1. society

(Dis)Articulating Community
A critique of ‘community studies’ in Guatemala
with suggestions for future research
Victoria L. Henderson
GPHY 874
Dr. W. George Lovell / Dr. William Starna
Queen’s University, Kingston
21 December 2006
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How Guatemalans define their communities has been and will
be the most significant determinant of Guatemala’s future.
― Carol Smith (1990: 21)
This paper examines the (dis)articulation of community as a socio-spatial concept in
Guatemala. For more than seven decades, the “overwhelming bulk” of anthropological research
conducted in Mesoamerica “has been reported in the form of community studies” (Chambers and
Young 1979: 45; see also Carmack 1990, 1995; Hawkins 1984; Hervik and Kahn 2006; Hostettler
2004; Pebley, Goldman and Robles 2005; Smith 1990b; Vogt 1994; Warren 1978; Watanabe
1990; Wilson 1993; Wolf 1957). Despite — or perhaps because of — this trend, there remains
much debate over how community should be defined. Is it natural (Vogt 1994)?; imagined
(Wilson 1993)?; surreal (Hervik and Kahn 2006)? Is community a manifestly indigenous place —
an inversion of the urban ladino archetype (Hawkins 1984)? Is it a site of cultural reproduction
(Cojtí Cuxil 1996) or a last line of resistance against capital expansion (Smith 1984)?
The enduring centrality of community in anthropological research speaks to an appreciation
of its conceptual import. Yet scholars would be remiss to deny that, for all of the attention it has
received, community remains a disturbingly deficient category of analysis. The purpose of this
paper is two-fold. My first and primary concern is to undertake a review of existing literature on
Guatemala in order to demonstrate the over-use and under-theorization of community as an
analytical construct. All too often, the concept is conflated with, made subordinate to, or
unsettled by other categories of analysis, such as geo-political boundaries, ethnicity, and class.
This derives, I argue, from a tendency to study community as a condition rather than as a
process. When studied as a condition, community is romanticized, homogenized, and reified;
when studied as a process, community may be understood as contingent, emergent, always
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existing but never reduced to an axiomatic ideal. At issue is whether community should be
embedded, theoretically and territorially, in the (local) landscape, or whether it is more accurately
rendered in constant and dynamic tension with non-local (regional, national, international)
interests. Drawing on political-economic and social theories, I make a case for the latter.
My second and corollary concern involves considering how the processual study of
community might be operationalized in a way that is sensitive to the material and conceptual
exchange flows between local and non-local interests. In theory, this is less than revolutionary.
Few scholars would deny that community is shaped, to some degree, by external forces — even
if many often overlook “the possibility that local-level processes actively shape the larger
picture” (Smith 1984: 195). In anthropological practice, however, the processual study of
community has largely been dismissed as the purview of ‘other’ social scientists, due either to an
“inability” on the part of scholars “to conceptualize... a dialectical process that involves the
articulation of different layers in a multilayered system” (Smith 1984: 194), or to a disciplinary
belief that “(t)he attempt to view other systems from ground level is the basis, perhaps the only
basis, of anthropology’s distinctive contribution to the human sciences” (Ortner 1984: 143; see
also Vogt 1994: 354). 1 The goal in proposing a processual study is to uproot community as a
ground level condition. To that end, I suggest a transfer in the (dis)articulation of community
from landscape to soundscape. The phenomenon of (indigenous) community radio in Guatemala
is used to model a ‘messier’ entanglement of interests that crosses geographic, socio-political, and
economic boundaries. 2 While soundspace community is neither an equivalent to, nor a
replacement for, community embodied in landscape, I suggest that its inherent non-fixedness may
1
Italics mine.
This approach is consistent with what has been called an “obvious first step” in processual study: “to develop
models of those structures that mediate between the local community and the world system” (Smith 1984: 194).
2
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give it heuristic import, opening up a conceptual thirdspace to scholars of community studies, who
have historically — but not unproblematically — focused on “territories as didactic aids in the
consumption and comprehension of metaphysical concepts” (Hervik and Kahn 2006: 220).
