It is fitting that Linda Green’s book on Mayan widows comes out at the end of the century. This tour de force provides a powerful context for understanding how historical processes and material forces have combined to shape contemporary Mayan culture. Readers both new and familiar to Guatemala are presented a penetrating analysis of the poignancy and stakes of everyday life through an exploration of the relationship between material conditions and lived experience. Central to this relationship in Guatemala is the role of violence.
The accounts of widows surviving their losses with dignity illuminate exactly what has been, and continues to be, fiercely contested and at stake throughout the body politic of Guatemala. Green shows that these women—at once considered victims and suspects—embody the very national and historical pathos that has shaped the character of modern Guatemala.
The author deftly recalibrates the way we look at Guatemala, challenging revisionist accounts that minimize the centrality of state violence in Guatemala. She also argues against those who discount anthropological works focusing on the operations of fear or terror. Green’s historicized and subtle account requires skeptics to seriously consider how violence and fear are constituent elements of everyday life. The strength of Green’s work lies in its willingness to embrace in all its complexities and contradictions the very heterogeneity of violence and the manifold nature of power as it has operated over time, place and social context.
The first section of the book traces the legacy of violence in Guatemala. Green describes how both structural and political violence conspire to constrain agency, induce silence and maintain fear. If the result of violence and fear were simply compliance and acquiescence, then the question of Mayan resilience and will could easily be ignored. Yet Green’s dialectical treatment of violence, particularly in the second section of the book, reveals the impressive capacity for survival and resistance of the Mayan people. Everyday acts like the grinding of corn and the weaving of cloth, along with the richness of associational life both in religious groups and mutual aid societies, are testimony to the dignity and determination of the Maya. The intertwining of violence and survival has structured how the Maya exist and operate in a world that remains eternally uncertain and ambiguous.
This eloquent and sophisticated ethnography of Mayan Indians in general, and Mayan widows in particular, provides much-needed insight into the reality of violence and survival in Guatemala today. Fear as a Way of Life should be read as a primer on the subtle and insidious ways power and violence operate. Regardless of whether the violence exercised is direct, as in military bombings, or indirect, as in the fear of being wrongly accused, violence has shaped the structure of everyday life and limited the range of options individuals and communities can exercise. The absence of war does not mean that peace reigns as long as the institutions of violence and impunity remain intact. As long as this is the case, and it has been for some 500 years in Guatemala, fear will continue to be a way of life.
