevertheless, a closer examination of specific stressors might provide some important data for consideration. For instance, the two stressors that stand apart as highly rated by IDP refugees but lower rated by EDP refugees are

Items 32 and 33—death of spouse due to violence and death of child due to violence, respectively. These are the two highest rated stressors for this sub-domain, but also the full consensus model, which reflects the severe distress that informants from both groups feel about the loss of their most important loved ones during the war. Other stressors rated highly by IDP informants include poor health without access to medicine

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(Item 4), torture (Item 11), death of other family member due to violence (Item 34), and the kidnap/disappearance of a child (Item 36), all of which are among the highest rated stressors in the full consensus model.

Again, my hypothesis to explain this result is that the families of many IDP informants experienced the loss of loved ones but, collectively, the circumstances of the death and the circumstances of the violence resulting in death were often different from those of my EDP informants’ families. For instance, IDP informants often described how the loss of their loved ones was traumatic, but that the inability to give them a proper burial only exacerbated their loss.

I believe that my interpretation is reinforced by an examination of the stressors rated high by EDP informants but low by IDP informants. For example, imprisonment

(Item 14), forced separation from family (Item 19), and forced isolation from others (Item

21) are all lived experiences of informants from the El Tesoro refugee camp in

Honduras. Similarly, the stressors related to forced harm of others (Items 26, 28, and

31) may be higher rated by EDP informants because many of them actually witnessed that happen when the army came to their original communities; some of the older informants described how they personally witnessed many terrible acts apart from kidnapping and murder, including sexual violations (Item 42) and neighbors being forced to harm others in their community.

Sub-domain analyses: stressors related to the nation-state

Collectively, the stressors associated with national governance and security institutions are rated lower than the other four sub-domains from the questionnaire.

However, approximately two-thirds of the items are rated 3.5 or higher on the ladder

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scale. As shown below in Table 7-7, the highest rated stressors are discrimination

(4.73), no confidence in police (4.59), and police corruption (4.98), government corruption (4.73), and army corruption (4.50). The lowest rated stressor was thinking that the violence of war could happen again (2.70).

Table 7-7. Cultural consensus answer key, national stressors Answer Key Stressors Related to National Institutions 4.98 Corruption of the police 4.73 Discrimination 4.73 Corruption of the government 4.59 No confidence in the police 4.50 Corruption of the army 4.49 Robbery 4.40 No confidence in the politicians 4.09 Assaults 3.71 Presence of gangs 3.49 No confidence in the army 3.40 Vandalism 3.13 Drug Trafficking 3.03 Presence of the army 2.70 Thinking that violence of war could begin again

I was initially surprised by these results, because much of the recent academic work about post-conflict Guatemala cites these kinds of national and institutional issues as being amongst the worst facing the country in the post-war era; furthermore, they were chief among my informants’ concerns during the previous stage of ethnographic interviews. Institutional corruption is a common topic in newspaper headlines and daily radio and television newscasts, and informants commonly described to me, and to visiting government officials, the deleterious trickle-down consequences of corruption felt by community residents. On reflection, however, these stressors may resonate

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deeply but perhaps do not impact informants as acutely, or as often, as they do for people living in larger urban centers like Coban, Antigua, or Guatemala City.

An examination of Cronbach’s alpha finds that the 14 stressors included in this sub-domain are highly reliable (α = .93), and an exploration of principal components reveals some interesting groupings. PCA resulted in four retained components, as described in Table 7-8. All but one of the stressors have loadings greater than 0.55 on only one of the four factor components; drug trafficking, which displays relatively high loadings on two components, is excluded for this discussion.

The items that load the highest on the first component factor include no confidence in politicians, and military corruption, police corruption, and government corruption. Informants widely view endemic corruption within State institutions as one of the most pressing problems facing Guatemala's immediate and long-term future; furthermore, corruption is widely viewed by my informants as the root cause of the poverty they face. Academic literature about post-conflict Guatemala (and post-conflict settings more generally) consistently reinforces the view that the long-term well-being of impacted communities is dependent upon the health of the State and its engagements with recovering populations, a view also widely reported in the Guatemalan news consumed by my informants.

Table 7-8. Principal components analysis, national stressors Factor 1 Factor 2 No confidence in politicians No confidence in military Government corruption Presence of gangs Military corruption War violence could reoccur Police corruption

Factor 3 Factor 4 No confidence in police Discrimination Assaults Robbers Presence of the military Vandalism

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The highest loadings on the second factor include fears the war could start again, the presence of gangs, and no confidence in the military. Interestingly, these were among the lowest rated items from the entire consensus answer key, which suggests that these are not the most pressing concerns at my fieldsite. The highest loadings on the third component are assaults, no confidence in the police, and presence of the military. I discuss these two factors together because my intuition, based on informant interviews and my own experience in rural Guatemala, is that there are two separate but related concerns reflected in these two component groupings.

Some of my informants laughed at the notion that the violence of the civil war could start again, but were quick to recognize that there is already an ongoing “war” in

Guatemala between the government and drugs cartels (e.g., Sinaloa, Los Zetas) and criminal gangs (e.g. Mara Salvatrucha). The military, as mandated by the Peace

Accords, is not permitted to operate within the boundaries of Guatemala without explicit government approval, and even then only for a temporary period of time and because of extraordinary security situations. However, the presence of soldiers at entrances to major towns and cities reflects the reality that the military is nevertheless being used to buttress national security. My informants describe a conflicted view of security institutions like the police and the military, believing them to be corrupted by (and often affiliated with) criminal networks but simultaneously believing them necessary for cutting down on rampant criminality.

Many of my informants described how the rise of drug-related violence is related to the post-war dismantling and reformation of the military and police sectors, which resulted in many former (and even current) officers turning to employment within those

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drug-running networks. Informants also expressed the belief that the military remains complicit in these networks; however, informants are even more disenchanted with the national police, and viewed the obvious presence of the military in rural areas to be a more effective deterrent to both drug-related activities and more common street crimes like assaults, kidnappings, and murders.