Conspicuously ill-defined, the community study is the most time-worn approach to
anthropological research in Guatemala. What constitutes community as an analytical framework
is rarely spelled out in monographs. The supposition, it seems, is that community is an accepted
paradigm, one of those “all-purpose conceptual boxes” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 31) that
scholars need not engineer or quality test but only fill. The odd time a red flag is raised and a
definition of community is offered, it tends to be uncritically vague. Acknowledging the term
community study as “subject to misunderstanding,” for example, the authors of a comprehensive
review on Mesoamerican research first define community as “a group of people living in close
proximity, most often in a place with recognized geographical or political boundaries” and then
propose that a community study is that which is “devoted to a single such place, or to a part of a
community... or to the comparison of a number of recognized and bounded communities”
(Chambers and Young 1979: 46). It is unclear why the condition of ‘close proximity’ is not held
constant. The fact that it appears in the first place implies that community is subject to some
degree of enviro-spatial determinism, which may call into question the analytical value of a
study that seeks to compare, non-ceteris paribus, two or more spatially distanced and
environmentally distinct communities. 3 Moreover, the suggestion that part of a community may
3
The anthropological literature on the effect of enviro-spatial determinism is contradictory. One study of Q’eqchi’
peoples in Alta Verapaz argues that Q’eqchi’ attachment a local “sacred landscape” has diluted across time. Where
once “local geography” (particularly the local mountain) was considered the “cornerstone of community identity,”
Q’eqchi’ later “incorporated principles of universality and accepted a wider basis of association than just the
community” (Wilson 1993: 126—131). Another study among the Q’eqchi’ diaspora in Petén, questions the group’s
adaptability to new enviro-spatial conditions, suggesting that Q’eqchi’ acknowledge “few ecological dependencies”
in Petén. The implication is that “ceremonial attachment to high sacred mountains” of the originary community
“detours access to ecological information relevant to lowland commons survival” (Hostettler 2004: 438).
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be isolated and treated as a discrete social unit is highly problematic. The authors offer the
example of “an Indian group within a larger community” (Chambers and Young 1979: 46),
framing group affinity as a condition of ethnicity. Boundary-making, however, is processual;
ethnicity and community are both dependent concepts. The former may be understood as an
“aspect of a relationship, not a property of a group” (Hervik and Kahn 2006: 214; see also Barth
1969: 9); the latter is said to exist only “by virtue of its opposition to another community”
(Donnan and Wilson 1999: 24). Ironically, the authors of the review conclude by lamenting the
“especially disappointing” tendency toward parochialism and criticizing anthropologists for
presenting community “as a unified, integrated whole” — an approach which they admit “seriously
distorts the reality of most Mesoamerican communities” (Chambers and Young 1979: 65).
How scholars have represented the ‘reality’ of communities in Guatemala has changed
across time. While the community study has almost always held as the research model of choice,
it has been approached from differing methodological and epistemological positions, or what
may be understood as differing “boundaries of interpretation” (Thompson 2001: 75). From the
1930s to the 1970s, most studies of (Maya) communities were conducted in situ in the Western
highlands. These studies overwhelmingly reported social units that were “socially integrated,
closed to the outside world, and strongly resistant to change” (Hostettler 2004: 435—436). The
‘closed corporate peasant community’ posited by Eric Wolf (1957) became a benchmark against
which to measure Maya communities. 4 According to this prototype, the closed peasant
community is one that strives “to prevent outsiders from becoming members,” places limits “on
the ability of members to communicate with the larger society,” and encourages members to
“content themselves with the rewards of ‘shared poverty’” (Wolf 1957: 2).
4
Wolf has since re-evaluated the totalizing ‘boundedness’ of this model (Wolf 1982). Given its purchase in existing
literature, however, it is worth (dis)articulating here.
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The ‘closed corporate peasant community’ prototype had a long run among scholars of
Guatemala, who continued to reference the work well into the late-1980s and early-1990s (see,
for example, Collins 1980; Handy 1990; Lutz and Lovell 1990; Smith 1984; Watanabe 1990). It
is not within the scope of this paper to present an exhaustive account of the darts and laurels
directed towards the corporate peasant model. The way in which community was conceptualized
in this model, however, deserves brief mention. It has been argued that the “closed corporate
model has come to be taken more as a substantive index of ‘community’ rather than as the
Weberian ideal type that Wolf intended” 5 (Watanabe 1990: 183). That Wolf’s article sketches
definitions for the terms ‘peasant’ and ‘corporate’ but avoids doing the same for ‘community’
seems to reinforce the argument that community is an ‘all-purpose conceptual box’ among
scholars. 6 Further, the embodiment of community as a corporate model underscores the tendency
to see community as a condition. Although Wolf is said to have been concerned with “social
processes” (Watanabe 1990: 183), by his own account such processes were catalyzed by “forces
which lie within the larger society to which the community belongs rather than within the
boundaries of the community itself” (Wolf 1957: 7). Wolf’s model places peasant communities
on a “cultural continuum” that has as its end-state “closed and corporate properties” (Lutz and
Lovell 1990: 47). As an analytical construct, the Weberian ideal type is not without utility.
