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This article was downloaded by: [University of Sussex Library]On: 03 April 2013, At: 14:02Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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A Contemporary Micropolitics of
IndigeneityMonica DeHart
Version of record first published: 11 Jul 2008.
To cite this article:Monica DeHart (2008): A Contemporary Micropolitics of Indigeneity, LatinAmerican and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 3:2, 171-192
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17442220802080618
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Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2008, pp. 171192
A Contemporary Micropoliticsof Indigeneity
Monica DeHart
Contemporary studies of the relationship between indigeneity and neoliberalism in Latin
America have focused primarily on how indigenous groups have negotiated thecontradictory effects of political decentralization and multicultural reforms, which both
recognize and yet continue to exclude indigenous subjects. In order to more fully
comprehend the nature and the implications of these transformations in governance, as
well as their relationship to different kinds of indigenous subjects, I argue that we need
an analytical approach that takes us beyond the frame of national politics to shed light
on the micropolitics of indigeneity. An analysis of micropolitics asks how the shifts in
governance associated with neoliberal multiculturalism have brought into question
forms of authority and governance within the indigenous community. Specifically,
this approach illuminates how the forms of knowledge and identity that have been
validated by state and international development policies articulate with pre-existing
forms of difference within the indigenous community to authorize new configurations of
indigenous knowledge and authority. In this article, I draw on ethnographic encounters
among Guatemalan Maya activists as well as local indigenous community leaders in
order to illuminate the contours and the stakes of a micropolitics approach.
Keywords: indigenous; identity; micropolitics; neoliberalism; Latin America;
Guatemala
Analyses of the ambivalent relationship between indigeneity and neoliberalism have
dominated a new generation of anthropological research in Latin America. Much of
this analysis has been focused on how neoliberal policies such as state decentraliza-
tion, economic privatization, and market deregulation have created new relationships
between states and indigenous communities, qualitatively transforming the nature
and stakes of indigenous organizing (Postero & Zamosc, 2004; Postero, 2007; Sawyer,
2004; Sieder, 2002; Warren & Jackson, 2002). Working primarily through Gramscian
theoretical frameworks that define neoliberalism as a hegemonic project or
philosophy,1 these studies ask what new forms of governance characterize neoliberal
global and state regimes and what implications these forms bode for indigenous
communities. In particular, they ask how these forms enable and/or preclude
ISSN 17442222 (print)/ISSN 17442230 (online)/08/02017122 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/17442220802080618
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substantive development and national belonging for indigenous communities.
Through rich ethnographic analyses of community life, regional politics, and
activism, these authors demonstrate how indigenous communities have experienced
neoliberal state politics and responded to them by both opposing the intensification
of exploitation and inequality, while also taking advantage of new spaces for political
participation.
Neoliberal state policies in Latin America provide a unique context for indigenous
communities because of the way they have paired free-market economic policies
with political reforms that stress the development of civil society and social capital,
as well as the collective rights of culturally disadvantaged groups (Hale, 2005, p. 12).
Thus, rather than seeing political decentralization and constitutional reform as
promoting equality or empowerment, anthropologists have asked how state
multicultural policies have reinscribed and deepened racist and class hierarchies
even as they have endowed indigenous subjects with new rights. The double-edgedsword of neoliberal multiculturalism, as this new regime of governing has
increasingly been called, involves the production, recognition, and protection of
cultural difference by both state and international actors in ways that essentially
neutralize opposition to the state and re-entrench economic and social inequality
(Hale, 2005, p. 13; see also Garcia, 2005; Postero, 2007; Sawyer, 2004; Speed, 2005).
These contemporary analyses build upon a tradition of scholarly analysis that has
posited the stateindigenous relationship to be the primary modern political dialectic
in Latin America (Smith, 1990a; Urban & Sherzer, 1991; Warren & Jackson, 2002).
Consequently, one of the most compelling contributions of recent studies has been
the ability to provide comparative analyses that discern certain patterns of
indigenous experiences of and resistances to state-specific neoliberal development
politics in places as diverse as Bolivia and Mexico, Guatemala and Peru (Postero &
Zamosc, 2004, p. 4). For example, these studies help to explain the ascendance of
indigenous leaders, like Bolivias president Evo Morales, to state power, highlighting
how indigenous mobilization has evolved out of and/or articulated with other
sectors of civil society (Postero, 2007). Furthermore, they allow us to scrutinize the
new conditions for belonging that neoliberal multicultural policies have extended
to indigenous groups, and to evaluate them in relation to other citizens rights and
experiences (Hale, 2006). Yet, while the national lens allows us to discern thechanging lines of power between state and indigenous communities, I argue that it
also leaves much out of the picture.
The neoliberal shifts in governance that recent studies identify that is, the
devolution of state power, the promotion of participatory community development,
and the implementation of citizenship regimes that justify this transfer in
responsibility point to increasingly diffuse and localized, or even individualized,
forms of rule.2 The current context thus reflects qualitatively different arrangements
of power than earlier, corporatist and authoritarian forms of governance in Latin
America (Alvarez et al., 1998; Yashar, 2005). These new arrangements frequently
operate through such rubrics as participation (Keating, 2003; Paley, 2001), local
power (MacLeod, 1997; Galvez Borrell 1998; Ochoa Garcia, 1993), and ethnodevel-
opment (Davis, 2002; Kleymeyer, 1994; van den Berg, 2003) that reposition the
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indigenous community as an important organ of governance and a source of
development knowledge. Rather than being defined exclusively by the state, these
arrangements are also enacted through engagement with a wide range of
international and non-governmental entities including the World Bank, multi-
national corporations, and independent aid organizations that play a major role in
articulating the conditions for and the implications of indigenous agency.3
In order to more fully comprehend the nature and the implications of these
transformations in governance, as well as their relationship to different kinds of
indigenous subjects, I argue that we need an analytical approach that takes us beyond
the frame of national politics to discern how the forms of knowledge and authority
promoted by neoliberal governance are negotiated within the multiple sites
where governing happens and the subject forms through which they work.
Specifically, I am interested in how the changes in governance associated with
neoliberalism bring into question forms of authority and governance within theindigenous community.