I interpret the stressors on the fourth component to be those that informants believe are the most common and problematic in the community, neighboring communities, and Guatemala in general. San Jose El Tesoro is remote enough and isolated enough that the problems associated with gangs and drug cartels, though ever- present in informants’ minds, are not common daily concerns within the village. Yet petty property crimes, like robbery and vandalism, are viewed as relatively widespread and are most often considered to be the discriminatory actions of neighboring communities.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have considered these stressors for the community sub- domain.

The results of multiple regression analysis of the consensus factor loadings for this domain are presented in Table 7-9 below. None of the three demographic variables—age, sex, or refugee status—are significant on the first factor (cultural competency). However, sex (P = 0.013) is significant on the second factor (residual agreement).

Table 7-9. Multiple regression analysis, national stressors Dependent Variable = Dependent Variable = Independent Variables Cultural Competence Residual Agreement Age 0.002 0.003 Sex 0.075 0.247* Refugee Status -0.109 0.036 R² 0.127 0.197 *P < 0.05 **P < 0.01

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These results can be explored in an alternative way by examining a scatterplot of the first and second consensus factor loadings. In Figure 7-5, I provide a scatterplot in which each informant is represented by a single datapoint, with the size of the dot increasing with age and color codes to represent female informants (blue) and male informants (red).

Figure 7-5. Consensus factor loadings, national stressors

Based on this plot, we see that most of the informants, with a few exceptions, are clustered on or beyond the 0.5 mark along the X-axis (cultural competency). This

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supports the notion that both male and female informants are in general agreement about the relative severity of national stressors in the full consensus model. However, using the zero center of the Y-axis as a guideline, we can also see that some of the variation in the full model is explained by a gendered component about these particular stressors: more female informants group below the zero-line, and more male informants group above it. Thus, I turned my attention to sex-related deviations from the model's consensus ratings.

Figure 7-6. Consensus answer key deviations, national stressors

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One of the interesting results of this scatterplot is that, among the questionnaire items that men collectively rate as more difficult, several are associated with the military

(i.e., military corruption, no confidence in the military, and the presence of the military) and the greatest deviation is feeling that (war) violence could start again. Without ethnographic experience in the community, I might justifiably think that this new data suggests that male informants fear that the military could be an ongoing threat; however, based on previous interviews with village residents and my own ethnographic experience in Guatemala, I think that an additional stressor rated more highly by men— narcotrafficking—may offer some interpretive guidance.

During the previous semistructured interview phase of research, many informants described concerns that the nation-wide problem of narcotrafficking would reverberate and trickle into the community. A retroactive review of those interviews in light of these deviation results revealed that many of those informants are men, and their concerns seem to center on X broad potentialities: (1) the drug cartels rumored to be operating in the vicinity of Yalpemech, Raxruha, Chisec, and Sayaxche could bring violence to the village's proverbial doors; (2) the street gangs widely believed to be affiliated with those cartels might appeal to the young men and teenagers living in the community, and (3) the government, or its security forces, might claim that the impoverished community is sympathetic to drug trafficking and, thus, use that as a motivation to take their lands.

By contrast, female informants seem to collectively rate the more common petty thefts as more difficult for the community to experience than the large criminal networks described by men. Figure 7-6 illustrates that my sample's female informants differ from my male informants in their ratings of assaulters, thieves, and vandalism. Women also

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rate more highly than men corruption of police and no confidence in police. This data suggests to me that perhaps the concerns of my female informants are more focused upon the everyday threats to individuals in the community rather than the kinds of criminal networks that academics and development agencies describe as threats to the nation and which my male informants appear to view as looming threats to the future well-being of the community as a whole.

Sub-domain analyses: stressors related to community context

The consensus answer key for the sub-domain of community-related stressors is displayed in Table 7-10 below. Note that all but three of the 14 questionnaire items are rated above 4.0 out of 7. The two highest rated stressors are no work in the community

(5.82) and water contamination (5.42), which I guessed might be rated as the most difficult aspects of community life after having lived there myself. The two lowest rated stressors are trash in the community (2.85) and air contamination (2.81).

Many people described how their labor, in the home and in the fields, could usually provide sustenance for their immediate and extended family, but that very little income could be derived from their crops, either because people lacked the time or resources to go to the market(s) outside of the village to sell their foods, because the price for selling food at the market was too low to justify the travel to the market anyway, and because the income they did earn often went to supplies necessary around the house, including the purchase of additional foods, medicine, and regular household items. Although several families earned enough to save beyond a daily or weekly existence—either from their crops, their business, or their employment—the majority of families in the community have difficulties saving generated income for the

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larger purchases they face, including education, property taxes, and catastrophic illness.

Table 7-10. Cultural consensus answer key, community stressors Answer Key Stressors Related to Community Life 5.82 No work in the community 5.42 Contamination of water 4.71 Roads are difficult to use 4.61 High price of food, for buying 4.52 Accusations 4.50 Problems with neighbors 4.43 Low price of food, for selling 4.33 Contamination of land 4.28 Alcoholism in the community 4.22 Gossip 4.12 Drug use in the community 3.44 Unsanitary living conditions 2.85 Trash in the community 2.81 Contamination of air

Water contamination, as well, was a significant problem for the community, which relies entirely upon whatever falls from the sky. Though there have been efforts in the past to send the community running water to a central location via pipes and pumps from outside the village, these previous attempts were not successful because, I was told, neighboring communities refused to allow “their water” to be redirected elsewhere and on several occasions sabotaged the pipe networks delivering that water to the village. Consequently, residents rely upon large barrels and, at most houses, open concrete tanks that fill with rainwater collected from the corrugated lamina rooftops and makeshift drainage runoffs.

