The Post War Anthropology in Centroamerica

AN44CH23-Moodie ARI 8 September 2015 17:34

The Post–Cold WarAnthropology of CentralAmericaJennifer L. Burrell1 and Ellen Moodie2

1Department of Anthropology, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany,New York 12222; email: [email protected] of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana,Illinois 61801; email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2015. 44:381–400

First published online as a Review in Advance onSeptember 3, 2015

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online atanthro.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014101

Copyright c© 2015 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

Keywords

violence, security, democracy, politics, political economy

Abstract

This article reviews the recent and emerging post–Cold War sociocul-tural anthropology research on Central America, defined as the five coun-tries that share a common colonial and postcolonial history: Costa Rica, ElSalvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Following a considerationof the foundational literature widely engaged by scholars to theorize regionalprocesses, three sections reflect major themes of investigation in the area: po-litical economy, including environmental concerns and migration; political,ethnic, and religious subjectivities; and violence, democracy, and in/security,including gangs. We conclude that the well-developed anthropology of Cen-tral America has made key contributions to disciplinary analyses and debates,especially in the fields of political and economic anthropology and in termsof furthering studies of violence, migration, neoliberalism, and postconflictdemocracy. Anthropologists working in the region have been at the forefrontof public and “engaged” anthropology, recognizing the political contexts andpower relations in which knowledge is produced.

381

Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


INTRODUCTION

Central America returned to world headlines in 2014, when a “surge” of “unaccompanied minors,”more than 68,000 children, arrived at the Texas-Mexico border over the course of a year. Thirtyyears earlier, news of the region had overflowed evening airtime and morning column inches.Ronald Reagan had famously warned of a red menace that could reach the United States in aslittle as two days, evoking images of Sandinistas in Soviet tanks making it “as far as a shopping centerin Pecos [Texas]” (Reagan 1986). In the panic that swept North America in 2014, disseminatedfirst through social media, leaked photographs of women and children huddled on concrete floorsat the border station alarmed some Californians so much that they blocked a Department ofHomeland Security bus carrying undocumented migrants, mostly from Guatemala, El Salvador,and Honduras, from entering their community.

These two scenarios, one imagined and the other all too real, have much in common. Inboth, people flee terror and persecution as well as economic devastation, only to find hostility,official and unofficial. The types of violence may differ: In the 1980s, people feared death squads,soldiers, and guerrillas, whereas in the past decade Central Americans increasingly dreaded gangmembers and crime. But, now as then, migrants at the border also encounter the solidarity ofpolitical, scholarly, and religious communities. Once again, the status of people living in thevolcanic neck between Mexico and Colombia has been fiercely debated in the US Congress, theirfates tied to ideological agendas. Central Americans themselves, in the isthmus and throughoutthe diaspora, still struggle and suffer, organize and endure.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Cold War directed scholarly and political attention to the war-torn region. The revolutionary movements and civil wars in Guatemala (1960–1996), El Salvador(1980–1992), and Nicaragua (∼1985–1990), together with their excesses spilling into Hondurasand Costa Rica, shaped generations in the North and the South. The Annual Review of Anthro-pology issued two articles in 1987 and 1988 orienting researchers toward regional history andsorting through masses of new work (Smith & Boyer 1987, Smith et al. 1988). Here we examineknowledge production in and on Central America since 1988. We consider what social scientistsonce compelled by Cold War crises have moved on to, and we explore interests taken up by newgenerations of anthropologists.

The context that drew so many to Central America has led to long-term commitments, forging“engaged” and “activist” practices of anthropology that recognize the conditions of possibility forany kind of knowledge production and the relations of power implicated in it (Hale 2006). Whereascommon portrayals of Central America seem to lurch from crisis to crisis, ethnographic methodschallenge one-dimensional understandings of the region and its people.

Following broader academic trends, many social scientists in the past quarter century have ex-amined uneven processes of democratization and economic liberalization in Central America, andtheir entanglement with precarity and insecurity. Many researchers thus probe rule of law, judicialreform, and de- and remilitarization, as well as civil society antiviolence initiatives. Anthropologistsfollow these trends but specifically attend to discursive details and practices of neoliberal gover-nance, as well as the textures of everyday life. Early on they challenged once-smooth narratives oftransition, long before gang violence became a dominant Central American trope, and long beforethe Latin American “pink tide” of new victories of the Left, at least in El Salvador, Nicaragua,and Honduras. Ethnographic interventions contest the dominant view of success promoted bypundits and policymakers, who once held up the region’s transition experience—fostered “underdirect U.S. tutelage” (Robinson 2003, p. 87)—as a model for “post”-conflict Iraq.

Robinson (2003) critically delineates the rise of transnational states and the transformations inglobal relations of production, and his work has become a key reference for Central Americanists.

382 Burrell · Moodie

Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


What was happening in the 1980s and 1990s, he contends, reflects “a prolonged period of changein the social structure. . .reciprocal to and in dialectical interplay with changes at the level of theglobal system” (Robinson 2003, p. 57). Many anthropologists carrying out fieldwork in the isthmusstudy the on-the-ground expressions and practices of these global shifts and theorize the way theseshifts take form, reform, and deform so often in the name of “democracy.”

Robinson has called “democracy promotion” by the United States a euphemism for “nationalsecurity” (Gindin 2005). Indeed, crucial for anthropologists of post–Cold War Central Americahas been a consideration of the multiple, layered meanings of in/security. Popular representationsof the region have left behind “always already revolting subaltern subjects” (Nelson 2009, p. 136)and gluttonous coffee oligarchs (Paige 1998), but they continue to fill a “savage slot” with commonimages of gang members and drug cartels. The insecurity of everyday life sprawls beyond the dreadof iconic enemies: Many political scientists and international studies scholars have focused oninstitutions, especially policing and the rule of law. Anthropologists and sociologists demonstratehow distrust of institutions, politicians, and strangers plays into social relations. “Security,” thus,has become a keyword in research in the region, embedded in themes of crime and violenceas well as migration, labor, and livelihood. Security both impels and threatens the rise of socialmovements and political participation, as well as imaginaries of democracy; it arises from andinfiltrates religious tenets, and it is shaped through structures of gender, race, sexuality, andethnicity.

We have divided this article into four sections. First, we see much post-1988 work as con-fronting an “after,” a “post,” or a “transition”: Thus, the next section is titled Foundations andAftermaths. Second, we consider Political Economy and Environmental Battlegrounds. Thoughthe agrarian lifeways documented by a previous generation of researchers are declining, most Cen-tral Americans, rural and urban, still struggle for subsistence and engage in grassroots resistance.Third, we review how Political, Ethnic/Racial, and Religious Subjectivities have transformedover the post–Cold War era, as manifested in political struggles, social movements, and religion.Fourth, we focus on Violence and In/Security. In tandem with a disciplinary interest in politicaland structural violence, much recent literature confronts the interlinked complexities of the state,politics, and poverty.

We limit our consideration of research on Central America to the five countries that share acommon colonial and postcolonial history: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, andNicaragua, which were briefly unified after independence from Spain (1823–1838). We acknowl-edge the enormous amount of outstanding work on the region we have not been able to includein this article because of space limitations. Further, though we sought to include much work ofCentral America–based anthropologists in this review, different modes of publishing limited ourbibliography. Social scientists in Central America are much more directly involved than those inthe United States, for example, in drafting public policy, in consultation on development efforts,and in shaping debates around themes such as public health and education. Their work is oftenfunded, published, and circulated by nongovernmental organizations and institutes, and not inpeer-reviewed journals (see sidebar, Central American Anthropology in Central America).