By proposing this conceptual shift, I am raising more than simply a substantive
question for example, what is the nature of indigenous knowledge and authority
within the community? I am not merely suggesting a modification in scale so as to
capture a lower point on some vertically organized, scalar organization of global,
national, and local spaces (Ferguson & Gupta, 2002). As noted previously, it is not a
local or ethnographic perspective that is missing from current analyses. Instead,
what I call amicropolitics of indigeneitydenotes a new analytical stance that asks why
particular forms of knowledge are authoritative within the indigenous community,
howthey work through particular kinds of subjects, and howthey relate to neoliberal
forms of rule.
Since 1995, my research on indigenous development initiatives in Guatemala has
focused primarily on the dynamic intersection between neoliberal development and
indigenous identity politics. In this context, I have been especially interested in how
forms of authority and knowledge, relationships between different locales and agents,
and identities are presupposed and transformed by different practices of governing.4
A rich tradition of community studies in Guatemala provides a nuanced panorama
within which to situate this kind of inquiry. These studies have documented how
diverse formulations of Maya culture articulate with changing national and globalpolitical economic contexts. Collectively, they highlight certain continuities in Maya
culture that is, the primacy of knowledge and practices identified as community
custom, the centrality of the physical space of community, and the enduring
sense of an essential Maya cosmology. They also document the shifting terms of
intra-community debates over the relationship between indigenous identity and
modernity for example, religious affiliation, land ownership, political party
membership, age, community service, and ritual conduct in relation to particular
historicalstructural configurations of power in Guatemala.5
What distinguishes a micropolitics approach from these previous studies of
community debates over modernity is the particular context provided by
neoliberalism as it has shaped the ways knowledge is being defined and debated
within the space of community. Because neoliberal arrangements of power work
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through local strategies of governance that have privileged ethnic difference, they
increase the stakes of claims to indigeneity. In other words, convincing configura-
tions of indigenous knowledge and authority become an important vehicle for
accessing development funds and political recognition both within and beyond the
community. Therefore, these changing practices of governance require that we
analyze how pre-existing inequalities in the community shape the terms through
which the authenticity and authority of the diverse forms of knowledge are evaluated.
In this paper, I examine two debates over indigenous authority that are reflective
of broader patterns within my research on community-based ethnic development
initiatives.6 One encounter consists of debates among different development groups
within a rural Maya Kiche community in Totonicapan and the other features
discourses on authentic culture within the Guatemalan pan-Maya movement. In each
of these encounters, Maya community leaders draw on situated, contingent forms of
knowledge and authority in order to lay claim to authentic indigenous culture andthe material resources and social status that indigeneity affords them within the
neoliberal development context. The devolution of development practice to the
community level and the privileging of ethnic difference define this particular social
and political economic juncture. The diverse forms of knowledge mobilized in these
debates originate in self-designated communitycostumbre(custom), including ritual
community service, consensus, and reciprocity. They also draw on formulations
associated with neoliberalism, including calculative choice, technical expertise,
rationalized data collection, modern budgeting, and social entrepreneurship.
I examine how emerging and often contradictory forms of authority deriving from
these disparate forms of knowledge and practice intersect with pre-existing
inequalities within the community, especially along the lines of class.7 These
moments thus provide a sense of what a micropolitics of indigeneity might look like
and what it might reveal about transformations in governance and authority under
neoliberal multiculturalism.
Community, Consensus, and Corporate Responsibility
Accounting for Community Development
Located in the mountainous, forested highlands of Totonicapan, Guatemala, theMaya Kiche community of San Pedro8 is a relatively prosperous rural community of
about 5,000 residents. San Pedros much talked about development success was
evident in the high proportion of successful merchants and artisans among its
population (a fact well-documented by Smith, 1984, 1990b), as well as its
construction of a modern community hall to house many thriving development
programs.
Within the community, two institutions were centrally responsible for this local
development process. One was the community council a group of residents who
were affiliated with a local Kiche umbrella organization, the Cooperacion para el
Desarrollo Rural de Occidente (Cooperation for Rural Development of the West)
(CDRO) (to be described more fully below) which ran development programs
in the areas of healthcare, infrastructure, microcredit, artisan enterprises, and
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womens issues. Council members were elected by their fellow program participants.
Nonetheless, despite the councils demographic diversity, its board of directors
was constituted by middle-aged men who were considered among the community
economic elites. As fairly successful small-time entrepreneurs and merchants,
many of these council members had a direct interest in acquiring microcredit funds
made available through CDRO to buttress their business pursuits. Furthermore,
their class privilege enabled them to send their young sons to college and then draw
upon their sons new technical knowledge (e.g. grant writing, accounting) to enhance
their pursuit of new development opportunities.
The other institution that held sway over development was the local political body.
This political institution was constituted by the local authority structure that had
defined community governance in Totonicapan communities since colonial times
vis-a-vis the civil-religious hierarchy9 (a history to which I shall return). Authorities
were elected to serve one-year terms of office to satisfy ritual service obligations to thecommunity, and they were responsible for the daily governance of the communities
in positions ranging from alcalde communal (community mayor) to town clerk to
guardian of the communal forest. In terms of demographics, they reflected a broad
spectrum of age, vocation, class status, and religious difference, including both
neophytes to political office as well as elders with a long history of ritual prestige and
service. As Cancian demonstrated in his 1965 analysis of Maya cargo systems, the
degree and manner of a mans participation in the hierarchy is a major factor in
determining his place in the community (Cancian, 1965, p. 2). Consequently, what
political authorities potentially lacked in economic capital, they compensated for in
the form of the social capital or prestige derived from their service.10
A climactic meeting among these two groups and community members in 1999
illustrated the growing tensions that had emerged over who had authority to control
community development decisions, and on what basis. Although momentous at the
time, this type of event proved not to be an isolated incident, but rather came to be
a frequent feature of community development politics in Totonicapan over the
following years as local councils became more successful in recruiting development
resources. Indeed, I attended another of these meetings in a neighboring community
in 2006 that revealed similar issues. The San Pedro meeting, like those that followed
it, was meant to constitute a conciliatory gesture reflecting both an effort tobridge the gap between council and authority development efforts as well as to forge a
new consensus on community development methods and goals. At stake was who
could legitimately claim ownership of authentic indigeneity, and the economic and
social value derived from it, both within and beyond the community. As I
demonstrate, the neoliberal context shaped the parameters of this debate both in
terms of the kind of knowledge mobilized and the social significance attached to it by
the community at large.