Applied in cases where rigidly ethnocentric ‘boundaries of interpretation’ have produced false
(scholarly) consciousness, however, the ideal type becomes strikingly counter-intuitive, artificially
flattening social diversity and vitiating human agency. The “common life situations” (Wolf
1957: 12) said to shape Mesoamerican peasant communities remain a point of contention, in no
small part because community itself continues to be an ambiguous category of analysis.
5
6
Italics mine. See Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1949).
Wolf uses the terms ‘community’ and ‘village’ interchangeably.
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Contemporary criticism of anthropological research on Guatemala charges that scholars
frequently represent small communities as “territorialized vehicles of Mayanness” in order to
“bring forth a meta-image of a homogenous cultural group,” unfettered by linguistic, political,
environmental, and historical distinctions (Hervik and Kahn 2006: 211). The imagining of a panMaya, “supra-communal world view” (Wilson 1993: 133) has strong political salience; however,
it requires that a deeply essentialist identity be embedded, theoretically and territorially, in the
(local) landscape. 7 In theory, this identity would “encompass and perhaps ultimately replace the
longstanding community-based allegiances of Maya groups,” forcing a “fundamenta(l)
restructuring (of) the way in which millions of individuals view the world and their position
therein” (Fischer 1999: 487; see also Fischer and Brown 1996). Concern over the extent to which
anthropologists accept and embrace a pan-Maya identity is not misplaced. The discipline has
historically encouraged scholars to study “the crystalline patterns of a whole culture, and not
the blurred zones in between” (Fabian 1983: 209). But it is precisely in the ‘blurred zones,’ the
areas of interaction and incursion, where the process of boundary-making and identification
unfolds. The fact that Maya peoples have most often responded to oppression as “separate
communities” rather than as “a self-conscious class” (Smith 1990a: 18) is both a damning
political reality and a compelling ethnographic declaration. But it begs the central question: how
are ‘separate communities’ defined?
The connection between community affinities and geo-political boundaries in Guatemala
is nothing if not enigmatic. Attempts to relocate Maya peoples into nucleated communities or
congregaciones during the colonial period were frustrated by persistent fugitivism, as “Indians
repeatedly fled to outlying rural areas to escape the exploitation they suffered while residing in
7
For a discussion of “strategic” and “class” essentialism in reference to pan-Mayanism, see Kearney (1999).
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town or close by” (Lovell 1988: 34). Moreover, congregaciones were often internally divided by
rival parcialidades, 8 which “tended to preserve their autochthonous identity by continuing to
function socially and economically as separate components rather than merging to form a
corporate body” (Lovell 1988: 35). In Sacapulas, for example, parcialidades held land and
paid tribute “as discrete Indian parts of a Spanish-conceived whole” (Lutz and Lovell 1990: 48;
see also Hill and Monaghan 1987). Occasionally, the parcialidades fell into disagreement
among themselves over land rights and boundaries (Lovell 1988: 36), lending credence to the
observation that “(w)hat boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of
meanings and bodies” (Haraway 1991: 201). The problem however, is that anthropologists have
long regarded “movement” as the “antithesis to culture” (Thompson 2001: 17; see also Fabian
1983), so that even in those cases where fieldwork reveals boundary-making as process,
community is most often recorded as a cultural condition. Take, for example, an early community
study of Jacaltenango, which contradictorily reports that Jacaltecos were both “dominat(ed)” by
the centripetal “custom of centering around one village” and prone to a centrifugal tendency to
“scatter into little settlements” closer to the fields in which they laboured (La Farge and Byers
1931: 71, cited in Thompson 2001: 73—74). In spite of the apparent (dis)articulation of
community into ‘little settlements,’ it is the village that is privileged as reifying ‘custom.’