As much as the rain turned village paths treacherous, and seemingly everything muddy, everyone was happy to have good long rainstorms, not just for the fields but for

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replenishing both the storage tanks and, more important, the aquifers and creeks supplying the community with running water from upstream. Running water was viewed as being more clean, fresh, and safe to consume, and many informants described how the aquifers feeding the community were mostly unsafe unless there has been a recent and steady rain because too many people throw garbage down the village’s wells.

These assertions made sense to me, as I was not long in the community before I too began worrying about the water; although I had the resources to travel for purchases of purified drinking water, I did not do so until after several bouts of stomach virus that I believed originated from unsanitary water.

An examination of Cronbach’s alpha reveals that the 14 community stressors included in this sub-domain are highly reliable (α = .88), and PCA retained five factor components. I dropped two components because they contained fewer than three stressors meeting the minimum 0.55 loading; this removed three stressors from my analysis: roads are difficult to use, alcoholism in the community, and no work in the community. In addition, I dropped one stressor—water contamination—because it did not have a single loading greater than 0.55 on any component. Table 7-11 displays the groupings of 10 stressors that remained across three factors.

Table 7-11. Principal components analysis, community stressors Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 High price of food (to buy) Gossip Contamination of air Low price of food (to sell) Accusations Trash in the community Contamination of land Problems with neighbors Drugs in the community Unsanitary community conditions

Based on participant-observation and semistructured interviews, I believe the first component reflects informants’ concerns with the economic environment of the village, and particularly concerns with the land’s ability to provide family income. Informants

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described to me how land contamination is a growing concern as the years pass, particularly as the original area of land plots have diminished over time as parcels are either sold or given to children when they marry. Consequently, many families are forced to overwork their farm plots from season to season rather than let them lay fallow, and most farmers use fertilizers and other chemical supplements to maintain soil productivity, a necessary evil that places additional burden on the land. Still, the yields from harvests for most families have grown smaller over time, leaving many with fewer crops to sell for profit. This situation is exacerbated by a regional economy in which prices for selling those crops locally have decreased but costs for buying market goods outside of the community have increased.

The second factor is much easier to interpret. Two of the most common problems that informants cited about community life are gossip and accusations, both of which underlie many of the problems people have with specific community members. I personally experienced the impact of gossip and accusations first hand during my fieldwork, and there were times when I came to believe that the trafficking of gossip was a kind of social capital in the village. These represent, perhaps, the most impactful problems related to the social environment; the stressors loading on the third component, by contrast, reflect additional problems with the natural environment. In this case, however, I believe these stressors to be grouped together because informants generally rated them as being less important, and less severe, types of community stressors.

The results of multiple regression analysis of the consensus factor loadings for this domain are presented in Table 7-12 below. On the first factor—cultural

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competency—both age (P = 0.014) and refugee status (P = 0.011) are significant; on the second factor, however, only sex (P = 0.010) is significant.

Table 7-12. Multiple regression analysis, community stressors Dependent Variable = Dependent Variable = Independent Variables Cultural Competence Residual Agreement Age 0.006* -0.005 Sex 0.089 0.253* Refugee Status 0.202* 0.137 R² 0.315** 0.273* *P < 0.05 **P < 0.01

These results are also visualized in the form of a scatterplot in Figure 7-7. Here, each informant is represented by a single point on the plot, with the informant's age reflected by point size and sex by color (red = female, blue = male).

Figure 7-7. Consensus factor loadings, community stressors

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There is clearly less agreement between female informants about the relative severity of community stressors, as reflected in the wide spread of blue dots along the

Y-axis (residual agreement). By contrast, the closer clustering of men suggests that they are in closer agreement about these stressors. The next question, then, is how men and women differ—that is, on what stressors are they in less agreement—in relation to the consensus ratings. Again, I turned to an examination of deviation scores for each stressor, which is displayed as a scatterplot in Figure 7-8.

Figure 7-8. Consensus answer key deviations, community stressors

The scatterplot reveals some key gendered differences. The stressors rated higher by men appear to be those associated with the quality of the natural environment

(air contamination, land contamination, trash, and unsanitary conditions), employment

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(no work), and the marketplace (high price to buy, low price to sell). Similarly, female informants appear to rate more highly those stressors that directly impact their own daily labor activities outside of the home (water contamination, difficult roads, alcoholism in the community). Interestingly, gossip, accusations, and problems with neighbors are the community stressors rated as most difficult by women (but least difficult by men). While these three stressors were commonly cited in informant narrative by both men and women, young and old, and though they may seem to be part of the social

“environment” rather than physical, my belief is that these are stressors that impact the economic activities of women more so than men. Men typically spend most of their days working in their fields, while the activities of women involve far more social interaction with neighbors.

Sub-domain analyses: stressors related to the family

The highest rated stressors in this sub-domain are the death of a parent, spouse, child, or other family member due to illness or accident. Comparing the results in Table 7-13 below with the answer key results from the HTQ sub-domain, we find these stressors to be rated in the same range, if slightly lower, as the deaths of loved ones due to violence. The lowest rated stressors concern strife within the family—e.g., fighting between family members, overcrowding in the house—followed by the separation of family members due to employment outside of the community. I admit that I was somewhat surprised by that, as many of my informants, especially women, described a general sadness that hangs over a home when a member of the family is away for long periods of time.

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Table 7-13. Cultural consensus answer key, family stressors CCA Answer Stressors Related to Family Life 6.82 Death of a child, due to illness 6.81 Death of a child, due to accident 6.65 Death of a spouse, due to accident 6.62 Death of a family member, due to accident 6.44 Death of a parent, due to accident 6.44 Death of a spouse, due to illness 6.27 Death of a parent, due to illness 5.36 Violence between family members 5.00 Illness of family members 4.97 Inability to seek education 4.94 Separation from spouse, due to problems in the home 4.77 Death of a family member, due to illness 4.68 Unacceptable housing conditions 4.65 Relations between spouses 4.60 Separation from child, due to work 4.42 Separation from spouse, due to work 4.04 Separation from family member, due to work 3.52 Fighting with family members about work 3.33 Fighting with family members about money 2.93 Fighting with family members about food 2.82 Overcrowding in the house

An analysis of Chronbach’s alpha finds that the stressors included in this sub- domain scale well together and are highly reliable (α = .94). Principal components analysis resulted in the retention of four component factors. The fourth component was removed because it featured only one stressor—illness of family members—with loadings greater than 0.55. Three stressors were removed for having high loadings on more than one factor: death of parent due to accident, separation of spouse due to work, separation from family due to work. I also removed one stressor—separation of child due to work—because it did not have a single loading greater than 0.55 on any one component. My analysis, thus, focused on the evaluation of 16 stressors across three principal components, which are listed below.