As I entered the San Pedro community hall early on Saturday morning,
I immediately sensed that this meeting would not be like the other events I had
attended there. Because it was the weekend, the community hall was free of the
shouting school children that usually filled this multi-purpose centers inner salon.
Instead, a nervous silence hung in the air, punctuated occasionally by the loud
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squeal of a chair being dragged across the floor. I took a seat in one of the back
rows of folding chairs and wobbly benches that had been set up along both sides of
the room. This seating was oriented toward the front of the room where a large
stage had been mounted, housing an overhead projector and screen and a podium.
As the hour progressed, several young council members and some of the CDRO
main office representatives slowly took their seats along the right side of the room.
At about 9:30, the mayor and accompanying authorities, each wielding his
ceremonial cane, solemnly exited their upstairs office and proceeded down to the
inner hall. They took their seats along the left side of the room. When they were
settled, two young community members initiated what, indeed, proved to be an
unprecedented meeting.
In many ways, it was remarkable that the function was held neither in the councils
office nor in the authorities office the two places where a meeting might otherwise
be held. Usually matters of general community politics, like elections, were debatedin the office of the local authorities. There, the local mayor presided over the
meeting, and a general assembly of community members would discuss the issues
until a consensus was achieved. As a deeply valued community norm, consensus was
an essential pre-requisite for collective action and decision-making within the
community.11 Community assembly discussions usually proceeded in Kiche but,
due to increasing bilingualism, were interspersed with some Spanish. Nonetheless,
ritual prestige, age, and moral reputation figured prominently in evaluating each
speakers views. Council development issues, on the other hand, were usually dealt
with in the separate office where the San Pedro council held its weekly meetings.
In making its decisions, the council often solicited data and advice from the young
community semi-professionals that made up the councils support team. These
young participants generally spoke more Spanish than Kiche, a fact often lamented
by their parents as a sign of cultural decay. For todays meeting between the two
parties, however, the community halls inner salon had been prepped as a literal
middle ground.
The meeting commenced as a council member came forward to ritually introduce
the parties and moderate the event. Speaking in Kiche, he noted that the purpose
of the meeting was to reach a consensus on community development issues. The
council member then proceeded to call up a series of council members to describethe councils activities. One young college student placed several flow charts onto
the overhead projector as he explained in Spanish the status of the communitys
microcredit funds, procured from CDRO. He highlighted the source of the
revolving funds, the amount of credits allocated to community members, the
interest received on those loans, and the status of the councils overall account.
An older gentleman with an architectural background used table graphs to explain
the various phases of construction for the community hall, including the purchase
of materials, the justification for structural design, and the buildings overall space
allocation.
While these men talked, another council member walked around the room, passing
out a spiral-bound report that summarized the information presented to each of the
meetings participants. The materials included computer-prepared summaries of the
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councils organizational structure, a systematized classificatory schema highlighting
areas of institutional focus as well as the scope/function of specific offices, and
detailed spreadsheets enumerating program beneficiaries and budgetary allocations.
This was exactly the kind of documentation that the council, or any other local
development organization, would submit alongside grant applications. It evidenced a
universally recognizable, rationally organized institution with rigorous, empirically-
proven evaluative mechanisms of the kind validated by neoliberal norms. I wondered
immediately about the significance of these materials for the unevenly literate
population in attendance at the meeting.
The presentations by council members continued uninterrupted until, after a brief
recess, they opened up the floor to general questions. It was only at this point that the
authorities spoke up, and a prolonged debate about community development
commenced.
The community authorities immediately took issue with the councils databecause, for them, the empirical, rationalized nature of the councils evidence raised
a red flag. Although the authorities were suspicious of the supposed self-evidence of
the councils facts, they were even more troubled about the introduction of this
mode of argumentation into the debate. Far from demonstrating transparency, for
them the reliance on rationalized classificatory schema, empirical audits, and
enumeration reflected a powerful association with Western modernity (Hacking,
1982) that seemed to only confirm the councils distance from the forms of
knowledge that defined the indigenous community. The fact that the council was
made up of more privileged community members primarily the successful
merchants and their increasingly college-educated children made this distance even
more dubious. So, while council members deployed technical, professional data as
a sign of their development efficacy and transparency, the San Pedro authorities
interpreted this form of knowledge as a sign of that the council was an outsider,
motivated by an interest in privatizing and usurping resources that rightly belonged
to the community as a whole.12
Customary Critiques
The authorities argued their critiques of the council through an insistence on the
custom of community consensus and the role that age, lineage, ritual prestige, and
personal virtue play in structuring authority within that process. Rather than
empirical fact and transparency as governing principles, the authorities reiterated the
importance of a Maya moral economy based on responsible, virtuous behavior
enacted through practices of collectivism and ritual service. It was adherence to this
particular set of rules of conduct that operated as the means for establishing authority
and evaluating the effectiveness of development actions. Based on this configuration
of moral authority, the authorities argued that they were the only entity fit to
supervise and administer local development resources.
In citing this Maya moral economy as the basis for their power, the authorities were
invoking a tradition of local governance that situated particular forms of indigenous
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knowledge and practice such as consensus and ritual prestige as timeless,
authentic foundations for indigenous authority. However, these representations
elided the fact that the entire local political structure was, itself, the product of
historical shifts in local and state governance arrangements, as well as transformations
in the social meaning that residents applied to those arrangements. According to
local historians, the authority of the community mayor was a relatively recent
development, and one that evolved from a long chain of other authority structures
that is, from the principales (elders) whose authority was based on age, lineage, and
spiritual knowledge, through theempricowhose authority was based on his ability to
serve as a liaison to the state civil registry by providing an inventory of community
births and deaths (Tzaquitzal, Ixchu, & Tu, 2000, pp. 5455; see also Asturias de
Barrios, 1998a, 1998b). Consequently, the forms of knowledge and practice that
authorities summoned as the basis for local authority were themselves a reflection of
historically-situated shifts in the forms of governance. The neoliberal context wassignificant here both as a unique moment within this historical trajectory as well as
for the particular way that it framed the debate about indigenous knowledge, in terms
of who or what was seen to embody it and how it was juxtaposed to non-community
forms of authority and governance.