FOUNDATIONS AND AFTERMATHS

Robinson’s (2003) work positions Central American states in larger currents of post–Cold Warneoliberal capitalism, an approach developed out of the world-systems theories that girdedGuatemalan Torres Rivas’s (1971) influential Interpretacion del desarrollo social centroamericano.Forty years later, he published Revoluciones sin cambios revolucionarios (Torres Rivas 2011): Kruijt,author of the regional retrospective Guerrillas (Kruijt 2008), calls it “a synthesis of history,

www.annualreviews.org • Post–Cold War Anthropology of Central America 383

Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


CENTRAL AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Since the (formal) end of the conflicts, many scholars in Central America have welcomed the post–Cold War aper-ture as an opportunity for professionalization. In the late 1980s and 1990s, isthmian anthropology, consolidated inmuseums, universities, and research institutes, began to expand with support from nongovernmental organizations(M. Bolanos & M.E. Bozzoli, unpublished manuscript). External funding channeled many research agendas towarddevelopment or commerce, as well as environment and gender. Recognizing their dependence on others’ agendas,Central American social scientists began to organize regionally as they sought more autonomy and to strengthenSouth–South ties. After a series of meetings and workshops between 1988 and 1994, La Red Centroamericanade Antropologıa (Anthropological Network of Central America; RCA) was formalized in 1994, and biannual con-ferences have been organized ever since. M. Bolanos & M.E. Bozzoli (unpublished manuscript) divide CentralAmerican anthropological advances into two phases, 1985–2000 (which they dub Processes of Globalization) and2000–2013 (called Central American Anthropology as World Anthropology). Studies of alternative development,popular culture, the informal economy, and indigeneity dominated the first phase. By the second phase, anthropol-ogists were confronting rising social challenges: increasing violence and narco-trafficking in the region, as well asenduring poverty and migration in a time of neoliberal globalization. They were also writing more about gender andsexuality, indigenous rights, and ethnic identities, and they had begun to explore more deeply historical memory inconflictive regions.

sociological explanation, and rueful looking-back at decades of tragedy, suffering, and depressingconsequences” (Kruijt 2014, p. 57).

Other social scientists join in “rueful looking back,” including some of the then-young an-thropologists highlighted in the 1987–1988 Annual Review of Anthropology articles: Field, Hale,Edelman, and Bourgois. Field (1999) and Hale (1994) arrived in Nicaragua to work with the San-dinista socialist project, but they published their books after the 1990 electoral defeat—a momentthat forced many observers and participants to reconsider the possibilities of post–Cold War revo-lutionary politics. Conditions in their respective fieldwork sites, with artisans in western Nicaraguaand in Miskitu communities on the Atlantic Coast, urged them to challenge the lack of racial andgendered subjects in the class-based call for unity in a country that had largely imagined itself as ahomogenous mestizo nation. Lancaster, after applying religious-symbolic and Gramscian analy-ses to liberation theology (Lancaster 1988), acknowledges in Life Is Hard (1992) how Sandinismostrained under the US-funded Contra war. The book, which contests Western sexual categoriesin its analysis of Nicaraguan masculinity, is today cited as foundational to queer studies in an-thropology. In After Revolution, Babb (2001) analyzes the everyday effects of the renewed marketeconomy while tracing post-1990 feminist, LGBT, and other social movements. Montoya’s (2012)historical ethnography, based on long-term research in a rural Sandinista stronghold, reveals thecontradictions inherent in “gendered scenarios of revolution” in which, despite the promise ofemergent gendered possibilities for “New Men” and “New Women,” patriarchal social structurescontinue to dominate interactions. Along with work on gender and sexuality, much post–ColdWar research on Nicaragua has also figured prominently in theorizing postsocialism.

Popular representations of Costa Rica, Nicaragua’s neighbor to the south, often continue tofollow scripts of peaceful exceptionality. Edelman’s (1999) analysis of peasant movements showsthe friction behind the pura vida (pure life) discourse. In 1981, Costa Rica was the first country inLatin America to default on its foreign debt obligation, adopting neoliberal market reforms earlyon. Still, not looking back as ruefully as others, Edelman finds that social movements are dynamic


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


in their political commitments and learn from experience, and the same actors may reappearin different political actions and organizations. He also believes that peasant identity remains aprimary Central American way of relating to the world, something Boyer & Cardona Penalva(2013) demonstrate in the reemergent activism of seasoned leaders of peasant unions and farmer-to-farmer networks in postcoup Honduras. Such hope contrasts with others’ dire prognoses forHonduras, the country with the world’s highest murder rate.

Bourgois (2001), entrenched in the rueful mode, offers a dramatic aftermath analysis. In 1981he began fieldwork among Salvadoran peasant supporters of the Farabundo Martı National Liber-ation front (FMLN). Caught in a scorched-earth military campaign, they were soon forced to flee.He followed. Years later, they met again and he revised his neo-Fanonian view of revolutionary vi-olence as liberatory. Seeing Salvadorans’ postwar self-blame and disillusion, as well as high rates ofviolence (structural, symbolic, and everyday), Bourgois decided he had sanitized his records of theoriginal experience, unconsciously mimicking a Cold War morality (poles reversed). Bourgois’saccount sparked a debate with Binford (2002). Drawing on his research in El Mozote—the site ofthe 1981 military massacre of more than a thousand peasants (Binford 1996)—Binford suggestedthat the ex-guerillas might not have interpreted the past with such recrimination had insurgencyled to more justice. Instead, the “market democracy” following the 1992 peace accords reinscribedinequalities in a neoliberal mode. The country, much like Guatemala and Honduras, survives onremittances sent by migrants who continue to flee.

Whereas this disillusioned mode characterizes much post–Cold War research on El Salvador,many scholars working in the country do discern emancipatory aftereffects of the organizationsand social movements that emerged during wartime. They see hope, for example, among thosewho participated in the popular church (Peterson 1997) or in former combatants who came toawareness in the popular health system (Smith-Nonini 2010), or within diverse communities thattoday collaborate in reconciliation and memory projects, creating new forms of national belong-ing (DeLugan 2012, Velasquez Estrada 2015). Ultimately, though, social suffering haunts manyresearchers—whether theorizing links between wartime political violence and postwar criminal,gang, and everyday violences in the context of post–Cold War neoliberal restructuring and politicalcorruption, or exploring deeply entrenched gendered and class inequalities.

This debate over violence and its aftermaths animates much research in Guatemala. With itsrich indigenous history, the country has long drawn scholarly attention. Violence and repressionhave characterized everyday life, especially for the Maya, through much of Guatemala’s history.The intensity of conflict pushed anthropologists to write about la violencia by the mid-1980s.Carmack’s (1988) edited volume Harvest of Violence includes before-and-after accounts by anthro-pologists conducting long-term fieldwork in indigenous communities. Manz (1988), too, reportson historical changes; her team of researchers conducted extensive interviews with war refugeesin Guatemala and Mexico. Two recent collections consider how Guatemalans are reconstructingtheir lives and imagining their futures a quarter century later (Little & Smith 2009, McAllister &Nelson 2013). The genocidal nature of the civil war violence forced Guatemalans in the post–ColdWar moment to confront the deep-seated racism of their society. Casaus Arzu’s (1992) work onrace and lineage inaugurated a conversation acknowledging the role of the elites in perpetuatinga severely discriminatory state (Adams et al. 2004a,b; Dary Fuentes 2013).

One particular Guatemalan voice haunts many reflections on that era: that of anthropologistMyrna Mack, whose criticism of the government’s maltreatment of indigenous people led to herassassination by a military death squad in 1990. The state is not a shadowy or mystical presence insuch lives and deaths; it is a fiercely felt reality, in Guatemala and throughout the isthmus. Todaymost anthropologists take as a given Smith’s (1990) insistence that ethnicity and nation cannot beunderstood without investigating the state.


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


What it means to live in a state of violence and fear has motivated much of the post–Cold Warliterature in Guatemala as well as El Salvador (and later Honduras). Green’s (1999) dialecticalanalysis of fear and terror in everyday life links Maya war experiences with long-term inequalitiesand structural violences. Sanford (2003), like Binford in El Mozote, reveals the complicated terrainof postwar forensic and other human rights investigations as well as the power (and pain) of wartestimonies.

This research has focused on emergent actors such as widows, human rights interlocutors,evangelical converts, Mayan cultural rights activists, and even “gringas,” the North American andEuropean women who dedicated themselves to grassroots work at the war’s end (Adams 1998). Itreflects on the meaning of postwar in particular places, and it contributes to creating a founda-tion for research on aftermaths. A corresponding political and theoretical vocabulary—includingimpunity, accountability, dignity, victimhood, fear, waiting, secrecy, and agency—informs anthro-pological insights on violence and postconflict periods, even as everyday experience seems to veerfar from past history.