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Table 7-14. Principal components analysis, family stressors Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Death, spouse (accident) Arguing about money Death, parent (illness) Death, spouse (illness) Arguing about food Separation of spouse (work) Death, child (accident) Arguing about work Spousal relations Cannot pursue Death, child (illness) Violence b/w family members education Death, fam/friend Overcrowding in home (accident) Death, fam/friend (illness) Poor house conditions

The reason for the grouping of stressors on the first component factor should be fairly obvious: the death of a child, parent, spouse, or other family member is devastating to family life, no matter where in the world that family lives. This reality is reflected in the high consensus ratings these stressors received. What gives me pause, however, is the inclusion of poor house conditions on the first factor and the death of a parent due to illness on the third factor. Perhaps the inclusion of poor home conditions here simply means that respondents also view this stressor as comparably difficult as death to family members; however, its consensus rating (4.68) does not bear out this interpretation. I remain confused by this finding and would pursue the question in future research in the community.

Similarly, I am not sure why death of a parent due to illness is included on the third factor grouping. Looking at the three stressors it is grouped with does not provide a readily identifiable answer. My suspicion is that, aside from the death of a family member, these four stressors represent the greatest threats to the cohesion and normal functioning of the family unit. As noted above, death of a parent due to accident had high loadings on two components: Factor 1 and Factor 3. Though not included in this

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discussion, I feel that the high loading on the third component gives some credence to this interpretation.

The second factor, I believe, reflects those stressors that are not viewed by informants as being difficult, or perhaps even common, domestic stressors. The three stressors about arguments and overcrowding in the home are the four lowest-rated stressors in the sub-domain, and rank in the lowest 10% of the entire questionnaire.

One of the broad takeaways I left with after my stay in the community—much more a feeling than some empirical observation—is that the families I met and interacted with in

San Jose El Tesoro are more tightly knit and accustomed to working together as a team than are the families typical to the United States; the concept of “alone time” seemed less important to many of my informants.

Multiple regression analysis of the first and second consensus factor loadings, as shown below in Table 7-15, reveals that age is significant on both the first factor (P =

0.035) and second factor (P = 0.046). These results are also provided as a scatterplot visualization in Figure 7-9.

Table 7-15. Multiple regression analysis, family stressors Dependent Variable = Dependent Variable = Independent Variables Cultural Competence Residual Agreement Age 0.005* -0.005* Sex 0.045 0.001 Refugee Status 0.026 0.046 R² 0.138 0.121 *P < 0.05 **P < 0.01

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Figure 7-9. Consensus factor loadings, family stressors

In this scatterplot, I have color coded female informants (blue) and male informants (red), but the important feature is the size of the datapoint. Multiple regression analysis found that age is statistically significant for both the first and second factors, so the size of each point has been adjusted to the age of the informant. There is a clear clustering of the older informants along both the X-axis (cultural competency) and the Y-axis (residual agreement). Again, I turned to an analysis of consensus deviation scores to examine more closely the specific stressors about which younger and older informants diverge.

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Figure 7-10. Consensus answer key deviations, family stressors

The central clustering on the scatterplot shown in Figure 7-10 suggests that informants, both young and old, tend to rate family stressors in much the same way.

However, there is also a clear pattern of variation: older informants tend to rate sickness and the deaths of children (accident, illness), spouses (accident, illness), or other family members (accident) as more difficult than do the younger informants. By contrast, the domestic stressors rated most highly by younger informants compared to older informants are fighting over food, money and work, separation from family due to spousal relations, separation from children due to work, overcrowding in the home, and an inability to seek education.

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I am uncertain why younger informants are rating these stressors higher than older informants, but my intuition is that these are the problems characteristic of new young families, many of whom remain living with their parents as a consequence of poverty, unavailable land, and tradition. By contrast, older informants may believe these stressors to be a more normal and, thus, acceptable part of domestic life, and far less difficult than the death of loved ones, a traumatic loss that older people typically will have experienced more often than younger generations.

Sub-domain analyses: stressors related to poverty

The answer key produced by consensus analysis for the sub-domain of poverty is provided in Table 7-16 below. As you will recall from the full consensus answer key scatterplot (Figure 7-2), the stressors of poverty are collectively rated as more difficult than the stressors in any other sub-domain aside from the HTQ. Seventeen of the questionnaire items are rated 3.5 or higher, and eleven are rated 5.0 or higher.

Informants’ narratives described how living in poverty is among the most severe life experiences for members of the community. Poverty permeates every aspect of life in the village, and thus I was not surprised to find these concerns to be rated so high.

The concerns rated as most difficult are, respectively, lacking money for medicine

(6.56), for visiting a clinic or hospital (6.10), for paying off land plots (6.08), for consulting with a doctor or curandero (6.07), and being unable to earn money from employment (6.04).

The lowest rated stressors are those financial needs that informants do not view as important by comparison, including donations to the church (2.63), attending fairs in

Raxruha, Chisec, or Sayaxche (2.85), purchasing credits for cellular phones (3.00),

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purchasing new clothes (3.00), buying games/toys for children (3.80), and being unable to travel outside the village to visit friends or family (3.80). While people identified these latter expenditures as being important for having a good life, my informants made clear that the needs and desires for these items pale in comparison to the constant concerns about providing basic necessities for their family and preparing for the future.