In response to the authorities challenges, the council members attempted to
redefine the terms of legitimate indigenous knowledge to more closely reflect the
basis of their authority within the broader development community. The council
members noted that community residents had authorized them to serve as custodians
of the development process when they had entrusted them to solicit resources on
their behalf. Indeed, strategic plans and grant proposals drafted by the council
articulated the objective of developing the organized community of San Pedro.
The fact that the council had been quite effective at acquiring those resources, with
the very building they were standing in as material evidence of their success, further
validated their authority in their own minds.
While council members argued these views, they frequently referred back to the
documented data and reports. These texts were presented as written facts whose
authority hinged on both their apparent neutrality as well as on their uninterpret-
ability by this unevenly literate audience. Council members would simply refer to
the tables and say, See. Every penny is accounted for. These actions implied thatwhat made council members legitimate representatives of the community was not
their individual morality or virtue as demonstrated through social conduct within the
community, but rather their ability to justify their behavior in abstract accounting
terms and material resources.
In relying on these data to make their argument, the council members were
enacting a notion of professionalism that had earned them considerable recognition
within the development arena. There, the success of the council was determined both
by the empirical accuracy of its bottom line and also its claim to be working on behalf
of the indigenous community, as opposed to as a particular group of individuals.
Its ability to provide professional, rationalized data on the development process
marked the council as having both the managerial expertise and the auditing abilities
to perform as efficient ethnic entrepreneurs (DeHart, n.d.). Indeed, it was through
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these particular practices, and the value attributed to them by neoliberal development
norms, that the council members established their authority over community
development. Therefore, this particular mode of argumentation reflected the
councils growing material and professional power as a development broker, and
its ability to parlay particular configurations of indigeneity into essential resources
from state and international development institutions.
Adams (1970) analyzed this articulatory function of power brokers as they
translate interests from one level of power to another dynamic in his study of the
national social structure in Guatemala. Importantly, however, Adams argued that a
brokers power at each of the two levels depends on the success of his operations
at the other level (1970, p. 321). In the case of the San Pedro, we see the council
achieving success in the development arena based on its ability to speak for the
indigenous community and to embody certain forms of knowledge that were
recognizable and authoritative according to neoliberal conventions specifically,enumerated empirical data and rationalized evaluative mechanisms. However,
rather than this development success translating into greater authority within the
community (as was the case of young Chimalteco brokers described by Watanabe
& Fischer, 1990, p. 194), we see something more complex and contentious
occurring.
The authorities could not reject the councils authority out of hand; after all, they
as other community members did benefit from the development resources captured
by the council. Nonetheless, because of the dubious correlation the authorities
perceived between the kind of knowledge mobilized by the council and the class
identities of the council members who articulated it, the authorities stigmatized the
councils argumentative methods and the particular formulation of indigenous
knowledge upon which they based it. Authorities argued that because the resources
had been solicited in the communitys name, the council had a moral obligation to
place these resources at the disposal of the entire community and to act according to
the communitys interests (represented through the authorities). In other words, the
councils professionalized development knowledge and practices were only valid to
the extent that they were put to the service of the community. To the extent that the
council failed to do so, its authority remained suspect.
A Contemporary Micropolitics of Consensus
The San Pedro consensus story demonstrates how community efforts to capitalize
on the development opportunities and correspondent legitimacy provided by
formulations of indigeneity that had been validated by state and international
development agencies provoked new debates about community authority and
governance conventions as well as produced new indigenous subjects. Consensus
between the authorities and the council was essential to ensuring that development
was interpreted and administered as a genuine community initiative, both within the
community and beyond. However, changes to the form and method employed in
reaching consensus highlight the dynamic and contentious nature of the relationship
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between multiple, situated forms of authority within the indigenous community.
This tension was productive in that it authorized new types of knowledge and written
modes of expression that is, development proposals, professional budgets and
technical reports as well as privileged new types of development actors namely,
younger professionals rather than older men with a long history of community
service and social prestige. Nonetheless, the value of those new forms had to be
subjected to scrutiny and debate vis-a-vis more traditional consensus procedures.
Furthermore, they had to be re-situated within community morality so that even to
the extent that council members were feared to reflect capitalist entrepreneurial
interests, those interests were harnessed by an invocation of the need for corporate
responsibility.
The authorities use of a capitalist critique to discredit the council highlights the
importance of analyzing, rather than naturalizing, a market/non-market distinction
within neoliberal politics.13
As mentioned above, Smiths analysis of pettycommodity producers in Totonicapan has highlighted the fact that this region
exhibits no antimarket or anti-capitalist counterhegemony (1990b, p. 217).
Therefore, as Fischer (2004, p. 267) also notes, In this context, trying to disentangle
capitalist activities or mindsets from non-capitalist ones is pointless. The capitalist
critique is thus significant not for the palpable difference it references in terms of
subject type, but rather for the role that it plays in articulating the boundary between
authentic versus inauthentic community values and practices.
As this point illustrates, a micropolitics approach enables a substantive analysis of
the nature and stakes of the neoliberal forms of governance that are increasingly seen
to define indigenous politics. While many scholars have speculated about the
ubiquity of hegemonic neoliberal rationalities as a force that infuses all domains of
social, political, economic, spiritual and cultural life (see, for example, Comaroff &
Comaroff, 2000; Harvey, 2005), a micropolitics pushes us to distinguish which
practices or forms of knowledge are identified as specifically neoliberal, how they
work through particular subjects, and why they may or may not gain authority
(Hoffman, DeHart, & Collier, 2006). In the San Pedro case, the councils
mobilization of neoliberal development norms interjected new forms of knowledge
and claims to authority into the debate over authentic indigenous identity, making
visible new kinds of development actors. However, the hegemony of these empirical,rationalized forms of knowledge and development practice in broader development
contexts did not guarantee the authority of these techniques within the community.