Central American post–Cold War anthropology also demonstrates how shared, coherent nar-ratives of what happened, how, and to whom are elusive. By the late 1980s, Rigoberta Menchu’s(Burgos-Debray & Menchu 1984) account of the horrors that befell her, her family, and herK’iche’ Maya community was circulating worldwide. Testimonio, a genre burdened with an auraof “authenticity” and usually defined as a first-hand account written by an eyewitness (or dictatedto a transcriber/collaborator), became an important form of documenting struggles throughoutCentral America (Falla 1992, Montejo 1987, Tula & Stephen 1994). For several years sensationaldebates raged about the autobiographical versus communal nature of testimonies, and the appro-priation of the genre by academics and the Left in general. The polemics (Arias 2001, Stoll 1999)demonstrate the impossibility of “fixing” history, especially in aftermaths.

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND ENVIRONMENTAL BATTLEGROUNDS

Scholars of Central America have deepened their focus on political economy in the post–Cold Waryears, investigating entrenched, emergent, and shifting forms of labor and livelihood, just as pre-dicted by Smith & Boyer (1987). Many have followed crops, especially coffee and bananas. Studiesof such commodities became lenses through which regional histories and everyday relationshipscould be observed. In research anticipated in the Annual Review of Anthropology articles mentionedabove (Smith & Boyer 1987, Smith et al. 1988), Bourgois (1989) examines the mobilization ofethnic identity in Costa Rica, plumbing the relationships among work, class, and ethnicity on aChiquita banana plantation. Paige (1998) takes up the region’s entangled history with coffee inhis wide-ranging exploration of links among coffee, politics, and finance.

While wars raged and in their aftermaths, the neoliberal economic model has reached into theremotest rural corners of Central America. Markets opened, public holdings were privatized, andresource extraction quickened. Tucker (2008) and Lyon (2011), among others, have revisited coffeecultivation, considering new arrangements of production and marketing as well as community andhousehold politics, kinship, and transnational linkages. Fresh, frozen, and otherwise processednontraditional export crops such as snow peas, broccoli, melons, and cut flowers have producedalternative livelihood opportunities (Hamilton & Fischer 2005). Research on commodity chainsoffers a means to trace aspects of globalization such as the links between international producersand US consumers, and it points to the way Central Americans articulate their desire for algo mas(something more) (Fischer & Benson 2006). The diversion of subsistence plots to the cultivation ofexport crops, the high use of pesticides and resulting environmental devastation, and the expansionof such practices as shrimp and mollusk cultivation contribute to what Stonich et al. (1994) call an


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


enduring crisis with human and environmental consequences. Debates over genetically modifiedcrops, especially corn, echo throughout the region (Grandia 2014). In Costa Rica, organic seedshave become a linchpin for the negotiation of kinship versus intellectual property rights (Aistara2014). Such studies offer insights into how agriculturalists and other economic actors such asmarket vendors reframe “risk” and “crisis” and may act contrary to expert advice and predominantmarket logic (Little 2013, Tucker 2013).

Since the Cold War, neoliberal forces have impelled the market reorganization of land, owner-ship, and resources. In her study of waves of dispossession of Q’eqchi’, Grandia (2011) emphasizeshow neoliberal trade and infrastructural projects financed by international development banksincite conflict between Maya and conservationists. Loker (2003) explores how Hondurans havecoped with environmental changes over two decades since the construction of the El Cajon hy-droelectric dam, finding increased vulnerability of poorer households. Environmental historiesalso drive Nading’s (2014) ethnographic attention to vulnerable urban poor in Nicaragua. Heconceives of the dengue pandemic, his research focus, in terms of entanglements of intercon-nected bodies and environments, challenging the idea that there are borders between them. Inmost post–Cold War research in Central America, borders, if not challenged, are being redrawn,from the Honduras Bajo-Aguan land reform program (Edelman & Leon 2013) to indigenousland rights debates in Guatemala (Hale 2006). Galemba’s (2013) chance encounter with Mexicansoldiers, sent to enforce border control on a normally unpatrolled strip of road crossing fromMexico to Guatemala, led her to reflect on the arbitrary ways in which activities, peoples, andplaces are rendered illegal. Brondo’s (2013) work among the Garifuna in Honduras points to thecontradictions that arise when identity politics, tourism, and land rights claims mix in land grabs.

Dispossession of communal patrimony and resources is increasing. Resource battles give riseto local organizing, rights-based initiatives, and the formation of advocacy NGOs. Water strug-gles are especially acute in Costa Rica, where an active anti–water privatization movement callsfor transparency (Ballestero 2012), a demand echoed by the Nicaragua anti–water privatizationmovement (Romano 2012). Central Americans are mobilizing against mining companies in in-digenous communities of Guatemala as well as in former war zones of El Salvador (Dougherty2011, Spalding 2014). In Costa Rica, “bio-vigilante” activists monitor local fields in their oppo-sition to transgenic seeds (Pearson 2012). As new players enter the global market, most notablyChina, development frameworks are shifting. DeHart’s (2012) research in Costa Rica examineshow China’s presence challenges the politics of economic development, promoting South–Southcooperation.

The post–Cold War moment has witnessed a fundamental restructuring of the world economy.In Central America, shifts in mass migration, tourism, and export production signal a break in re-gional modes of accumulation and international division of labor. In Nicaragua, Bickham Mendez(2005) observes a movement that shifted its focus from the Sandinista revolution to informal la-bor organizing in the maquilas (assembly factories); Northern companies outsource labor needsthroughout the isthmus, paying low wages for work in flimsy factories in urban and rural tax-freezones. New industrial laborers, such as women (Aguirre Hernandez 2010, Pine 2008) and Mayanyouth (Green 2003), are subject to draconian measures of discipline. Maquilas become both sites ofresistance and the means for expanding consumption, exacerbating generational conflicts (Goldın2011). Brooks (2007) shows how they are also places of transnational consumer protest campaignsconnected to the labor rights movement in El Salvador.

Recent work renders visible previously hidden forms of labor. Offit (2008) challenges pre-dominant wisdom about child street labor by showing Guatemalan working youth’s economicplanning and well-beyond-survival income generation. Thomas (2012) reveals the world of small-scale Mayan apparel manufacturers producing unauthorized Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


sweatshirts in concrete-block backrooms. These counterfeiters cull their normative business prac-tices from development ideologies promoted by neoliberal policy agendas and international law.Studies by Hendrickson (1995) and Kistler (2014) show the work and worlds of Mayan womenand their centrality to political constructions of identity and community.

More visible are the changes affecting tourism, as countries attempt to capitalize on forests,beaches, archeological zones, and cultural traditions. Beyond picturesque villages and volcanoes,however, lie complex negotiations among individuals, communities, and states. Nicaragua’s movefrom revolution not just to maquilas but also to resorts illustrates the contradictory impulses oftourism and nationalism (Babb 2004). Babb (2013) in Nicaragua and Frohlick (2013) in CostaRica explore sex, power, and the touristic encounter. In Guatemala, Antigua’s market vendorsresist attempts to represent and commodify Mayan culture and act to reshape these processes totheir own benefit (Little 2004). Mayan culture has also emerged as part of heritage branding inCopan Ruinas, Honduras (Mortenson 2014); meanwhile, Honduran coastal dwellers challengemultinationals in the marketing of their culture (Anderson 2013, Loperena 2012). Ecotourism isgrowing throughout the isthmus, especially in Costa Rica, where multiple actors shape and contestenvironmentalism in the cloud forests of Monte Verde (Vivanco 2006).