Table 7-16. Cultural consensus answer key, poverty stressors CCA Answer Stressors Related to Poverty 6.56 No money to buy medicine 6.10 No money to visit clinic or hospital 6.08 No money for lot payments 6.07 No money to consult doctor or curandero 6.04 Cannot travel to earn money 5.58 Cannot buy desired foods 5.40 No money to buy materials for home improvement 5.37 No money to give children education 5.37 Cannot buy supplies needed for work 5.14 Cannot travel to search for employment 5.01 Cannot buy desired animals 4.96 Cannot buy seeds 4.31 No money to pay workers 4.17 No money to travel to market 4.10 No money to have electricity in house 3.80 No money to travel to visit family or friends 3.80 Cannot buy toys/games for children 3.00 Cannot buy new clothes 3.00 Cannot buy phone credits 2.86 No money for the fairs 2.63 Cannot give money to church or community

Paying off the land titles, as well as the various fees and taxes accrued during the course of that process, was a significant concern amongst most families in the community. However, whether or not people could readily come up with the money for those costs, the community at least had some warning about when those fees were due and what monies would be needed to complete the process. Healthcare, though, is a much different concern. Informants know full well that some medical emergency will

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emerge for the family in the near future—that is a part of life in San Jose El Tesoro— and many of my informants described the strain that arises from worrying about not being able to save for such an emergency.

Chronbach’s alpha (α = .89) reveals that the 21 poverty stressors included in the sub-domain are reliable and scale well together, but the groupings of stressors revealed by PCA reinforces the importance of these financial concerns. Initial analysis retained six factor components, but Factors 4, 5, and 6 were dropped from consideration because they each featured fewer than three stressors with loadings higher than 0.55.

The removal of these factors resulted in the loss of four stressors, related to a lack of money for visiting a curandero, buying seeds, providing education to children, and buying games/toys for children. An additional four stressors were removed from analysis because they did not feature factor loadings of 0.55 or greater on any one component; these include purchases associated with desired food, desired animals, traveling to the market, and donating to church. This process left 13 remaining stressors across three principal components.

Table 7-17. Principal components analysis, poverty stressors Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Cannot pay workers Cannot buy medicine Cannot buy work supplies Cannot pay for electricity Cannot improve home Cannot travel to find work Cannot buy new clothes Cannot visit doctor/hospital Cannot work to earn money Cannot buy phone credits Cannot pay for land fees Cannot go to fair Cannot travel to visit

family/friends

To my mind, the three component factors are clearly grouped according to unnecessary purchases (Factor 1), important purchases (Factor 2), and work-related stressors (Factor 3). The first component grouping includes being unable to pay for

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electricity and phone credits, both of which are increasingly important to life in the modern world but are relatively recent conveniences for most of the community’s residents. Informants made clear that the remaining stressors grouped on Factor 1 are simply not that important for daily existence, although the ability to travel, to buy new clothes, and to pay workers would be nice if money was available.

By contrast, the stressors grouping on the second component reflect the most important expenses faced by informants during my stay in the community. Informants’ narratives in previous stages were dominated by concerns about money for healthcare, securing land, and maintaining a safe and secure home, and these concerns drove most the hard economic decisions facing most families. The stressors grouping on the third factor similarly relate to this reality but they are specifically focused on stressors associated with employment.

Multiple regression analysis identified age (P = 0.010) as a significant predictor of variation on the first consensus factor—informants’ knowledge scores—while sex (P =

0.000) is a significant predictor of variation in the remaining, residual, agreement. A summary of results from MRA is provided in Table 7-18; Figure 7-11 brings these statistical results into visual relief with a scatterplot of consensus factor loadings.

Table 7-18. Multiple regression analysis, poverty stressors Dependent Variable = Dependent Variable = Independent Variables Cultural Competence Residual Agreement Age 0.005* 0.002 Sex 0.105 -0.283** Refugee Status 0.078 0.033 R² 0.280* 0.449** *P < 0.05 **P < 0.01

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Here, each plot point represents a single informant, with increasing size reflecting increasing age and color codes to identify women (blue) and men (red).

Figure 7-11. Consensus factor loadings, poverty stressors

Looking at the X-axis, which corresponds to consensus knowledge scores, increased age of informants is clearly associated with greater representativeness to the consensus answer key about the severity of poverty in the community. However, an examination of the unexplained variability—the residual agreement described by the Y- axis—reveals a clear gendered dimension, as well, with most of the women clustering above the 0 line and most of the men below. Based on my previous ethnographic work

(and the results of analysis for the family and community sub-domains), I hypothesized that these differences were likely related to gender-based work roles in the family. An examination of consensus rating deviations seems to support that conclusion.

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In the scatterplot of consensus deviations (Figure 7-12), we see that men and women are generally in agreement about the relative difficulty of these poverty-related stressors, as evident by the central clustering of the scatterplot.

Figure 7-12. Consensus answer key deviations, poverty stressors

However, there is also a clear pattern to the residual variation, which I believe to be associated with gendered work responsibilities. This is best illustrated by the stressors rated highly by men but low by women: cannot pay workers, cannot purchase work supplies, cannot earn money in the community, cannot travel for work, and, to a

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lesser extent, cannot purchase seeds.12 All of these stressors are related to characteristically male economic activities. By contrast, the health of the family (travel to consult doctor or curandero) and the education of children are typically the daily responsibilities of women, whose work is centered out of the home rather than the farm.

Women in this sample seem to appraise items related to maintaining the house and caring for children as being more important than do men, who are more concerned with being able to work the fields or to find employment elsewhere. To a lesser extent, women also rated as difficult the stressors of being unable to travel to the fair in

Raxruha and to purchase phone credits, electricity, and new clothes; while I am uncertain why the fair is rated so highly compared to men, I believe these other stressors reflect the growing importance of these items, even in a relatively isolated community, in the increasingly connected, technology-driven market economy of

Guatemala.