More contemporary studies continue the trend of delimiting community, at least in part,
in accordance with geo-political boundaries, principally either the municipio or the aldea — or,
somewhat confusingly, both. In all cases, the definition is problematic. A study of the impact of
Guatemala’s early-1950s agrarian reform law reveals that the redistribution of municipal land
“marked only one more turning point in a long struggle between various municipios or between
8
Parcialidades are social units generally ordered “as patrilineal clans or localized kin groups” (Lovell 1988: 35).
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parts of municipios over land. Often this represented a disagreement over what constituted the
community itself” (Handy 1990: 179). A community study of Totonicapán undertaken in the
1970s attempts to theorize the difference in communal affinity between municipio and aldea, 9
but the result is an analytically troublesome brew that refers interchangeably to community and
ethnicity (writing out the ladino cohort) as municipal identities, and splits political and
sociological concerns territorially. The relevant ‘political’ meaning of community is said to be
found in the municipio, while the ‘natural’ community is reported to be the aldea: 10
... while the Indians of Totonicapán had a strong sense of identification with
their hamlet (where a basis for community solidarity obviously existed in
kinship, close familial relationships, marriage, and even remnants of community
property), their active social and political allegiance was to the municipio — an
entity that created a sociological basis for community solidarity only through
political struggle (Smith 1990b: 224).
To suggest that community is defined by political and/or sociological affinities is not, in
and of itself, problematic; nor is it beyond reason to claim that such affinities manifest geopolitically in both municipio and aldea. What taxes the analytical value of community as
presented above, however, is the fact that the stated territorial boundaries encompass a ladino
cohort that is wholly excluded from both political and sociological groupings. Totonicapán is
described as having “as many as eighty thousand Indians, together with one or two thousand
ladinos who are not part of the ‘community’” (Smith 1990a: 18). 11 In this case, it would seem
that the most appropriate category of analysis is not community per se, but rather Maya
‘groupness’. Following the lead of scholars who have stepped forward to critique the much overIn earlier work by Sol Tax the municipio was declared not only the “territorial administrative divisions recognized
in all governmental matters,” but also “as it happens — the basic ethnic division and cultural groups into which the
country is divided” (Tax 1937: 425, cited in Hervik and Kahn 2006: 213).
10
The extent to which the definition of aldea as a “natural unit” (Smith 1990b: 225) applies to other communities is
open to debate. The civil war (1960—1996) resulted in one in four Maya peoples being displaced between 1981 and
1985, and led to the forced relocation of “suspect communities” into new “model villages” (Lovell 1988: 47; see
also Wilson 1993: 31).
11
Italics and single quotation marks in original.
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rated concept of identity in postmodern discourse, I argue that this is not a ‘merely semantic’ or
‘terminological’ issue: first, because social science “requires relatively unambiguous analytical
categories” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 31); and second, because border-making of any sort is
an exercise of power and must be scrutinized as such. Recent anthropological criticism draws
attention to the fact that “a number of scholars of the Maya examine ethnicity by means of
community by concurrently conceptualizing ladinos as not ethnic but as the ethnicizers” (Hervik
and Kahn 2006: 215—216; see also Wilmsen and McAllister 1996). 12 The result is that ladinos
do not qualify analytically as ‘ethnic’ or as members of ‘community.’ 13
Since at least the late-1950s, when Wolf’s ‘closed corporate peasant community’
introduced a discussion of the “dualization of society into a dominant entrepreneurial sector and
a dominated sector of native peasants” (Wolf 1957: 8), and more pronouncedly since the 1970s,
when world-systems and dependency paradigms took hold in anthropology (Ortner 1984: 141—
144), scholars have, in varying ways and to varying degrees, ‘placed’ Maya communities in a
class (and cultural) struggle against ‘external’ forces, arguing that “in this wider context
‘community’ represents the locus of Mayan resistance to proletarianization by the state” (Smith
1987: 214, paraphrased in Watanabe 1990: 184; see also Hervik and Kahn 2006: 221—222).
Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in attempts to situate “local dynamics in the context of an
increasingly globalized world” (Hostettler 2004: 437) are questions of continuity and change.
Scholars have tended to embed the former, theoretically and territorially, in the (local) landscape,
12
Italics mine.