Instead, these new governing practices worked through specific subject positions
whose legitimacy and authority were evaluated relative to multiple, overlapping
standards in this case comprised by alternate understandings of indigenous
knowledge and also class considerations. Therefore, the councils legitimacy as an
authentic, professional Maya development agent within state and global development
circles did not guarantee increased authority at home; instead, it actually undermined
the councils power and made it subject to increasing scrutiny by community
authorities. This example highlights the contingent, unstable nature of these new
formulations of knowledge and authority and the importance of extant class
differences in determining their legitimacy.
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Indigeneity within the Maya Revitalization Movement
As the San Pedro experience illustrates, debates over which forms of knowledge and
types of subjects represent authoritative configurations of indigeneity emerge not
only through debates with the state. Therefore, while much analysis of neoliberalgovernance and its effects on indigenous communities is conducted through the
national lens, a micropolitics approach is essential to revealing how neoliberal norms
are negotiated across the multiple sites and processes where governing happens.
Principally, it seeks to show how neoliberal arrangements of authority problematize
forms of knowledge and authenticity within the indigenous community, shaping the
way indigenous knowledge is defined and deployed by different actors. While the
neoliberal context and its privileging of the indigenous community has heightened
the stakes of claiming authority over the community (making authentic local
knowledge the source of political and economic value), a micropolitics suggests that
the success of specifically neoliberal configurations of authority is nonetheless
contingent, based on the way that they work through differently-situated individual
subjects.
To further illustrate this point, I turn now to discourses of indigeneity from within
the pan-Maya movement in Guatemala. I demonstrate how one Maya institution in
particular attempted to redefine authoritative forms of indigenous knowledge in
ways that both reflected and challenged the neoliberal politics with which it was
engaged. Importantly, these formulations of indigeneity were produced in relation to
overlapping, competing forms of indigeneity articulated within the Maya commu-
nity. In other words, they reflected efforts to negotiate legitimacy in the eyes of and inrelation to other Maya organizations. They highlight the contentious relationship
among community practice, the market, and state politics as alternate spaces for
formulating indigenous identities and politics.
In the early 1990s, indigenous activists in Guatemala gained international attention
for their efforts to redefine Maya indigenous identity and its place within Guatemalan
national culture.14 Actors in the movement articulated Maya identity not simply in
terms of local community affiliation, as had historically been the case (and as was
forcefully displayed in the San Pedro example), but in terms of a national or even
transnational Maya community. Collectively, these activists projected indigeneity as apowerful repertoire of cultural traditions, forms of spirituality, and deeply-felt
community identifications, as well as an important source of resistance to centuries
of racism and state violence.15 This formulation was often visibly embodied in both
national and global media in the image of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta
Menchu. Within Guatemala, however, no single icon encapsulated the movements
nature or goals; instead, the movement was defined by an ongoing discussion among
diverse indigenous intellectuals and activists over the meaning of indigeneity and its
relationship to the Guatemalan nation-state and Western capitalist modernity more
generally.16
CDRO is a prominent Kiche development organization in the Western
Highlands of Guatemala that gained enthusiastic support from both the
Guatemalan state and also international development agencies for its particular
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formulation of indigeneity.17 CDRO is a grassroots organization created in 1986 by
local activists and intellectuals from the same rural, indigenous communities of
Totonicapan that the organization serves. A core group of these activists/intellectuals
forms CDROs current administration, while the majority of the institutions
employees are younger university students or graduates with semi-professional or
technical skills.
CDRO gained notoriety during the 1990s for its innovative efforts to operationalize
Maya culture as a tool for development, utilizing indigenous forms of knowledge and
everyday community practices such as collective ownership (of property and
production), mutual support, and horizontality, as concrete development meth-
odologies (CDRO, 1997). Indeed, it was exactly this innovation that drew me to begin
my own research with the organization in 1995. The organization deployed its
indigenous methodology through both social programs directed towards education
and healthcare, as well as productive enterprises including artisan exports, microcreditloans, and an herbal medicine processing plant. All projects were designed and carried
out by local councils in each of CDROs affiliate communities such as the one
discussed above in San Pedro so as to position the indigenous community as
a collective protagonist of local self-development. CDROs prominence in state
and international development circles derived from the authentic cultural difference
from Western modernity it invoked, and the way that that difference was channeled
toward international norms of development efficacy and sustainability (DeHart,
2008). Despite this status, CDROs relationship to the broader Maya movement was
a topic of frequent debate. I argue that these debates within the Maya movement
were central to defining authentic forms of indigenous knowledge and authority
and their relationship to changing forms of governance.
My study of CDROs development program involved ongoing discussions with the
institutions administrators, employees, and community affiliates about their notions
of indigeneity. Because the organizations general advisor, Benjamn Son Turnil,
played such a central role in articulating CDROs institutional ideology, he was one
of my most frequent interlocutors on this topic. Son Turnil is a Totonicapan native
with a degree in economics and an especially keen sense of politics an organic
intellectual in every sense of the word. The combination of his indigenous activism,
charisma, and intellectualism had earned him much respect, as well as extensiveconnections to state officials and international organizations. Therefore, his
interpretations of Mayanness carried much authority both within the CDRO
institutional setting and the rural communities in which it worked, as well as in state
and international development circles. During one of our almost daily conversations
in 1996, Son Turnil provided a telling portrait of CDROs positioning within the
broader Maya movement. In this narrative, Son Turnil articulated how the meaning
of indigeneity was being called into question by recounting a visit to a neighboring
Maya organization:
One day I went to visit a non-governmental organization in Chimaltenango. The nameof the organization was written in Cakchiquel,18 and upon entering the office, I saw a
desk covered with tpica (indigenous) fabric, there were expressions from the Popol
Wuj19 . . . everything appeared to be indigenous. But when I spoke with the director,
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I encountered an administration that was eminently Western, capitalist. So the external
was indigenous, but the internal was not. What that approach communicates is that the
only valuable thing we have is something that can be photocopied. This isnt right
because in the rural communities Ive found many ideas about how to manage
emergency situations, how to mutually support one another, how to attend to problemsof public welfare, how to help each other with production, how to administer
resources . . . We are throwing away the most substantial part of our culture, and were
orienting ourselves toward the past without trying to confront the present.