Potential Limitations of Results

I would be remiss if I did not mention some caveats that might limit the strength of my findings in this chapter. Several of my own concerns are related to the development of the ratings questionnaire and the “items” I chose to include on it. Weller

(2007, 348) notes that these items could be gathered from a wide variety of sources— e.g., academic publications, informant interviews, participant observations—but they

12The largest deviation corresponds to not having extra money to give to the church or to the community. I am not clear on why men might rate this item so much higher than women, but this finding does lend some anecdotal support to the idea that this kind of data analysis is not just useful for expanding consensus models but also for generating new research questions to be explored further in future ethnographic interviews.

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must be “reasonable indicators of the concept being measured.” Weller (2007, 349) further advises that researchers “obtain twenty or more questions/items, at the same level of difficulty, on a single topic.” Furthermore, those items should be balanced such that they are expected to elicit both positive and negative responses from informants or, in this case, stressors that I expect to be rated higher and stressors I expect to be rated lower.

These points deserve consideration here for several reasons. First, I cannot assert that the stressors I included in the domain of “stressors in post-conflict settings” were not identified solely by the informants at my fieldsite. My establishment of the domain began before I set foot in Guatemala. Although I came to learn that my informants often speak of suframiento (suffering) about a wide-range of experiences, I began my fieldwork with the assumption that war-related traumatic exposures, like those found on diagnostic checklists for mental health, could be reasonably evaluated alongside other, perhaps mundane, sources of everyday stress. I believe that my findings substantiate that assumption.

Second, evaluating the complete suite of 113 stressors, I certainly satisfy Weller’s advice of using at least twenty items per domain. A case could be made, which a few informants did, that there were too many stressors included on the questionnaire.

However, if I evaluate the questionnaire according to each of its five constituent sub- domains, I did not follow Weller’s advice. Although the HTQ sub-domain contains 43 items, and both the family (n=21) and poverty (n=21) sub-domains contain more than 20 items, the sub-domains of nation-state (n=14) and community (n=14) stressors contain fewer than 20 items.

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Finally, a case also might be made that the items for each sub-domain are not

“balanced” in the way that Weller advises. For instance, I predicted that the HTQ stressors would likely receive ratings of 3.5 or higher—that is, I expected these life experiences to be rated by informants as more difficult than the majority of the stressors from the other four sub-domains. My overriding concern was to keep this list as similar as possible to the checklists of post-traumatic stress commonly used by health researchers in post-conflict settings. However, in each of the other four sub-domains, I added stressors that I believed would be rated as less difficult life experiences; when considering the questionnaire's entire range of stressors, I believe that these low-rated stressors help to satisfy the requirements for balance in the full consensus model.

After expressing these concerns in personal communications with Russ Bernard,

Bill Dressler, and Lance Gravlee, all of whom have experience designing research that incorporates the methods of CCA, I am confident that there is a respectable balance between the stressors I expected to be high-rated and those I expected to be rated lower. The principal goal in this stage of the project was to test the hypothesis that informants do, indeed, evaluate some chronic everyday stressors to be as difficult as traumatic stressors related to the war-era; I do not believe that the concerns with balance that I outline here are substantial enough to diminish the core findings of my analyses.

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CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION

At the beginning of this research project, I was focused on one simple idea. Much of the public health research about war-related violence, refugee displacement, and zones of conflict that I was reading as a doctoral student seemed to rely on identifying who had and had not experienced some of the many traumatic exposures commonly associated with violent conflict. Yet much of the anthropological research on this topic -- from the broad social theory about post-conflict settings to the empirical anthropological work of researchers working in those settings -- maintained and reinforced an assertion that (1) the wide variation in trauma-related community health outcomes could likely be explained by aspects of community context not typically addressed by the diagnostic instruments measuring traumatic stress and (2) the types of life experiences that might trigger the human stress response, and the reasons why, are themselves culturally- constructed and, thus, must be a fundamental consideration of health researchers.

My goal was to test those assertions, and the ethnographic research described in this dissertation is significant because I am able to reaffirm them with empirical data.

The results of the semistructured ethnographic interviews confirmed much of the contemporary social theory about life in rural Guatemala, social suffering research more broadly, and the conclusions of a growing body of public health and social epidemiology research about the limitations of clinical evaluations of traumatic illness and stress- related health in post-conflict contexts. The interviews I carried out with residents of San

Jose El Tesoro illustrate that people do indeed talk about distress and suffering in terms of much broader suite of distressing life experiences than are conventionally evaluated by public health researchers following the cessation of war-time violence.

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My analyses of informants’ narratives, and the consensus responses to the structured questionnaire, reinforce the notion that the chronic concerns of endemic poverty, social marginalization, and unattainable resources loom large in local conceptions about the causes of suffering in zones of conflict. In the post-Peace

Accords era of contemporary Guatemala, at least at my rural fieldsite, people do seem to be more concerned with the impact of structural inequalities related to poverty, unequal access to resources, and marginalization from the fair rights that they believe citizenry should provide than they are concerned with the events and experiences of the civil war.

Decades of conflict-related health research from the medical and social sciences has argued (1) to expand the analytical gaze beyond “traumatic” exposures to include context-specific stressors related to poverty and structural inequalities and (2) to evaluate health outcomes according to a more culturally-sensitive suite of potential stressors rather than to rely upon an a priori list of traumatic exposures. My findings give credence to arguments about the former point, but if I intend to contribute evidence to the latter point I will need to reconsider both my research design and my understanding of the theory underlying that design. This was made clear in some of the critiques I received during my defense of this dissertation.

Reconsidering the Project Design

From the inception of this project, my thinking was that the best way to test the assertions of previous researchers about stress-related health in post-conflict settings was to compare informants’ valuations of an ethnographically-derived list of post-conflict stressors to a list of traumatic stressors commonly found in war-related health research.