In a study of San Andrés Semetabaj, ‘community’ (single quotation marks in original) is presented as a metaphor:
“In a certain range of contexts, Trixanos speak of community as a bi-ethnic entity in which Indians are always
subordinated to ladinos by ethnic identity. Alternatively, in other contexts, Trixanos speak of community as an
exclusively Indian entity that has inherited ‘blood’ (or common ‘descent’) and ‘tradition’ from the first Indian
ancestors” (Warren 1978: 43). That community exists as a category of practice is not in dispute; but there are clear
methodological and epistemological implications to adopting community as a category of analysis where two (or
more), often oppositional, definitions of community exist — especially when those definitions deny constituency to
a particular cohort based on the condition of ethnicity.
13
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while framing the latter as a ‘foreign’ incursion. Some of the most outspoken critics of resistance
discourse in Mesoamerican anthropology charge that “small communities” have always been coopted by scholars as markers of continuity, “flawless and unadulterated reproducers of the status
quo” (Hervik and Kahn 2006: 212). This is, perhaps, a more defensible position in reference to
earlier anthropological work, as much post-1980s literature cautions against romanticization and
encourages greater recognition of Maya agency (see, for example, Lovell 1988: 48—49 n. 6). Even
among contemporary scholars, however, there remains a tendency to truncate the material and
conceptual exchange flows between local and non-local interests at the (supra-)community level.
Maya peoples are seen to embody the condition of change. Consider the suggestion that Maya
peoples are “actors who have responded to events in ways that help determine no small part of
their cultural reality” (Farriss 1983, paraphrased in Lovell 1988: 26). There is nothing untrue about
this statement, of course; but there is a good argument to be made that scholars must concern
themselves to explain “not only how capitalist expansion affect(s) one small local system, but also
how local institutions interac(t) with externally imposed forces to create a particular dynamic that
affect(s) capitalist expansion itself” (Smith 1984: 196).
The call to examine community as process — to uproot it as a ground level condition and
analyze it in action rather than romanticizing its inaction — is no small challenge, especially for
a discipline that has long maintained “cultures must be protected from movement, and contained
within borders, or else they disappear” (Thompson 2001: 17). But some scholars have
entertained the challenge, at least in part. John Watanabe, for example, has disassembled the ‘allpurpose conceptual box’ that stands for community in order to define its constituent parts.
Watanabe argues that ‘community’ 14 in the Western highlands of Guatemala consists of two
14
Single quotation marks in original.
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“realities”: place and premises. The former is conceptualized as a “physical locale with a given
populace and resources”; the latter, regarded as “conventional strategies for surviving in that
place” (1990: 184). Watanabe is heading in the right direction, but he stops frustratingly short of
the goal. His theorization of place marks a laudable effort to inhibit the reification of community:
... ‘place’ posits no a priori constellation of local institutions or cultural
practices that exclusively defines community. Instead, it draws attention to the
ongoing existential concerns and ‘ecological’ parameters that motivate
‘community,’ whatever its form. Rather than simply an artifact of its extrinsic
consequences, ‘community’ becomes a problematic social nexus that must also
be explained in its own terms (Watanabe 1990: 184).
By adopting an empirical theory of place as distinct from, but corollary to community,
Watanabe is able avoid the flattening tendency of the ideal type in order to present
Chimaltenango (in this case) as a community that “confounds preconceptions” due to its
“economically stratified” but “ethnically homogenous” constitution (Watanabe 1990: 185). The
problem with Watanabe’s remodeled approach to community is his conceptualization of
premises as ‘conventional strategies for surviving in that place.’ 15 Emphasizing ‘surviving’ over
‘living’ may simply be poor word choice; in conjunction with that delimited concept of place,
however, it reinforces a sense of dialectic stasis — the communal benchmark being set at
survival rather than, for example, progress (however that might be defined). 16 Defining survival
as a condition embedded in the (local) landscape perpetuates the misconception that change is
driven only by the incursion of an ‘external’ force, impeding a more comprehensive
15
Italics mine.