On the one hand, Son Turnils critique resonates with a long history of indigenous
debates on modernity wherein, as noted above, indigenous authority has been
articulated in terms of authentic insiders versus capitalist impostors a dichotomy
that elides the pervasive capitalist context in which discussions over indigeneity have
taken place (see again Smith, 1990b; Fischer, 2004; DeHart, 2008). For Son Turnil, an
essential indigenous subjectivity is evidenced through persuasive interpretations of
the meaning and appropriate uses of traditional Maya knowledge and practices embodied here in Maya calendrics, historical texts, artisan production, and the
symbolism upon which all of these were built.
Son Turnils perspective is not a simple reiteration of previous debates; rather,
I argue that the significance of his narrative must also be analyzed in relation to the
specific context of neoliberal practices and policies in which CDRO was situated.
From this angle, Son Turnils critique was not just a claim on the modern, but an
attempt to redefine indigeneity through the accepted terms of localization and
decentralization that characterized neoliberal forms of governance. Furthermore,
because of the primacy of the indigenous community within those practices ofgovernance, there was much more at stake, both within the Mayan community and
beyond, in authoritative assertions of authentic indigenous knowledge.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Latin American development strategies reflected the
confluence of economic liberalization and political decentralization vis-a-vis
community and ethnodevelopment policies that devolved responsibility for basic
development activities to grassroots actors. Ethnodevelopment paradigms recast
ethnic difference as a potential resource for, rather than an impediment to,
community development efforts (Davis, 1993, 2002; van den Berg, 2003). For
development practitioners, being able to lay claim to historically and geographically
distinct forms of authentic cultural difference, understood as discrete local
knowledge, played an important role in making certain indigenous actors more
visible than others as legitimate development agents.20
Returning to Son Turnils critique, we see that he endorsed his version of
Maya culture as embodied in CDROs programs by forefronting an essential
epistemological difference from Western capitalist culture, a foil we encountered in
the San Pedro debate. This difference was manifest in alternative forms of social
welfare, production, and administration of resources within the Maya communities.
In his words, the value of these forms of cultural difference derived as much from
their essential ethnic origins, as they did from their practical efficacy and applicability
as development practice.21 After all, his privileging of the local community was
supported by neoliberal decentralization policies. It was the particular combination
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of ethnic difference and its systematization into a coherent development program
that allowed Son Turnil to represent his vision as an authentic and authoritative
source of indigeneity endorsed by both state and global development institutions.
The neighboring organizations exhibition of cultural artifacts only thinly masked
its perpetuation of Western capitalist ways and, thus, could be easily dismissed
as lacking the ethnic substance on which Son Turnils portrait of authentic Maya
identity was sketched.
In a similar conversation in 2006, Son Turnils formulation of what constituted an
authentic source of indigenous authority had shifted in some respects, but also
demonstrated continuity in terms of the primacy attached to community-based
knowledge and practice. Whereas in 1999 it was the economic logic on which
indigeneity was articulated that is, a capitalist mentality that relied upon
commodified cultural artifacts versus a collective, community-based development
orientation by 2006 it was the political positioning of a given Maya institution thatdetermined its authenticity. Specifically, when I asked him in the recent interview
about the status of the Maya movement, Son Turnil lamented that many of its leaders
had been absorbed into the government or become closely affiliated with specific
political parties. One group had aligned itself too closely with the Guatemalan
National Revolutionary Unity (UNRG, the umbrella organization of revolutionary
groups who negotiated the 1996 Peace Accords with the Guatemalan state). Other
indigenous activists had formed part of the right-wing government of Alfonso
Portillo between 2000 and 2004.22 These political associations demonstrated to
Son Turnil a distancing by some indigenous actors from the Maya communities. He
claimed that CDROs continued authenticity in this context was demonstrated by its
lack of political affiliation and its strident emphasis on everyday development
concerns in the rural communities. Consequently, what determined the authority of
ones Mayanness was distance from traditional state politics vis-a-vis bureaucracy
or political parties and engagement in local community development.
Son Turnils effort to define an authoritative vision of indigeneity in relation
to other indigenous formulations reflects how CDROs institutional formulation of
indigeneity interfaced with or built upon multiple, overlapping forms of indigenous
knowledge and practices circulating within the Maya community. His commentaries
show how the neoliberal context produced manifold forms of indigeneity ascommodified cultural artifacts, as political ideology, and as community development
practice. He authorized his own formulation of indigeneity by demonstrating it to be
an essentially local and neutral form of knowledge that could serve as an effective
development tool. This construction illuminates the contentiousness of notions of
Maya indigenous identity among differently situated members of a broader Mayan
community, and the importance of those references for defining the very substance of
indigenous knowledge and practices in relation to neoliberal forms of governance.
Here, we again see the importance of the social positioning of specific indigenous
subjects and institutions for their ability to project and validate particular
configurations of authoritative indigenous identity. One way of establishing the
credibility to provide respected interpretations of this kind was by asserting ones
proximity to the community of origin and conformity to the specific daily practices
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and beliefs of that place. Seen in this light, Son Turnil sought to reinforce the
legitimacy of his interpretation through his invocation of its embeddedness in Maya
community life, where Kiche language, calendrics, and traje operated as lived
practice, rather than cultural relic. Despite the politics that we saw surrounding
development in San Pedro, Son Turnils portrait reframed the community as a
non-political space the space of authentic cultural production and development
that should be privileged over more politicized, bureaucratized forms of indigeneity
that had been mobilized within the national space. What was at stake in Son Turnils
formulation of Mayanness in both of these commentaries was not only international
recognition and access to development resources, but also authority within the
broader Maya community.
Conclusions
This contemporary micropolitics of indigeneity has examined how the forms of
knowledge associated with neoliberal forms of rule for example, the rationalization
of information into classificatory schema, the enumeration of development activities,
the production of modern financial audits and empirical evaluative mechanisms
have shaped the ways indigenous community members debate and evaluate authority
within their own communities. This approach has attempted to decenter the role of
the state, showing the significance of the micropolitics of the indigenous community
for understanding the contours and implications of the new forms of governance.
While this decentering is not meant to erase the significance of the state, it has sought
to show why a dialectic approach to stateindigenous community relations is limitedin what it can illuminate regarding the techniques and effects of these specifically
neoliberal power arrangements.