Migration and remittances have arguably reshaped contemporary Central America more indeli-bly than coffee once did. Now, cash flows south to enhance national GDPs as Central Americansflock north, both to search for livelihood and to flee violence. Some places, such as La Quebrada inHonduras, have transformed so rapidly that residents struggle to cope (Reichman 2011). Regionalstudies chart changes in sending communities in Guatemala (Taylor et al. 2006), the reimaginingin El Salvador of developmentalist politics and transnational migration (Wiltberger 2014) as wellof family in the context of transnational separations (Abrego 2014), and the reshaping of kinship,care, and generational relationships in Nicaragua (Yarris 2014). Emerging transnational ethno-graphies explore how lives across borders are shaped and negotiated in multiple places, throughtheoretical lenses such as value (Pedersen 2012), morality (Foxen 2008), state imaginations(Baker-Cristales 2004), citizenship (Coutin 2007), debt (Stoll 2012), informal labor (Quesada1999), and authenticity and belonging across polarized lines (Burrell 2013, Dyrness 2014). An-thropologists and other social scientists chart the dangerous passage north (Rivas Castillo 2011,Vogt 2013), and many of them have become migrant advocates (Lazo de Vega & Steigenga 2013).Emerging studies of South–South migration—especially of other Central Americans to CostaRica (Hayden 2003, Sandoval-Garcia 2004)—shed new light on the dynamics of transnationality.

POLITICAL, ETHNIC/RACIAL, AND RELIGIOUS SUBJECTIVITIES

Cold War logics produced binary-political subjectivities—oppositional ideological identificationswith very little room for ambiguity or compromise, as Bourgois (2001) demonstrates in his re-flections on violence among Salvadoran peasant insurgents. The upshot, in Central America aselsewhere, is that after the Cold War, things got messier. Moral poles became more ambiguouseven for activists and solidarity analysts, not to mention once-committed Central Americans, theirlives mired in what Silber (2010, p. 10) calls “entangled aftermaths.” Neoliberalism emerged as anamorphous enemy that often elicits depoliticizing, individualistic responses—for example, shop-ping in malls (Rivas 2014, Way 2012) or sharing crime stories that parse violence as individualacts to be managed as everyday risk, unrelated to social relations or political conditions (Moodie2010).

The great impulse of revolutionary movements is to overcome individual orientation and pro-duce collective, class-conscious subjects. Grandin (2004) develops the concept of “insurgent indi-viduality” in studying the events leading up to the 1978 Panzos massacre in Guatemala: “Collective


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


action distilled for many a more potent understanding of themselves as politically consequent in-dividuals” (Grandin 2004, p. 181). The paradigmatic example of this transformation is 1992 Nobellaureate Rigoberta Menchu. Debates stemming from her text arose in the post–Cold War con-text of doubts about political solidarity and emancipatory movements. As Howe’s (2013) friendsin Nicaragua explained, the post–Cold War moment has produced dispersed luchas (struggles)rather than the sustained movements of the past. For anthropologists, that once-socialist countryhas been a potent site for research on post–Cold War political subjectivities. Howe’s study of sex-ual rights activism joins a vibrant conversation on the legacies of Sandinista socialism on gender,feminism, and social movements in the context of neoliberalism (Babb 2001, Montoya 2012).

Anthropologists of Central America still probe memories of revolutionary-era coming toconsciousness—but also postwar disillusion and post–Cold War forms of struggle. In El Salvador,Silber (2010) analyzes the disappointment of “everyday revolutionary” women with developmentprojects and local and revolutionary politics; in the context of neoliberal governance and fatigue,many turned to nonpublic pursuits, including migration. Viterna (2013) theorizes why only somefemale guerrillas transformed existing gender roles and gained opportunities after the war. Womenwho after the war developed “progressive gender ideologies and worked to inspire cultural change”(Viterna 2013, p. 8) generally had not occupied strategically powerful positions; rather, they hadkey wartime connections. Posocco (2014) similarly explores the gendered dimensions of guerillasocialities and subjectivities in Guatemala. Smith-Nonini’s (2010) study of health-rights move-ments emerging from guerrilla medicine also seeks to salvage hope in the midst of neoliberalrestructuring. Binford (2013, p. 245), asking how guerrilla organization might empower formercombatants, proposes a positive “postinsurgent individuality.” Sprenkels (2014) uses terms thatecho Binford’s, but his ethnographic exploration of the experience of postinsurgency shows thatmany former rebel leaders have worked to safeguard and deepen their own privileges even (or es-pecially) after coming to power, actions often complicit with neoliberal restructuring in generatingpostwar inequalities. Montoya (2013) also demonstrates the salience of the war to contemporarySalvadoran politics (as well as to postwar violence, theorized as intrinsic to democracy), but herresearch on the 2009 presidential elections focuses on symbols and discourses among citizenry thatreintroduced unresolved wartime frictions into public debate. This postwar democracy researchjoins that of DeLugan (2012) on nation building and of Peterson (2006, p. 163), who sees a suddenpost-1992 rise of Salvadoran indigenous movements as an extension of “the revolutionary desirethat animated the social struggles of the civil war and before.”

El Salvador drew little anthropological interest before the war, possibly because of its perceivedlack of indigeneity—commonly (and inaccurately) traced to the 1932 massacre of Indians and peas-ants in a communist-led uprising. Today, as Salvadoran indigenous identification grows, postwarcommemorations of 1932 are rising (DeLugan 2013) and scholars are revisiting the event (Gould& Lauria-Santiago 2008). Gould has long been interested in hidden or disappearing indigeneity;his earlier exploration of race and ethnicity in Nicaragua (Gould 1998) expanded to El Salvador,Guatemala, and Honduras in the late 1990s as part of a massive four-year project (Euraque et al.2005). Ongoing attention to indigeneity has meant that Guatemalanists have dominated anthro-pological literature on Central America. In the post–Cold War years, the pan-Mayan movement,pressing for multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual rights, has been seen by many asthe most dynamic force in the country (Fischer & Brown 1996, Montejo 2005, Warren 1998).Nelson’s (1999) study of cultural politics on the occasion of the 1992 quincentennial of the Euro-pean conquest examines how power is deployed within Guatemalan racial and gender relations.Many anthropologists work with these ideas, considering the state and Mayan communities in thecontext of regional, national, and transnational politics (Casaus Arzu 2007, Velasquez Nimatuj2008) as well as religious practices (Adams 2009, MacKenzie 2009).


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


Critics note that Mayan organizations and leaders do not necessarily represent local indige-nous communities—rather, like many civil society organizations and social movements in thepost–Cold War era, they answer to NGOs and international funders (Stoll 2011). Hale (2004)describes in this context the figure of the indio permitido, the authorized Indian who collaboratesin benign neoliberal multiculturalism (Ybarra 2013). Ethnographers at the local level often findMaya to be less interested in abstract, identity-based rights claims than in local politics (Smith2009). Vanthuyne (2009) concludes that despite divergent perceptions of Mayan identity amongNGOs, intellectuals, and rural townspeople, there is still shared ground for identity politics. Hale(2006), meanwhile, probes Ladino (nonindigenous mestizo) perceptions of Mayan identities andmovements in Guatemala and finds that Ladinos share little ground with indigenous activists;rather, he finds them to be ambivalent in regard to race.

Studies of non-Mayan indigenous Central Americans and Atlantic Coast people of Africandescent once used to be categorized within the field of Caribbean studies. The 1980s conflicts po-sitioned these populations more clearly within Central America’s national power structures (Hale1994). A new generation of Central Americanists is exploring post–Cold War Afro-Central Amer-ican and Atlantic Coast indigenous subjectivities, often using a critical race studies framework.Anderson (2009) teases out the complexities of the seemingly contradictory claims of both black(cosmopolitan) and indigenous (rooted) identities among Garifuna in Honduras; Pineda (2006)investigates similar questions among Creoles and Miskitus in Nicaragua. England (2006) movesbetween Honduras and New York to study transnational Garifuna communities. In Nicaragua,Goett (2011) theorizes a tense postrevolutionary governmentality stigmatizing Afro-descendantpeoples despite the existence of multicultural modes of participation.