This is not meant to make light of hegemonic oppression that often does make (indigenous) community life in
Guatemala a matter of survival. It is meant to underscore, however, the potential for human agents to act, both
reactively and preemptively, in an effort to better their conditions. Reactive action may best describe a shorter-term
“interest theory” approach that is necessary to survival; preemptive action, a longer-term “strain theory” approach
that involves the type of systematic analysis that is the basis of progress. See Ortner (1984) for more information on
interest and strain theories. Watanabe suggests ‘premises’ serve “actors’ immediate ends of ‘getting along in the
world’” in addition so “some minimal ‘consensus of tradition,’” accounting for an awareness of past and present but
ignoring long-term, future-shaping strategies.
16
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understanding of process. Although Watanabe does not specify how that place is bounded, his
decision to offer Chimaltenango as an example suggests the importance of geo-political
boundaries. Given the tendency among scholars to disregard geo-political boundaries where they
interfere with building an account of Maya ‘groupness,’ however, it is uncertain whether
Watanabe’s conceptualization of place, and by extension community, would have purchase in
municipios and aldeas that are ethnically heterogeneous. As previously mentioned, the
connection between community affinities and geo-political boundaries in Guatemala is highly
enigmatic. By focusing on the premises that condition survival in that (geo-political) place,
Watanabe overlooks the ‘blurred zones’ where boundary-making unfolds. While dedicating time
to describe how Chimaltecos’ “‘way of being’ involves abiding attachments to the place first
settled by local ancestors and the immediate ‘condition’ of one’s blood” (1990: 187), Watanabe
glosses over the fact that one of the Chimaltecos’ strategies for ‘survival’ has been to migrate,
periodically or permanently, to the neighbouring municipio of La Democracia. We are left to
wonder how community obtains in this case. If im/migrant Chimaltecos retain a sense of
community (either among themselves as an im/migrant group in La Democracia, or with the
originary affinity in Chimaltenango) because the landscape remains familiar and sacred, then
‘place’ as defined geo-politically by Watanabe does not hold.
Clearly, scholars must ‘draw the line’ somewhere. It is impossible to exhaust all avenues
of communal affinity, especially when community is placed within an overarching world-system.
For as much as some anthropologists may argue for the importance of “studying down” (Vogt
1994: 353), the discipline as a whole has built a reputation for ‘generalizing up,’ appealing to a
state of ‘Mayanness’ through consistent references to “territorialized links, agricultural
metaphors, unadulterated ethnicity and tropes of resistance” (Hervik and Kahn 2006: 210). This
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suggests that the community study services supra-communal knowledge production; it implies
that places like Totonicapán, San Andrés Semetabaj, and Chimaltenango, while important in
their own right, are equally significant in contributing to the mapping of broader socio-systemic
‘realities’ (to use Watanabe’s phrasing). The difficulty rests with the fact that such realities tend
to be extrapolated from a highly problematic analytical base: the community as condition. 17 To
his credit, Watanabe recognizes the importance of process, arguing that he intends to “highlight
how ‘community’ here can both accede to global hegemony and yet also constitute a significant
determinant of that hegemony” (1990: 185) — a proposal straight out of anthropology’s
‘political-economic turn,’ which calls for a unified theory to explain both how the system shapes
practice and how practice shapes the system (Ortner 1984: 153—154). But the attempt falls short
insomuch as Watanabe conflates community and practice, arguing that community ‘accedes to’
(reproduces) and ‘is a determinant of’ (conditions) hegemony. What reproduces and changes
hegemony is not community but rather practice, or more accurately: practices. These practices,
or ‘premises’— by Watanabe’s own definition — constitute only part of community. If his
theory is to hold, the part cannot be made to condition the whole.
Like many other ‘key terms’ in the social sciences, community is passionately over-used
and sadly under-theorized. It has long held a central place in anthropological scholarship on
Guatemala; yet its resistance to definition has resulted in its frequent conflation with,
subordination to, or unsettling by, other categories of analysis, such as geo-political boundaries,
ethnicity, and class. That Watanabe should title an article on Chimaltenango “Enduring Yet
Ineffable Community in the Western Periphery of Guatemala” (1990) is a statement on both the
‘sacred’ and ‘inexpressible’ nature of community. It is also, however, indicative of the problems
17
See for example Watanabe’s conclusion, which examines how Chimaltenango “differs in degree, not kind, from
other Mayan communities on Guatemala’s western periphery” (1990: 202—204).