I argue that both of the above-described ethnographic encounters highlight
how community members negotiate multiple discourses of indigeneity that are linked
to pre-existing forms of inequality and, therefore, are ascribed different kinds of
value. In other words, these diverse discourses intersect with already formed social
hierarchies, both reflecting and shaping acceptable modes of indigeneity vis-a-vis
different identities, knowledge, and authority. Consequently, we see indigenous
identity emerge not simply as a response to the norms and priorities imposed by stateand global development regimes, but also as a complex negotiation of debates among
diverse indigenous subjects.
A micropolitics is illustrative in this regard because of the way that it highlights the
specific forms of knowledge being defined and deployed within the indigenous
community, the way these forms work through specific subjects and practices, and
their stakes within neoliberal practices that privilege the indigenous community as
a new site/form of governance and development.
In terms of the forms of knowledge being debated, I have focused on how the
neoliberal practices reflect the confluence of rationalized, professional forms of
development practice and authentic indigenous difference as a particular kind of
local knowledge. Diverse configurations of Maya culture produced by community
practitioners and institutional representatives reflected negotiations with and
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validation by neoliberal policies that privileged these dual imperatives of local,
professionalized, participatory development, even as they set the terms of new
community debates. In the foregoing examples, both Son Turnil and San Pedro
community authorities grounded their claims to authority in distinct forms of
knowledge whose authenticity was verified by both their traditional origins and
their part of everyday cultural practice. It was their difference from Western
development strategies that made these forms of knowledge legitimate and viable,
and it was their deployment in concrete practices of community life that evidenced
that difference. On the other hand, formulations by both Son Turnil and the
San Pedro council privileged the pairing of a modern education and professional
skills with community membership, indigenous language use, and work on behalf of
the community. These configurations of Mayanness reflected negotiations with and
validation by neoliberal policies that privileged local, professionalized, participatory
development. Therefore, they were not simply formulations of modernity, but ratherof a particular kind of professionalism that was distinct to neoliberal forms of rule.
Importantly, my analysis shows that neoliberal forms of power/knowledge
endorsed by the state are not guaranteed but rather, because of their diffuse forms,
work through differently situated subjects, thus making certain dimensions of their
impact visible only through a micropolitics.23 Therefore, by locating diverse
perspectives within specific constituencies, we begin to see how indigeneity, as a
taken-for-granted organizing principle for community identification and develop-
ment practice, nonetheless has functioned as a central arena for the negotiation of
shifting modes of knowledge and authority.
In San Pedro, different formulations of indigenous authority articulated with
already existing class relations within the community, determining who had access to
what kind of knowledge and what value was attributed to each. Therefore, while
neoliberal forms of knowledge were perceived as powerful for the material resources
they could potentially produce, their authority was not assured by this fact alone.
Instead, their embodiment in elite council members actually worked against the
consolidation of council authority over development. For community members, it
was no accident that the economic and social capital owned by these affluent,
educated community members had made them the privileged local interlocutors with
international forms of indigeneity in the first place. Therefore, they perceived councilmembers to be mobilizing their formulation of indigeneity most significantly in
order to cement their class status and gain access to important material resources.
San Pedro local political authorities, on the other hand, tended to reference a
distinct moral economy based on reciprocity and traditional hierarchies in order to
authenticate the value inherent in their particular formula of indigeneity. Their
insistence on the importance of ritual prestige, age, and morality reflected a notion
of indigeneity that ascribed value to their social status and service, rather than to
economic capital. Furthermore, they represented this particular formulation of
authority through costumbre, understood as a time-tested configuration of local
knowledge and practice. Nonetheless, when situated historically, their argument hints
at the contingency of indigenous customs in relation to a long-documented history
of indigenous community governance. A micropolitics analysis of this deployment of
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traditional knowledge thus allows us to better consider the significance of the
broader political economic context in which forms of local governance are enacted.
Class is not the exclusive or even the primary form of inequality that figures in
debates over indigenous authority. As in Son Turnils later commentary, the success
of some Maya activists in the national political scene has made political affiliation an
important new axis for determining authority. Furthermore, in encounters that
I describe elsewhere (DeHart, n.d.), gender difference can be seen to constitute the
measure by which legitimate indigenous knowledge and development authority are
evaluated. A focus on micropolitics is, thus, an important analytical tool for
discerning the contingency of these relationships between forms of knowledge and
authority and the social actors to which they are linked.
Finally, this focus provides an important means of discerning the changing stakes
of indigenous authority. I have argued that neoliberal forms of governance
especially vis-a-vis local power and ethnodevelopment models privilege theindigenous community as a site of governance and development. This reconfigura-
tion of governance clearly evidences a shift in the conditions of indigenous political
agency and belonging within the nation-state. Indeed, Postero (2007) and Sawyer
(2004) have shown how indigenous social movements have appropriated and
subverted these very state development policies and regimes of citizenship in order to
promote authentic indigenous rights and political legitimacy within the nation-state.
Nonetheless, by asking about how shifts in governance bring into question forms
of knowledge and authority within the community, we gain a more nuanced sense of
the effects of this transformation. In the ethnographic encounters described here,
we can see how neoliberal formulations of indigeneity that have been validated by the
international development industry do not represent simply a monolithic, menacing
hegemonic force that intrudes upon, erodes, or simply replaces some more authentic
indigenous form of knowledge. While these neoliberal norms certainly play a central
role in defining indigenous realities, their effects are far from assured. Instead,
hegemonic configurations of appropriate indigeneity24 are actively negotiated and
often reconfigured within the space of community consensus procedures. These
hegemonic forms are mapped onto pre-existing class inequalities, to name just one
example, and they work through shifting understandings of what counts as
authentically indigenous. Ironically, these shifting formulations and their embodi-ment in specific kinds of indigenous subjects could just as soon provide economic
value and status to a certain constituencys views as it could mark that group as
culturally distant and morally bankrupt. Ultimately, therefore, the contradictions
that arise from these overlapping forms of indigenous knowledge highlight the
productive role of indigeneity as the site of tense negotiations over authentic
representations of community authority and development practice.