Just as early Sandinista neglect of racial and ethnic difference once stymied the analysis ofpower dynamics, Costa Rica’s self-image as a mestizo nation has limited its ability to see itselfthrough a multicultural lens. Some of the most interesting work on post–Cold War Costa Ricapoints to its transformation from an apparently complacent, middle-class society to a more activistone, through the formation of a vigorous movement of patriotic committees opposing the nationalreferendum on the Dominican Republic–Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR)in 2007. The opposition movement framed the referendum debate ideologically, presenting it onthe one hand as an opposition between neoliberal globalization and national sovereignty, and onthe other as a crucial test for the survival of the Costa Rican welfare state (Raventos 2013, Rayner2014).

Honduras, too, has seen dramatic changes in its political and social milieu, marked in particularby Hurricane Mitch in 1998 (Ensor 2009) and by the 2009 coup that ousted leftist president Manuel“Mel” Zelaya. Many saw the angry protests and counterprotests (and brutal state response) thatensued as new developments—as Hondurans catching up to their (once) more radical isthmianneighbors—though Boyer & Cardona Penalva (2013) show that there is a tradition of long-termsocial movements in the country. In the postcoup context, they look with hope at the emergenceof new organizing around sustainable agriculture. Almeida (2014) sees post–Cold War battles inHonduras and throughout Central America as expressing a common opposition to neoliberalism;he argues that these movements have replaced the revolutionary and armed struggles of thepast.

Before the coup, few would have predicted the Honduran protests. Pine’s (2008) study ofHonduran subjectivity, seen through the lenses of everyday violence, alcoholism, and assemblyplants, suggests a negative self-identity characterized by self-blame and lack of discipline.Pine suggests evangelical Christianity is one way laborers reconcile the contradictions theyexperience in their daily lives. If during the 1980s and early 1990s academics interested in religionwere drawn to Central America to study the popular church (Lancaster 1988, Peterson 1997),


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


in the precarious, post–Cold War moment, religion scholars have been fascinated with theconversion to Protestantism of formerly Catholic Central Americans (Garrard-Burnett 1998).Pentecostals, in particular, encourage the Holy Spirit to intervene directly in their lives toincrease wealth (Girard 2013) or to participate in development efforts (Huff 2014). To others,evangelical churches offer the hope of redemption or refuge from gangs (Wolseth 2011). Inhis recent research in Guatemala City, O’Neill (2015) explores evangelical gang preventionprograms, building on his previous work on how the practices of neo-Pentecostal Christiancitizens are conceived of as political action in the midst of a violent city (O’Neill 2009).

VIOLENCE AND IN/SECURITY

From revolutions and armed conflicts to the everyday suffering imposed by severe social inequali-ties, to the spectacular gang aggression that grabs easy media attention, Central America is a regionthat has prompted much debate about violence and security. These are not new preoccupationsamong scholars of the region. Nevertheless, since the Cold War, violence has been shaped by newconfigurations of politics and power. Anthropological approaches to violence have expanded inthe past quarter century as well, pushed in part by Central Americanist scholars who have chal-lenged the clear separation of political and criminal (as well as structural, symbolic, and everyday)violences.

Regional studies of violence range across several broad themes, especially relative to deepeninginequalities. The first of these is the reconstitution of the state. The contemporary nature of thestate has prompted considerable debate. In Guatemala, some have analyzed indigenous effortsto exercise their own forms of law and justice (Sieder 2011); others have questioned the state’scapacity to include and govern indigenous populations (Hawkins & MacDonald 2013). Copeland’sresearch on fruit-fly eradication in northwestern Guatemala shows how Mayans living in theviolence of market-driven neoliberal democracy have produced an imaginary of the “monstrous”state as “the worst enemy of all the people” (Copeland 2014, p. 315). In her study of citizenshipand transparency in Guatemala’s conditional transfer program, Dotson (2014) concludes that thepoor bear the brunt of the state’s limited modernization project. In El Salvador, Baker-Cristales(2008) and Coutin (2007) find an emergent regime of transnational governmentality in the tensionbetween the exclusionary tactics taken by state actors to control transnational populations and theinformal influence the latter exercise through their remittances.

Another theme encompasses ongoing truth and justice efforts, including human rights, forensicinvestigation, and memory. Decades after the war, efforts to prosecute former general Rıos Monttin Guatemala for genocide and crimes against humanity, the first-ever national prosecution of aformer head of state, have raised new issues for ethnographers. Anthropologists and historians havebeen at the center of this process, serving as witnesses, documenting proceedings, and analyzingarchives (Steusse et al. 2013, Weld 2014). K. Vanthuyne & R. Falla (forthcoming in the Journal ofGenocide Studies) probe the ethics and politics of collecting accounts of annihilation and destruction,noting the complicated mix of symbolic acknowledgment of the death of loved ones, solidarity, andurgent material need that characterizes many Central American communities living in aftermaths.In El Salvador, Hume (2009) argues that the declaration of amnesty for all those accused of humanrights abuses in the Truth Commission report ignored the accounts of the victims and promoted anofficial version of history that silenced the collective memory of oppression. A postwar generationof Central Americans has taken on the question of historical memory in education, museum,and oral history projects (Bellino 2014, DeLugan 2012, Gonzalez-Rivera 2011, Oglesby 2007).Many embrace memory activism to build a more inclusive future through the documentation andrepresentation of national and community histories (Alarcon Medina & Binford 2014, Billingsly


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


2014, Hernandez Rivas 2011, Tully 1997). These initiatives contribute an increasingly publicaspect to the discipline as anthropologists consult, give testimony, and advocate.

Structural violence—the systemic ways in which individuals or groups may be kept from meet-ing basic needs—animates anthropologists working throughout the isthmus to give new meaningto daily struggles. These violences encompass everyday slights, gossip, and gender-biased culturalbarriers suffered by women in Guatemala’s Oriente (Menjıvar 2011); the grief of young Honduranmen at the commonplace deaths of their peers from gun and gang violence (Wolseth 2011); andthe experience of Nicaraguan women who wonder why they should get out of bed if they cannotsupport their families (Nouvet 2014). Anxieties about overwhelming hardship led the Nicaraguanwomen Yarris (2011) works with to suffer from dolor de cerebro (brainache). Quesada (1998) inNicaragua, Foxen (2009) in Guatemala, and Dickson-Gomez (2004) in El Salvador write of howeffects of war are embodied long after the fact, especially among children. State power and neo-liberal policymaking are mapped onto women’s bodies in relation to their weight (Yates-Doerr2012) as well as their reproductive capacities and pre- and postnatal choices (Maupin 2009). Theseviolences, structural and gendered, are doubly invisible; as Hume (2009) demonstrates, violencesin gender relations comprise taken-for-granted senses of what it means to be man or woman. Suchinvisibility might explain the regional rise of feminicidal violence (Carey & Torres 2010). As thesestudies show, a multitude of violences mix with chronic insecurity.

In post–Cold War Central America, “security” has been translated from the anti-communistNational Security Doctrine of the 1960s into a matter of citizen security (O’Neill & Thomas2011). Security is framed nationally as a state responsibility, or transnationally, for example, interms of zero tolerance efforts against gangs (Zilberg 2011). Security is also achieved locally, oftenat the margins where the state is perceived to be absent. “Popular justice” measures that includelynching and remilitarization and vigilantism (Burrell 2010, Sharp 2015) have risen to prominence.These local security initiatives, in common with state-led mano dura (commonly translated as “ironfist”) legislation, gain their legitimacy by mobilizing popular moral panic discourses about gangs(Moodie 2009), though many citizens call for social and integrative solutions to crime (Huhn2008). Ultimately, endlessly circulating crime stories reiterate a historical sense that things are“worse than the war” (Moodie 2010, p. 2), a sentiment that resonates in everyday life throughoutthe region, but perhaps especially in its urban cores (Torres 2015). Burrell (2013) also showsthe consequences of such discourses on the ground; in Todos Santos Cuchumatan, Guatemala,asserting generational authority has involved equating the “youth problem” with gang danger tojustify repressive tactics that mimic wartime security measures.

