Synopses & Reviews
Across Guatemala, Mayan peoples are struggling to recover from decades of cataclysmic upheaval--religious conversions, civil war, displacement, military repression. Richard Wilson carried out long-term research with Qand#8217;eqchiand#8217;-speaking Mayas in the province of Alta Verapaz to ascertain how these events affected social organization and identity. He finds that their rituals of fertility and healing--abandoned in the 1970s during Catholic and Protestant evangelizations--have been reinvented by an ethnic revivalist movement led by Catholic lay activists, who seek to renovate the earth cult in order to create a new pan-Qand#8217;eqchiand#8217; ethnic identity.
Synopsis
Across Guatemala, Mayan peoples are struggling to recover from decades of cataclysmic upheavalandmdash;religious conversions, civil war, displacement, military repression. Richard Wilson carried out long-term research with Qandrsquo;eqchiandrsquo;-speaking Mayas in the province of Alta Verapaz to ascertain how these events affected social organization and identity.
About the Author
Richard Wilson is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. He served as a consultant for the documentary series Before Columbus, which first ran on British television in 1992. He co-edited (with B. Gills and J. Rocamora) Low Intensity Democracy: Political Power in the New World Order, published by Pluto Press/ Westview Press, London 1993.ÿ