Acknowledgments
The research for this study was generously supported by the National Science
Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, the US Department of Education vis-a-vis
a Fulbright-Hayes research grant and a Foreign Language and Areas Studies (FLAS)
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grant and institutional support from Stanford University and the University of Puget
Sound. The present paper evolved out of and benefited greatly from, a panel discussion
on Latin American indigenous politics at the 2006 American Anthropological Association
meetings. The author thanks Nancy Postero, Brandt Peterson, Patrick Wilson, and Jason
Pribilsky for their productive intellectual engagement in that dialogue. Special thanks alsogo to Lisa Hoffman and Jennifer Hubbert for their keen intellectual insights, which
significantly enhanced the quality and clarity of the argument. Finally, the author is
grateful to Wolfgang Gabbert and three anonymous reviewers at Latin American and
Caribbean Ethnic Studies for their helpful substantive and analytical recommendations.
Notes
[1] Sawyer (2004) provides a notable exception to this rule.
[2] See Rose (1996, 1999), Barry, et al. (1996), Dean (1999), and Lemke (2001) for further
analysis of how these particular forms have been called forth to define neoliberal regimes ofgovernance.
[3] See, for example, Brysk (2000), Garcia (2005), and Speed (2005) for studies of the role of
international non-governmental development organizations, and Sawyer (2004) for the
impact of multinational corporations and international financial institutions. Escobar (1995)
provides a lengthy analysis of the role of the World Bank.
[4] Dean (1999, p. 30) identifies this focus as part of an analytics of government that places
practices at the center of analysis and seeks to discover their logic. For more, see Gordon
(1991).
[5] See, for example, Wagley (1949) and Tax (1964) for foundational studies of indigenous
community culture and its relationship to Guatemalan society. See Grandin (2000) for a
historical analysis of the relationship between Maya culture and Guatemalan nationalism.See Brintnall (1979) and Arias (1990) for studies of modernization debates in the context of
cooperative production and Catholic Action activism. See Tedlock (1973) and Watanabe
and Fischer (1990) for studies of the significance of time and place in Maya culture.
See Wilson (1995), Smith (1990a), Carlsen (1996), Carmack (1988), and Manz (1988) for
state violence. See Fischer (2001, 2004, 2006), and Little (2004) for the relationship between
Maya communities and global capitalism.
[6] This article builds on 22 months of field research in Totonicapan between 1996 and 2000,
as well a month-long follow-up study in 2006.
[7] I focus specifically on the role of gender in legitimating community development authority
in another paper (DeHart, n.d.).
[8] The name of this community has been changed so as to allow a degree of anonymity for its
residents.
[9] The civilreligious hierarchy, or cargo system, refers to the structured sequence of offices
within religious societies and community civil posts through which men in the community
could fulfill ritual service obligations and, thereby, prestige (Cancian, 1965). While the
municipio-wide cargo system was effectively dissolved in Totonicapan in the 1920s (Smith
1990b, p. 220), the tradition of community service continued through the local authority
structure. Indeed, Totonicapan authorities wielded enough power that they were sometimes
seen as a threat to local municipal authorities who attempted to supersede their decision-
making power through an appeal to national (rather than consuetudinary) law (Tzaquitzal,
Ixchu, & Tiu, 2000).
[10] Hereafter, I will refer to these two main groups as the council and the authorities.
[11] This emphasis on consensus is not unique to the Kiche community. Montejo (2004, p. 252)
reiterates the importance of consensus in Jakaltek communities as well, lamenting its
increasing abandonment as a result of the armed conflict.
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[12] This perspective reflects Brasss argument that debates over power within ethnic
communities are often articulated in terms of authentic insiders versus culturally different
alien invaders (Brass, 1991, p. 33).
[13] My thanks to Lisa Hoffman for emphasizing this point. See Hoffman, DeHart, & Collier
(2006) for a further elaboration of the importance of an analytical deconstitution ofneoliberalism. For further analysis of the role of the capitalist critique within community
development politics, see DeHart (2001, 2008).
[14] While this moment certainly did not represent the beginning of indigenous mobilization in
Guatemala, the early 1990s was momentous for the public coalescence of indigenous
organizing it reflected, especially around ostensibly non-politicized issues such as linguistics
or community development. Paralleling the historical trajectory documented by other
anthropologists (Arias, 1990; Nelson, 1999; Smith, 1990a; Wilson, 1995; Fischer & McKenna
Brown, 1996), indigenous activists that I worked with from Totonicapan situated the
emergence of a pan-Maya movement in the early 1980s, when indigenous communities in
the western highlands felt the full force of state violence and, simultaneously, began to realize
the inability of class-based ladino insurgencies to address specifically indigenous issues.
[15] For more on this, see Warren (1998), Nelson (1999) and Cojti Cuxil (1991, 1994).
[16] See Bastos and Camus (1993), Fischer and McKenna Brown (1996), and Warren (1998) for a
discussion of the diverse organizational forms, goals, and identifications articulated within
the Maya Movement. Also, see Nelson (1999) for an analysis of the diverse and contentious
meanings attributed to Rigoberta Menchu within Guatemala.
[17] See DeHart (2003) for an analysis of how CDROs Maya development project fits within
global neoliberal development priorities, and also how they articulated with Guatemalan
state decentralization policies.
[18] One of the 21 Maya languages spoken in Guatemala.
[19] The Popol Wuj is the sacred text of the Maya. Written in Kiche during the 16th century,
it documents the mythological and historical foundations of the Kiche people.
[20] See Nygren (1996).[21] Importantly, CDRO did not rely upon a rigid notion of ethnic difference; rather, it
legitimized the ongoing reformulation of ethnic identity in response to situated and shifting
understandings of what was valuable about Maya culture and how it could be productively
applied to address emerging development dilemmas. Within the neoliberal context, this
formulation of Maya culture as an efficient, effective tool for achieving sustainable, equitable,
and local development helped CDRO to authenticate its claim to cultural authenticity and
development power.
[22] See also Hale (2004) for further discussion of this critique of Maya activists.
[23] This is essentially what Foucault has called a microphysics of power.
[24] Hale (2004) uses the term indio permitido to denote limitations on structurally acceptable
forms of cultural difference prescribed by neoliberal multicultural regimes.
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Monica DeHart is at the Department of Anthropology, University of Puget Sound, 1500 N.
Warner, Tacoma, WA 98416, USA (Email: [email protected]).
192 M. DeHart