Studies of Central American gangs often point to Los Angeles as a point of origin for the twomajor Central American gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the Barrio 18, especially afterthe United States accelerated deportations in 1996 (Ward 2012, Zilberg 2011). Anthropologistsconducting fieldwork in Central America acknowledge the transnational frame of contemporarygang logics, but their ethnographic commitments reveal deeply local cultural dynamics. MartınezD’Aubuisson (2013) spent a year in a San Salvador neighborhood controlled by an MS-13 clique(loosely organized local unit), documenting its control of the community economy (includingextortion or “protection”), recruitment of children, and homicidal territorial battles. Rodgers’s(2007) account of becoming a broder (brother) and joining a Managua street gang in the mid-1990s examines the community-based ethos of earlier groups. Returning to Nicaragua years later,Rodgers (2009) finds that the pandilleros (gang members) had morphed into something much moreviolent. He attributes this shift to changing urban spatial orders. Others demonstrate how staterepression compelled gangs in the Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Hondurasto become more violent and organized as well as vertical and secretive, responding to crime sweepsand the suspension of due process based on mano dura logic (Cruz 2011, Gutierrez Rivera 2013).


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


Levenson (2013) traces the decades-long evolution of so-called maras (gangs) in Guatemala City,which she describes as a shift from being gangs of life to gangs of death. Gutierrez Rivera (2013)and Carter (2014) have researched mareros (gang members) in Honduras both in and out of prison,where emergency laws quickly filled precariously constructed and overcrowded penitentiaries withthousands of young men. Many regional specialists might recall the prison fires that frequentlybroke out in the wings housing gang members. Death, indeed, has been the only way out ofgangs for Central American gang members. One exception seems to be conversion to evangelicalChristianity (Brenneman 2012).

CONCLUSION

In the last brutal years of the Cold War, North American anthropology discovered CentralAmerica—at least according to the two Annual Review of Anthropology articles published in 1987and 1988 (Smith & Boyer 1987, Smith et al. 1988). Smith & Boyer (1987, p. 197) proposed thatvibrant revolutionary movements in the isthmus made social scientists “take serious notice of so-cial currents in Central America for the first time.” Of course, anthropologists had been workingin the region throughout the twentieth century, especially in Guatemala. But it is true that a newenergy emerged in work on the region at that moment. In this review we have tried to trace thatenergy, following its paths into the present.

Especially in the fields of war aftermaths, violence, and the formation of political subjectivities,anthropologists of Central America have elaborated innovative trajectories for the discipline as awhole. The regional scholarship’s historical strengths in political economy, indigenous studies,and social movement research continue to flourish. Work in this region pushes the boundaries ofhow we understand people’s relationships to the natural resources still abundant in the area’s richvolcanic soils and waters. The complex idioms of multiculturalism and identity politics have takenparticular forms in Central America that are foundational for the theorizing of anthropologistselsewhere. Ultimately, though, the vast majority of Central Americans live in precarious, violentconditions, ever more so under neoliberal governance. Insecurity and social suffering have becomehallmarks of anthropological research on Central America.

Central America is only intermittently in the news now. When it does come to worldwideattention, it is often in relation to migration, “natural” disasters, and gang violence. As this re-view demonstrates, anthropologists of Central America, and those building anthropologies withinCentral America, insist on accounting for the historically deep and geopolitically wide links thathave culminated in the present crises. They refuse visions of power vacuums, state failures, andamorphous violences rising from nowhere. Instead, they show how Central Americans, many ofthem dwelling in complex transnational worlds, continue to struggle to shape their own lives andlivelihoods.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings thatmight be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks go to research assistants David Aristizabal, Mounia El Kotni, and Joel Lennen, as wellas Helen Faller, Ann-Britt Ohlsen, and James Shuford. We are grateful for generous financialsupport from SFB 700 Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood at the Freie Universitat, Berlin,


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


especially to Marianne Braig, Markus-Michael Muller, and Markus Hochmuller of the Institute forLatin American Studies, and to DesiguALdades, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Re:Work at theHumboldt University, Berlin, UUP Albany Professional Development Program, and the CampusResearch Board of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We thank our many CentralAmerican and Central Americanist colleagues who generously shared work and ideas, respondedto calls for literature, and offered enthusiasm during the writing of the article. We would especiallylike to thank Susan Coutin, Marc Edelman, Carol Hendrickson, and David Stoll for thoughtfulcommentaries on the literature, Jon Carter and Jeremy Rayner for last-minute heroics, and TimSmith for culling useful data.

LITERATURE CITED

Abrego LJ. 2014. Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love across Borders. Palo Alto, CA: StanfordUniv. Press

Adams AE. 1998. Gringas, ghouls and Guatemala: the 1994 attacks on North American women accused ofbody organ trafficking. J. Lat. Am. Caribb. Anthropol. 4(1):112–33

Adams AE. 2009. Reviving our spirits: revelation, re-encuentro, and retroceso in post–peace accords Verapaz. InMayas in Postwar Guatemala: Harvest of Violence Revisited, ed. WE Little, TJ Smith, pp. 30–41. Tuscaloosa:Univ. Ala. Press

Adams R, Bastos S, Taracena A. 2004a. Estado, etnicidad y nacion en Guatemala, 1808–1944 y 1944–1985.Antigua, Guatem.: CIRMA

Adams R, Bastos S, Taracena A, eds. 2004b. Las relaciones etnicas en Guatemala, 1944–2000: una sıntesis. Antigua,Guatem.: CIRMA

Aguirre Hernandez L. 2010. Capacidad de mercado y la (in)tolerancia hacia la desigualdad social: los casos detrabajadoras de maquila y pequenos empresarios del sector turıstico en El Salvador. In “. . .Te das hastadonde aguantes.” Desigualdades de excedente en Centroamerica: Tolerancia y ciudadanıa social. El caso El Salvador,ed. JB Perez Sainz, pp. 117–64. San Pedro, Costa Rica: FLACSO

Aistara G. 2014. Actually existing tomatoes: politics of memory, variety, and empire in Latvian struggles overseeds. Focaal J. Glob. Hist. Anthropol. 69:12–27

Alarcon Medina R, Binford L. 2014. Revisiting the El Mozote massacre: memory and politics in postwar ElSalvador. J. Genocide Res. 16(4):513–33

Almeida PD. 2014. Mobilizing Democracy: Globalization and Citizen Protest. Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniv. Press

Anderson M. 2009. Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras. Minneapolis:Univ. Minn. Press

Anderson M. 2013. Notes on tourism, ethnicity, and the politics of cultural value in Honduras. See Burrell &Moodie 2013, pp. 276–92

Arias A, ed. 2001. The Rigoberta Menchu Controversy. Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. PressBabb FE. 2001. After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua. Austin: Univ.

Tex. PressBabb FE. 2004. Recycled sandalistas: from revolution to resorts in the new Nicaragua. Am. Anthropol.

106(3):541–55Babb FE. 2013. Intimate encounters: sex and power in Nicaraguan tourism. See Burrell & Moodie 2013,

pp. 261–75Baker-Cristales B. 2004. Salvadoran Migration to Southern California: Redefining El Hermano Lejano. Gainesville:

Univ. Press Fla.Baker-Cristales B. 2008. Magical pursuits: legitimacy and representation in a transnational political field. Am.

Anthropol. 110(3):349–59Ballestero A. 2012. Transparency short-circuited: laughter and numbers in Costa Rican water politics. PoLAR:

Polit. Leg. Anthropol. Rev. 35(2):223–41


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


Bellino M. 2014. Whose past, whose present? Historical memory among the “postwar” generation inGuatemala. In (Re)constructing Memory: School Textbooks and the Imagination of the Nation, ed. JH Williams,pp. 131–52. Rotterdam, Neth.: Sense

Bickham Mendez J. 2005. From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras: Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Nicaragua.Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press

Billingsly DM. 2014. “So that all shall know”: memory activism and epistemic authority in Guatemala. PhD Thesis,Wash. Univ., St. Louis

Binford L. 1996. The El Mozote Massacre: Anthropology and Human Rights. Tucson: Univ. Ariz. PressBinford L. 2002. Violence in El Salvador: a rejoinder to Philippe Bourgois’s “The power of violence in war

and peace: post-war lessons from El Salvador.” Ethnography 3(1):177–95Binford L. 2013. Migration, tourism, and post-insurgent individuality in Northern Morazan, El Salvador. See

Burrell & Moodie 2013, pp. 245–60Bourgois P. 1989. Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation. Baltimore, MD:

Johns Hopkins Univ. PressBourgois P. 2001. The power of violence in war and peace: post-war lessons from El Salvador. Ethnography

2(1):5–34Boyer J, Cardona Penalva W. 2013. Daring to hope in the midst of despair: the agrarian question within the

anti-coup resistance movement in Honduras. See Burrell & Moodie 2013, pp. 64–79Brenneman R. 2012. Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America. New York/Oxford: Oxford

Univ. PressBrondo K. 2013. Land Grab: Green Neoliberalism, Gender, and Garifuna Resistance in Honduras. Tucson: Univ.