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associated with adopting community as an analytical construct. Few would deny that community
exists as a category of practice. Similar in many ways to identity, community is used by people
in everyday settings to “make sense of themselves, of their activities, of what they share with,
and how they differ from, others” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 4). In that sense, scholars are not
wrong to point out the importance of “face-to-face” interactions (Vogt 1994: 355), “reflexive
lived experiences” (Fischer 1999: 477), and shared sense of “place” (Watanabe 1990; see also
Wilson 1993) as indicators of the practice and performance of community. But community
proves far more difficult as a category of analysis. Its ‘ineffability’ is incompatible with the
“relatively unambiguous analytical categories” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 31) demanded by
social science. This is not to imply that community is a dispensable concept, but to suggest that
we need new, more rigorous ways of delimiting it in research.
Social theorists have argued, in reference to identity, that if it is everywhere, it is nowhere
(Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 1). The same holds true for community. What makes both terms
problematic is the fact that their political value tends to be higher than their analytical value.
They surrender process (boundary-making) to condition (end-state). Embedding a haphazard
“mix and match” (Hervik and Kahn 2006: 210) of theoretical and territorial boundaries in the
Guatemalan landscape is a slippery slope and should be of critical concern to scholars.
Borders that are less obviously repressive than some of the others, and that may
even arise from a sense of solidarity with indigenous people, are the borders
that sympathizers, usually outsiders, construct in order to contain traditional
and landed cultures within forms of discourse. This discourse is usually related
to romantic views concerning the land and a sense of rootedness in the soil
(Thompson 2001: 15—16).
The primary aim of this paper has been to problematize the use of community as an
analytical construct in research on Guatemala. Existing literature is historically and culturally
rich and teaches us much about dynamic social relations across time and space, particularly
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among Maya peoples. But in large measure it lacks definitive engagement with the critical
boundaries implicit in the term community study. The recurring tendency to offset the word
community in scare quotes (‘’) is indicative of the fact that the object under study is in
question (see, for example, Smith 1990a; Warren 1978; Watanabe 1990). It is my position that
community is a particular ‘form of discourse’ among (mainly Western) scholars — and I argue
that it must be challenged as such. If community studies are to remain central to
anthropological research, greater care must be taken to explain the rationale for delimiting one
boundary of communal affinity over another. Moreover, scholars should examine community
in action: exploring the ‘blurred zones’ that unsettle tidy inversions and acknowledging
emerging ways of enacting community that cut across geographic, socio-political, and
economic lines. The phenomenon of (indigenous) community radio offers one example of the
ways in which communal boundaries are being (dis)articulated in contemporary Guatemala. I
will address this phenomenon briefly as a means to demonstrating how the processual study of
community might be operationalized.
Studying community as process involves tracing the material and conceptual exchange
flows between local and non-local (regional, national, international) interests. This approach has
held general import in anthropological research since at least the 1970s, when world-systems
and dependency paradigms gained favour in the discipline. Insomuch as scholars have tended
to frame ‘(Maya) community’ as the ‘locus of resistance’ or the ‘premises for survival’ against
external socio-political and economic hegemonies, however, process has been conceptualized
primarily as a local condition. The criticism is that too much emphasis has been placed on how
external forces have shaped local ‘realities,’ and too little attention has been paid to how local
communities have contributed to shaping non-local systems (Smith 1984). Overemphasis on
- 17 -
the local has lead to charges that (Maya) community has been ‘reified’ as a ‘romantic’ symbol
of continuity in the face of change (Hervik and Kahn 2006) and/or reduced to “little more than
intricate but fragile mosaics of ‘shared poverty,’ political insularity, and cultural inscrutability
that shatter irrevocably under the impact of global modernity” (Watanabe 1990: 201).
Hindering a comprehensive examination of community as process are the overwhelming
difficulties inherent in conceptualizing the dialectics of a multilayered system. An “obvious
first step” is modeling “those structures that mediate” between local and non-local interests
(Smith 1984: 194). Media — and more specifically in the case of Guatemala, radio — is one
such form of exchange.