At the time, I felt that adapting the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ) to the

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experiences of informants at my fieldsite would provide an adequate proxy for informants’ actual thoughts about the most distressing life experiences associated with the Guatemalan civil war. However, during the course of writing this dissertation, I struggled at times with a burgeoning dissatisfaction about that research design choice; committee members also recognized some of the same problems.

By constructing the survey instrument as I did, I assumed that the questionnaire does reflect the wartime experiences that are most prescient in the minds of my informants and I presupposed that my adaptation of the HTQ does reflect those experiences that informants consider to be most distressing. In retrospect, a better strategy might have been to refer to the HTQ (or another similar diagnostic checklist) as a kind of touchstone from which I developed interview questions to specifically address particular types of war-related traumatic stressors common to the experience of the

Guatemalan civil war. However, a more important and complicated critique is that by setting up the structured questionnaire as I did, with the specific intention to make a binary comparison between wartime stressors and post-conflict stressors, I also presupposed the existence of two distinctly different suites of life experiences. This is problematic for both practical and theoretical reasons.

Many of the HTQ stressors that I included in my structured questionnaire (e.g., death by violence, theft or loss of property) are not life experiences specific to the experience of war. They can, and often do, occur in the post-conflict era. During the structured interview phase, I did not make the distinction between wartime stressors and post-war stressors with informants; I believed, as I still do now, that the randomization of the questionnaire allowed me to obscure the distinction between the

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two “lists” of stressors. However, my analysis of the questionnaire responses began by re-categorizing those stressors (e.g., death by violence, theft or loss of property) as being specific to the war era simply because they were included on a checklist of traumatic exposures related to the refugee experience.

I felt that my construction of the consensus questionnaire – establishing an explicit comparison between the acute traumatic exposures commonly addressed in conventional public health research and the chronic stressors of everyday life after the war – was the best way to empirically test some of the assertions made by medical anthropologists about the potential problems resulting from a privileging of traumatic exposures when evaluating post-conflict well-being, suffering, and generalized stress- related health outcomes. In practical terms, the consensus questionnaire as described in this dissertation (and the explicit comparison between wartime and post-conflict stressors) may have served the purpose of that test; in theoretical terms, though, I may have unintentionally undermined my own efforts to attend to the critiques of medical anthropologists about conventional trauma research.

Reconsidering “Trauma”

There is ample evidence that distressing life experiences are associated with negative health outcomes, particularly in people who have been exposed to the violence and terror of war, where the large-scale loss of life and societal upheaval dramatically increase rates of morbidity and mortality. Conventional health research in post-conflict settings has traditionally centered on biomedical constructs – like depressive symptoms and posttraumatic stress disorder – reporting a range of variation in individual mental health outcomes. My belief at the outset of this project was that at least some of that variation could be explained if researchers expand the suite of potentially stressful life

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experiences beyond those directly associated with the war. I still believe this. However, my reliance upon the clinical evaluations of posttraumatic stress disorder, via the HTQ, as a measure for traumatic exposures may not have been the wisest decision.

First, the version of the HTQ that I adapted for use in the consensus questionnaire is derived from the DSM-IV, the most recent version of the diagnostic manual at the time of my fieldwork. The release of the DSM-V (American Psychiatric

Association 2013) reflects a decade-long process of revisions to how clinicians conceptualize and evaluate depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, and stress and trauma disorders (Kraemer, Shrout, and Rubio-Stipec 2007; Levin, Kleinman, and Adler

2014; Regier, Narrow, and Kuhl 2010). One of the most significant changes to the DSM-

V was to reorient PTSD out of the manual's section on anxiety disorders into a new section on “trauma- and stress-related disorders, a cluster that now also includes acute stress disorder, the adjustment disorders, reactive attachment disorder, and a variety of

“specified” and “unspecified” stressor-related disorders.

Second, although the HTQ may be the most commonly used instrument for assessing traumatic exposure in refugee populations, it is by no means the only one

(Sigvardsdotter et al. 2016). Furthermore, the DSM-V is not the only diagnostic model for classifying PTSD, and some trauma researchers incorporate the World Health

Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD1). While the two might be seen as analogous models for clinically diagnosing stress and trauma disorders,

1The full name of the ICD is “International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems.” The current version is the ICD-10, although the development of the ICD-11 is ongoing and expected to be approved in 2018.

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comparisons between the ICD and the DSM illustrate that the diagnostic criteria underlying each model can lead to different outcomes (Hyland et al. 2016; Kirkpatrick et al. 2013; O'Donnell et al. 2014).

Third, while changes to the DSM-V and the upcoming ICD-11, and research comparing the relative efficacy of each diagnostic model in regard to PTSD and other stress-related disorders, may reflect a recognition of the heterogeneity of individual responses to stress, the influence of “culture” remains largely neglected in both models.

Although idioms of distress are included as expressive presentations of trauma in the

DSM-V, the stress disorders clustering in the new diagnostic section are nevertheless viewed as being universal human responses to the experience of stress (Friedman et al.

2011). This is important because, although previous health research provides some evidence that symptoms of clinical disorder can be found cross-culturally (Hinton and

Lewis-Fernandez 2011), there are well-recognized limits to the validity of these constructs in non-Western settings.

Two recent edited volumes (Hinton and Good 2015; Kohrt and Mendenhall 2015) tackle this longstanding issue by collecting together case studies from a wide range of ethnographic contexts – both in the United States and globally – in order to explore the strengths (and weaknesses) of clinical diagnostic categories of trauma. The cross- cultural vignettes described in these volumes reinforce questions about how to research the overlap between acute traumatic exposures and chronic everyday stressors

(Anderson-Fye 2015; Duncan 2015), the consideration of time-scales in communities characterized by historical trauma (Ball and O'Neill 2015), the concept of trauma in relation to structural inequalities and material resource deficits (Wutich et al. 2015); the

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expression of idioms of distress in association with clinical mental health disorders

(Keys 2015; Pedersen and Kienzler 2015), the ways in which gender shapes different conceptions of distress (Finley 2015; Yarris 2015), and the political and economic ramifications that may result when clinical diagnoses of trauma are privileged over ethnopsychiatric conceptions of distress in local context (Friedman 2015; James 2015).