Ariz. PressBrooks EC. 2007. Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work. Minneapolis:

Univ. Minn. PressBurgos-Debray E, Menchu R. 1984. I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. New York: VersoBurrell JL. 2010. In and out of rights: security, migration and human rights talk in postwar Guatemala. J. Lat.

Am. Caribb. Anthropol. 15(1):90–115Burrell JL. 2013. Maya After War: Conflict, Power and Politics. Austin: Univ. Tex. PressBurrell JL, Moodie E, ed. 2013. Central America in the New Millennium: Living Transition and Reimagining

Democracy. New York/Oxford: BerghahnCarey D Jr., Torres GM. 2010. Precursors to femicide: Guatemalan women in a vortex of violence. Lat. Am.

Res. Rev. 45(3):142–64Carmack R, ed. 1988. Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis. Norman: Univ. Okla.

PressCarter J. 2014. Gothic sovereignty: gangs and criminal community in a Honduran prison. S. Atl. Q. 113(3):475–

502Casaus Arzu M. 1992. Racismo y linaje. San Jose, Costa Rica: FLACSOCasaus Arzu M. 2007. Reformulating the Guatemalan state: the role of Maya intellectuals and civil society

discourse. Soc. Anal. 51(2):148–66Copeland N. 2014. Mayan imaginaries of democracy: interactive sovereignties and political affect in postrev-

olutionary Guatemala. Am. Ethnol. 41(2):305–19Coutin S. 2007. Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. PressCruz JM. 2011. Government responses and the dark side of gang suppression. In Maras: Gang Violence and

Security in Central America, ed. T Bruneau, L Dammert, E Skinner, pp. 137–58. Austin: Univ. Tex. PressDary Fuentes C. 2013. Acknowledging racism and state transformation in postwar Guatemalan society. See

Burrell & Moodie 2013, pp. 131–45DeHart M. 2012. Remodeling the global development landscape: the China model and south–south cooper-

ation in Latin America. Third World Q. 33(7):1359–75DeLugan RM. 2012. Reimagining National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in a Global Context. Tucson:

Univ. Ariz. PressDeLugan RM. 2013. Commemorating from the margins of the nation: El Salvador 1932, indigeneity, and

transnational belonging. Anthropol. Q. 86(4):956–94


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


Dickson-Gomez J. 2004. “One who doesn’t know war, doesn’t know anything”: the problem of comprehendingsuffering in postwar El Salvador. Anthropol. Humanism 29(2):145–58

Dotson R. 2014. Citizen–auditors and visible subjects: Mi Familia Progresa and transparency politics inGuatemala. PoLAR: Polit. Leg. Anthropol. Rev. 37(2):350–70

Dougherty ML. 2011. The global gold mining industry, junior firms, and civil society resistance in Guatemala.Bull. Lat. Am. Res. 30(4):403–18

Dyrness A. 2014. National divisions, transnational ties: constructing social and civic identities in postwar ElSalvador. J. Lat. Am. Caribb. Anthropol. 19(1):63–83

Edelman M. 1999. Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica. Palo Alto, CA: StanfordUniv. Press

Edelman M, Leon A. 2013. Cycles of land grabbing in Central America: an argument for history and a casestudy in the Bajo Aguan, Honduras. Third World Q. 34(9):1697–722

England S. 2006. Afro-Central Americans in New York City: Garifuna Tales of Transnational Movements inRacialized Space. Gainesville: Univ. Fla. Press

Ensor MO. 2009. The Legacy of Hurricane Mitch: Lessons from Post-Disaster Reconstruction in Honduras. Tucson:Univ. Ariz. Press

Euraque DA, Gould JL, Hale CR. 2005. Memorias de mestizaje: Cultura politica en Centroamerica de 1920 alpresente. Miami: Cent. Investig. Reg. Mesoam.

Falla R. 1992. Masacres de la selva: Ixcan, Guatemala, 1975–1982. Guatemala City, Guatem.: Editor. Univ.Field L. 1999. The Grimace of Macho Raton: Artisans, Identity, and Nation in Late-Twentieth-Century Western

Nicaragua. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. PressFischer EF, Benson P. 2006. Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala.

Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. PressFischer EF, Brown RM. 1996. Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala. Austin: Univ. Tex. PressFoxen P. 2008. In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt Univ. PressFoxen P. 2009. Local narratives of distress and resilience: lessons in psychosocial wellbeing among the K’iche

Maya in postwar Guatemala. J. Lat. Am. Caribb. Anthropol. 15(1):66–89Frohlick S. 2013. Sexuality, Women, and Tourism: Cross-Border Desires Through Contemporary Travel. London:

RoutledgeGalemba R. 2013. Illegality and invisibility at margins and borders. PoLAR: Polit. Leg. Anthropol. Rev. 36(2):274–

85Garrard-Burnett V. 1998. Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem. Austin: Univ. Tex. PressGindin J. 2005. The battle for global society. Venezuelanalysis.com. http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/

1186Girard W. 2013. The outpouring of development: place, prosperity, and the Holy Spirit in Zion Ministries.

Religion 43(3):385–402Goett J. 2011. Citizens or anticitizens? Afro-descendants and counternarcotics policing in multicultural

Nicaragua. J. Lat. Am. Caribb. Anthropol. 16(2):354–79Goldın L. 2011. Labor turnover among maquila workers of highland Guatemala: resistance and semipro-

letarianization in global capitalism. Lat. Am. Res. Rev. 46(3):133–56Gonzalez-Rivera V. 2011. Before the Revolution: Women’s Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–

1979. University Park: Pa. State Univ. PressGould JL. 1998. To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880–1965. Durham, NC:

Duke Univ. PressGould JL, Lauria-Santiago AA. 2008. To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador,

1920–1932. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. PressGrandia L. 2011. Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce Among the Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders. Seattle:

Univ. Wash. PressGrandia L. 2014. Modified landscapes: vulnerabilities to genetically modified corn in northern Guatemala.

J. Peasant Stud. 41(1):79–105Grandin G. 2004. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago: Univ. Chicago PressGreen L. 1999. Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala. New York: Columbia Univ. Press


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.

http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1186

http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1186


Green L. 2003. Notes on Mayan youth and rural industrialization in Guatemala. Crit. Anthropol. 23(1):51–73Gutierrez Rivera L. 2013. Territories of Violence: State, Marginal Youth, and Public Security in Honduras. New

York: Palgrave MacmillanHale CR. 1994. Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894–1987. Palo Alto,

CA: Stanford Univ. PressHale CR. 2004. Rethinking indigenous politics in the era of the “Indio Permitido.” NACLA Rep. Am. 38(2):16–

21Hale CR. 2006. Activist research v. cultural critique: indigenous land rights and the contradictions of politically

engaged anthropology. Cult. Anthropol. 21(1):96–120Hamilton S, Fischer E. 2005. Maya farmers and export agriculture in highland Guatemala: implications for

development and labor relations. Lat. Am. Perspect. 32(5):33–58Hawkins J, MacDonald J. 2013. Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala: Indigenous Responses to a Failing State.

