A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala

by Diane M. Nelson

Book Overview

Many Guatemalans speak of Mayan indigenous organizing as "a finger in the wound." Diane Nelson explores the implications of this painfully graphic metaphor in her far-reaching study of the civil war and its aftermath. Why use a body metaphor? What body is wounded, and how does it react to apparent further torture? If this is the condition of the body politic, how do human bodies relate to it-those literally wounded in thirty-five years of war and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520212851
• ISBN13: 9780520212855
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

invaluable

In A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala, anthropologist Diane M. Nelson provides an analysis and ethnography of the Guatemalan State that is not only rich in its theoretical scope and in its empirical breadth, but that also brings to life the challenges of political struggle and everyday politics in Guatemala. This book contains information about Guatemalan political and government entities and events, such as the Academy of Mayan Languages, the ratification of ILO Convention 169, Guatemalan government actors and ministries, the Maya cultural rights movement, and the effects of the 36-year-long civil war, while simultaneously conveying incisive analysis of both actual actors in these struggles and the manner in which popular imagery, fantasies, fears, and stereotypes play into the struggles for self-representation of people in these different groups. While Nelson takes the Maya cultural rights movement and nation-state identity as her focus, because she focuses on the relations that constitute particular identities rather than on just the identities themselves, she provides an integrative analysis of how different identities-Maya, Ladino, gringo, "the State", "non-State actors", males and females, and others- constitute each other. The result is a book that offers insight not just into the Maya cultural rights movement in relation with the Guatemalan state and into the political context in the aftermath of the civil war, but also into how gender identities shape the roles and positions of women and men in relation with ethnic identities and the nationalist ladino discourse of the state. Using jokes, metaphor, and extensive ethnographic accounts from years of fieldwork, Nelson offers an analysis of Guatemala's recent political and social context, and the wider global context, that is both intellectually and politically provocative. She dares to make the connections that raise difficult questions; [i]f the subject of feminism, for example, does not exist as woman but is instead the effect of institutions and practices that produce the category of `woman' (and then never as a fixed identity), then how does one fight women's oppression?" (71). Nelson explores such questions through developing the concept of fluidarity as " a practice of necessarily partial knowledge-in both the sense of taking the side of, and of being incomplete, vulnerable, and never completely fixed (Clifford 1986). This neologism plays with the idea of solidarity in an attempt to keep its vitally important transnational relations open and at the same time question its tendency toward rigidity, its reliance on solid, unchanging identifications, and its often unconscious hierarchizing (42) ". The concept of fluidarity challenges readers to place themselves in relation with Guatemala's political and social context by acknowledging that all identity is mutually constitutive and by making connections with the wider global and transnational context within wh

Indispensable

Diane Nelson's extraordinary "ethnography of the state (3)" takes its title from a metaphor often used by Guatemalans to describe the indigenous cultural rights activism that has emerged in the wake of the Guatemalan war, a constant reminder to Guatemalans of the racial divisions that have structured national history and identity. A Finger in the Wound is an enormously rich and complex work, one that defies easy description or summation of its arguments. Nelson's stated aim is to examine the post-war emergence of Maya cultural activism; her integrative approach and subtle analysis, however, has produced a much more ambitious work. Through the prism of the state institutions, non-governmental organizations, cultural rights groups, popular culture, jokes (the appendix listing Rigoberta Menchú jokes is worth the price of the book alone), and global relations of production, Nelson examines the formation of Guatemala's racialized nationalism. Nelson's analysis deftly combines poststructural, gender, marxist, and psychoanalytic theory to argue for the articulated, relational nature of Ladino and Maya identity: "ethnic, gender, and nation-state identities are mutually constitutive, meaning that they do not exist outside their relation to each other, and at this historical moment the Guatemalan state is an important matrix through which these relations occur (7)." Unlike previous studies of Guatemala that dismiss the state as inherently illegitimate, Nelson takes the state seriously. Capacity to repress, while important, cannot alone explain its tenacity: "The state . . . is not a clear-cut set of interests that gets what it wants through repressive apparatuses. In Guatemala it has been and is still extraordinarily repressive-that is why there is so much attention to wounded bodies in this book. But it is also, and simultaneously, a set of relations: a structure of domination, yes, but one which in turns forms the conditions of possibility for all political work (28)." Nelson work demonstrates that these structures of domination often have unintended effects. One such effect is the space that has opened up in the wake of the war within state institutions for Maya activism. A Finger in the Wound examines the hostile reaction by many Ladinos, including Leftists, to this organizing. Nelson points out that while indigenous identity is an indispensable component of Guatemalan nationalism, Maya activists, by assuming what is considered a "western" lifestyle, threatens the binary assumptions -- particular/universal; past/future; female/male; etc. -- that underwrite racial, gender, and national identity. Importantly, Nelson's is the first study to examine critically the role gender ideologies and relations play in the development of the pan-Maya movement. Nelson admits to suffering from postmodern doubt: "In working on this book . . . I have found 'the people' to be rather more het