Maya after War

Anthropologist Burrell writes movingly and incisively about how that common story has played out in one well-known Maya community, Todos Santos Cuchamatin...From her vantage point in a single indigenous community, Burrell gleans special insights into the varied consequences of labor migration and remittance on social order at home and on a young generation's effort to chart a new course in the world. A highly readable and evocative work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. ~Choice

A significant contribution to Mesoamerican ethnography and social scientific studies of violence and its aftermath. . . . Burrell engages the major social forces (violence, migration, neoliberalism) that have affected the Highland Guatemala region. Her multilevel analysis of conflict is sorely needed within anthropology in general and regional ethnography in particular. ~Thomas A. Offit, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Baylor University

Burrell’s ethnography depicts the contradictions and competing interests that emerge among residents of a Maya town adjusting to life ‘after war.’ Neoliberalism, insecurity, conflict, democracy—the key words of the twenty-first century can all be found here, cannily interpreted through an ethnographic lens that situates global issues in the daily realities of people struggling to make a life amidst loss, anger, and grief. The book is essential reading for all seeking to understand Latin American history and society and the lives of indigenous people in the aftermath of violence. ~Daniel Goldstein, Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University

A beautifully written and deeply engaged book about indigenous people who, during war, experienced revolutionary mobilization, massacre, para-militarization, and displacement, and, ‘after war,’ confront migration, gangs, tourism, development, and lynching. In this, Todos Santos is a microcosm of the last fifty years of Guatemala’s history, and Burrell’s two decades of fieldwork afford readers a lovely and nuanced sense of people and place. Richly personal accounts mesh easily with rigorous analysis. . . . Local struggles over authority and resources mesh with more national and global forces in ways that make this very traditional place completely cosmopolitan, and [the struggles] continue to simmer—tendrilling into the postwar, sometimes emerging as acts of horrifying violence and grievous remorse. This is a profound and essential exploration of identity, sovereignty, organizing, and struggles over generational and gendered authority, as well as of anthropology itself. ~Diane M. Nelson, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Women’s Studies, Duke University