One of the reasons offered for the (mis)representation of (indigenous) communities as
‘closed’ and ‘insular’ is “the Mayas’ historical silence” (Watanabe 1990: 201). Community
radio is one way in which that silence is being challenged. An estimated 800 self-identified
community radio stations currently operate in Guatemala (Inforpress 2006). Many of these are
rural stations broadcasting in whole or in part in Maya languages; at least half are considered
‘pirate’ stations, transmitting on unauthorized frequencies. While the broadcasting range of
community radio is generally limited, there is a strong argument to be made that these stations
‘speak’ across geographic, socio-political, and economic boundaries — and what they speak
about has everything to do with how community in Guatemala should be defined. Tracing the
material and conceptual exchange flows between local and non-local interests through local
radio is one way to model the dynamic tensions of community as process. Of interest here is
not recording the particulars of community radio (a topic for another time), but rather
recognizing its presence as one of the ‘mundane’ ways in which community is practiced.
Interested parties involved in community radio in Guatemala include not only local Maya and
- 18 -
ladino broadcasters and listener-participants, 18 but also domestic 19 and international 20 nongovernmental organizations providing resources and/or skills training to local broadcasters, and
World Bank-funded government ministries, 21 which use community radio to transmit
programming initiatives. The tendency of scholars to approach community studies from ground
level, embedding communal affinities — theoretically and territorially — at the local level can
obscure the multiplicity of voices engaged in boundary-making as practice. Maya intellectuals
have long argued for the importance of indigenous community media (especially radio) as “a
means of ethnic expression and reproduction” (Cojtí Cuxil 1996: 42—43). Ladinos have similarly
engaged soundscape as means of practicing community, with at least one self-declared ‘nonIndian’ department (Jutiapa) symbolically incorporating a radio tower into its official coat of arms.
This paper has examined the (dis)articulation of community as a socio-spatial concept in
Guatemala. Its takes as its premise the observation that “(h)ow Guatemalans define their
communities has been and will be the most significant determinant of Guatemala’s future”
(Smith 1990: 21). By ‘placing’ community in existing anthropological literature on Guatemala,
the paper has attempted to demonstrate that community is a central but exceedingly ill-defined
concept, that it is often applied in a way that flattens social diversity and vitiates human agency,
18
While there is considerable debate about what constitutes a ‘community’ radio station in Guatemala (evidence of
the highly charged and very political nature of boundary-making), there is general agreement among the association
of community broadcasters, which includes both Maya and ladino representatives, that audience participation is
central to a community radio format. See Pérez (2006).
19
Madre Selva, a civil society group based in Guatemala City, contributed funds to help indigenous peoples in
Sipacapa (San Marcos) found Sipaestero. The community station has played an instrumental role in mobilizing
indigenous opposition to Canadian mining interests in the region. See Inforpress (2006).
20
Cultural Survival, a non-governmental organization based in Cambridge (Massachusetts), for example, is
currently engaged in a $2-million USD, five-year project involving 250 indigenous community radio stations in
Guatemala. See Cultural Survival (2006). The International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and
Racism (IMADR), based in Geneva and Tokyo, has also participated in radio ‘empowerment’ projects for Maya
communities. See IMADR (2002).
21
The Guatemala Municipal Radio Training Program is a joint initiative of The World Bank and The Secretary of
Planning and Programming of the Presidency of Guatemala and is intended to “help implement Guatemala’s
decentralization strategy” (World Bank 2006).
- 19 -
and that it has been used to reify communal affinity as a condition in order to make broader
arguments on the basis of ethnicity and class. The ‘ineffable’ community has thus been
problematized as a category of analysis. What is needed, it has been argued, are new ways of
conceptualizing community that show greater sensitivity to the dynamic tensions between local
and non-local interests and that, in turn, acknowledge the processual nature of boundary-making.
The phenomenon of (indigenous) community radio has been used to model a ‘messier’
entanglement of interests that crosses geographic, socio-political, and economic boundaries. To
be sure, the enactment of community in soundscape is neither an equivalent to, nor a replacement
for, community embodied in landscape. It does, however, uproot conventional notions of how
community may be, and is being, defined in Guatemala — and that, I argue, is of critical import.
In the spirit of Foucault, this paper has sought “(t)o give some assistance in wearing away certain
self-evidences and commonplaces... to bring it about... that certain phrases can no longer be
spoken so lightly, certain acts no longer, or at least no longer so unhesitatingly, performed”
(1991: 83). Words to live by for those scholars who will contribute to the next seventy years of
‘community studies’ in Guatemala.
- 20 -
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