Collectively, this recent research expands our understanding about the cultural- construction of stress and trauma, and the individual and community suffering that may result, but also reminds us that the clinical paradigm of posttraumatic stress disorder(s) not only shapes how researchers study health and well-being in zones of conflict but also shapes how those who are suffering are enabled or limited in their ability to seek recourse in response to that trauma (Shalev, Yehuda, and McFarlane 2016).2 Each of these two points are important considerations for me going forward as I reevaluate my own perspective(s) about the types of life experiences underlying a cultural model of suffering at my fieldsite in Guatemala.

Reconsidering Post-Conflict Guatemala

Many of my informants make clear that the problems they continue to face in the present represent an extension of the policies of economic, political, and sociocultural marginalization incorporated by the State long before the civil war began. While nearly everyone readily concedes that life is better than it was during the civil war, they also make clear the connections between the political-economic inequalities that existed before and during the war and their present ongoing struggles. Unfortunately, the failure

2In regard to the former point, see in particular Kudler (2016) and McFarlane (2016); for the latter, see Friedman (2016) and Steel and Silove (2016).

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of the government to follow-through on a majority of the UN-brokered Peace Accords, many of which were aimed at eliminating longstanding political-economic inequalities, has left many people at my fieldsite feeling that the government does not care about the plight of the country's poor and, further, that the failure of the government to fight the corruption plaguing the country represents an active engagement in the continued marginalization and oppression of the indigenous majority.

The idea imparted by some that the war against the rural countryside continues apace, except in the guise of economic forms of suppression, loomed large during my fieldwork and I was asked on many occasions to lend whatever institutional weight at my disposal to articulate their voices for anyone else who might hear about, and even assist, their ongoing struggle. A common refrain among the older members of my research community is that during the war people suffered greatly, but at least they were confident that their suffering would not last forever. At the time of my fieldwork, fifteen years after the formal cessation of violence, many of my informants had come to simply accept that things are not now, or any time soon, going to change much for the better.

This sentiment seems to be in line with recent ethnographic research from

Guatemala. For instance, Jennifer Burrell's (2013) study of Todos Santos, a municipio in the western highlands, describes a rural countryside filled with poor Guatemalans waiting for a “return” to normalcy following decades of life under the mercy of the coercive and controlling interests of the State. While peace exists, in the sense that the violence of the war has ended, Burrell argues that the increase in criminal delinquency, gang activity, and extrajudicial vigilante lynchings are expressions of distress and anxiety that still remain because the civil war fundamentally altered traditional forms of

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political-economic authority and communal governance. Kristen Weld's (2014) exploration of recently-discovered security archives provides substantial documentary evidence that this undermining of local politics and sociocultural relationships was a principal strategy of the State's war-era counterinsurgent operations. Edited volumes by

O'Neill and Thomas (2011) and Little and Smith (2009) explore the long-term consequences of those strategies in the post-Accord era in Guatemala's urban and rural communities, respectively, presenting a picture of a country and people still struggling to situate itself in the post-war era.

Conclusion

I argue in this dissertation that the structural and political-economic conditions that give rise to hopelessness in my informants’ lives, and the ways in which they perceive the severity of those conditions, are rarely explicitly addressed in community health surveys about the consequences of war. I argue that these conditions, particularly because they represent what people worry about in the present, are critically important for understanding the mental, biological, and behavioral processes that give rise to suffering and, more important, stress-related health outcomes and must, therefore, be fundamental considerations for future health research in post-conflict settings.

The incorporation of mixed method qualitative and quantitative research designs can be of great benefit to the design, planning, implementation, and evaluation of health interventions. This kind of engagement is significant for both theoretical and practical reasons. Theoretically, such an approach will bridge the gap between biomedical and anthropological research by actually testing how community life and shared constructions of what constitutes “good” and “bad” health relate to individual and

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collective well-being. In practical terms, this approach will contribute new knowledge about the social and cultural influences on population health that may inform future interventions to reduce the burden of poor health around the globe.

The results of the research presented here certainly support the assertions underlying those criticisms. However, the results also suggest that, even when studying

Western populations, researchers who study the health effects of traumatic exposure must broaden their analytic gaze in three fundamental ways: (1) to take as essential that the life experiences viewed as being difficult, distressing, or even traumatic following the experience of warfare cannot be relegated only to those war-related events that are commonly found on diagnostic checklists and questionnaires, (2) to recognize that the best way to learn about this wider range of distress is to ask the effected research population in person rather than to rely on a priori understandings of what constitutes distress, and (3) to incorporate the systematic exploration of inter- and intra-cultural variation with qualitative research in order to identify potential sources of variation in the appraisal of life stressors before the construction of community health surveys.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Brian Tyler grew up traveling the world, seeing and living in other cultures, which inspired his interest in other cultures and anthropology. He attended Washington

University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he received a B.A. in anthropology. Brian then moved on to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, attending Louisiana State University, where he pursued an interest in forensic anthropology, receiving an M.A. in anthropology.

Because he was not sure if he liked working with dead and decomposing human beings, and because he lacked the archaeological field experience to find a job working with human rights excavations in war zones, he worked for five years as a contract archaeologist in cultural resources management. Brian loved it, but being a shovel bum is hard work and he longed to go back to school to study violence and health in the prehistoric past. After a short stint at Florida State University, Brian changed his Ph.D. topic from the dead to the living, because he was way more interested in talking to people than in staring at a bunch of disarticulated bones, and he transferred to the

University of Florida with his mentor, Dr. Lance Gravlee. Brian loved being at UF, and he thinks often about the Medical Anthropology Journal Club, fun conversations and tough

(though justified) criticisms of his work in the lab, and talking about ideas and sharing dreams with his friends and colleagues there.

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