Norman: Univ. Okla. PressHayden B. 2003. Salvadorans in Costa Rica: Displaced Lives. Tucson: Univ. Ariz. PressHendrickson C. 1995. Weaving Identities: Construction of Dress and Self in a Highland Guatemala Town. Austin:

Univ. Tex. PressHernandez Rivas G. 2011. Conservacion y gestion de la memoria del conflicto armado salvadoreno. In Conflicto,

memoria y pasados traumaticos: El Salvador contemporaneo, ed. E Rey Tristan, P Cagiao Vila, pp. 241–54.Santiago, Spain: Univ. Santiago de Compostela

Howe C. 2013. Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua. Durham, NC:Duke Univ. Press

Huff JG Jr. 2014. Pentecostalized development and novel social imaginaries in rural El Salvador. J. Lat. Am.Caribb. Anthropol. 19(1):22–40

Huhn S. 2008. La percepcion de la inseguridad en Costa Rica, El Salvador, y Nicaragua. Rev. Cienc. Soc. Univ.Costa Rica 122:149–65

Hume M. 2009. The Politics of Violence: Gender, Conflict and Community in El Salvador. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell

Kistler A. 2014. Maya Market Women: Power and Tradition in San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala. Champaign:Univ. Ill. Press

Kruijt D. 2008. Guerrillas: War and Peace in Central America. London: Zed BooksKruijt D. 2014. The significance of Edelberto Torres-Rivas in Central America: a review of his academic

life and work. CROLAR: Crit. Rev. Lat. Am. Res. 3(1):55–58. http://www.crolar.org/index.php/crolar/article/view/137/html_63

Lancaster R. 1988. Thanks to God and the Revolution: Popular Religion and Class Consciousness in the New Nicaragua.New York: Columbia Univ. Press

Lancaster R. 1992. Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua. Berkeley: Univ.Calif. Press

Lazo de Vega S, Steigenga T. 2013. Against the Tide: Immigrants, Day Laborers, and Community in Jupiter,Florida. Madison: Univ. Wisc. Press

Levenson DT. 2013. Adios Nino: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death. Durham, NC: DukeUniv. Press

Little WE. 2004. Mayas in the Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization, and Cultural Identity. Austin: Univ. Tex.Press

Little WE. 2013. Maya handicraft vendors’ CAFTA-DR discourse: “Free trade is not for everyone inGuatemala.” See Burrell & Moodie 2013, pp. 181–95

Little WE, Smith TJ, ed. 2009. Mayas in Postwar Guatemala: Harvest of Violence Revisited. Tuscaloosa: Univ.Ala. Press

Loker WD. 2003. Dam impacts in a time of globalization: using multiple methods to document social andenvironmental change in rural Honduras. Curr. Anthropol. 44:S112–21

Loperena CA. 2012. A fragmented paradise: the politics of development and land use on the Caribbean coast ofHonduras. PhD Thesis, Univ. Tex., Austin

Lyon S. 2011. Coffee and Community: Maya Farmers and Fair-Trade Markets. Boulder: Univ. Colo. Press


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.

http://www.crolar.org/index.php/crolar/article/view/137/html_63

http://www.crolar.org/index.php/crolar/article/view/137/html_63


MacKenzie CJ. 2009. Judas off the noose: sacerdotes Mayas, costumbristas, and the politics of purity in thetradition of San Simon in Guatemala. J. Lat. Am. Caribb. Anthropol. 14(2):355–81

Manz B. 1988. Refugees of a Hidden War: The Aftermath of Counterinsurgency in Guatemala. Albany: SUNYPress

Martınez D’Aubuisson JJ. 2013. Ver, oır, callar: En las profundidades de una pandilla salvadorena. San Salvador,El Salv.: AURA

Maupin J. 2009. “Fruit of the accords”: healthcare reform and civil participation in highland Guatemala. Soc.Sci. Med. 68(8):1456–63

McAllister C, Nelson DM, ed. 2013. War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala. Durham,NC: Duke Univ. Press

Menjıvar C. 2011. Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. PressMontejo V. 1987. Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village. Evanston, IL: Curbstone BooksMontejo V. 2005. Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Identity, Representation, and Leadership. Austin: Univ. Tex. PressMontoya A. 2013. The violence of cold war polarities and the fostering of hope: the 2009 elections in postwar

El Salvador. See Burrell & Moodie 2013, pp. 49–63Montoya R. 2012. Gendered Scenarios of Revolution: Making New Men and Women in Nicaragua, 1975–2000.

Tucson: Univ. Ariz. PressMoodie E. 2009. Seventeen years, seventeen murders: the production of post–Cold War knowledge in El

Salvador. Soc. Text 99:77–103Moodie E. 2010. El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty and the Transition to Democracy.

Philadelphia: Univ. Pa. PressMortensen L. 2014. Branding Copan: valuing cultural distinction in an archaeological tourism destination.

J. Tourism Cult. Change 12(3):237–52Nading A. 2014. Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. PressNelson DM. 1999. A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: Univ. Calif.

PressNelson DM. 2009. Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. PressNouvet E. 2014. Some carry on, some stay in bed: (in)convenient affects and agency in neoliberal Nicaragua.

Cult. Anthropol. 29(1):80–102Offit TA. 2008. Conquistadores de la Calle: Child Street Labor in Guatemala City. Austin: Univ. Tex. PressOglesby E. 2007. Educating citizens in postwar Guatemala: historical memory, genocide and the culture of

peace. Rad. Hist. Rev. 97:77–98O’Neill KL. 2009. City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. PressO’Neill KL. 2015. Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala. Berkeley: Univ. Calif.

PressO’Neill KL, Thomas K. 2011. Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala.

Durham, NC: Duke Univ. PressPaige J. 1998. Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard Univ. PressPearson T. 2012. Transgenic-free territories in Costa Rica: networks, place, and the politics of life. Am. Ethnol.

39(1):90–105Pedersen D. 2012. American Value: Migrants, Money, and Meaning in El Salvador and the United States. Chicago:

Univ. Chicago PressPeterson AL. 1997. Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War.

Albany: SUNY PressPeterson B. 2006. Consuming histories: the return of the Indian in neoliberal El Salvador. Cult. Dyn. 18(2):163–

88Pine A. 2008. Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. PressPineda B. 2006. Shipwrecked Identities: Navigating Race on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast. New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers Univ. PressPosocco S. 2014. Secrecy and Insurgency: Socialities and Knowledge Practices in Guatemala. Tuscaloosa: Univ. Ala.

Press


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


Quesada J. 1998. Suffering child: an embodiment of war and its aftermath in post-Sandinista Nicaragua. Med.Anthropol. Q. 12(1):51–73

Quesada J. 1999. From Central American warriors to San Francisco Latino day laborers: suffering and ex-haustion in a transnational context. Trans. Anthropol. 8(1–2):162–85

Raventos C. 2013. “My heart says NO”: political experiences of the struggle against CAFTA-DR in CostaRica. See Burrell & Moodie 2013, pp. 80–95

Rayner J. 2014. A new way of doing politics: the movement against CAFTA in Costa Rica. PhD Thesis, City Univ.N.Y.

Reagan R. 1986. Remarks at a campaign fundraiser for William Clements. Dallas, Texas, July 23. http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/072386a.htm

Reichman D. 2011. The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniv. Press

Rivas CM. 2014. Salvadoran Imaginaries: Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption. New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers Univ. Press

Rivas Castillo J. 2011. Vıctimas nada mas? Migrantes centroamericanos en el Sotonusco, Chiapas. NuevaAntropol. XXIV(74):9–38

Robinson W. 2003. Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization. New York: VersoRodgers D. 2007. Joining the gang and becoming a broder: the violence of ethnography in contemporary

Nicaragua. Bull. Lat. Am. Res. 26(4):444–61Rodgers D. 2009. Slum wars of the 21st century: gangs, Mano Dura and the new urban geography of conflict

in Central America. Devel. Change 40(5):949–76Romano S. 2012. From protest to proposal: the contentious politics of the Nicaraguan anti-water privatisation

social movement. Bull. Lat. Am. Res. 31(4):499–514Sandoval-Garcia C. 2004. Threatening Others: Nicaraguans and the Formation of National Identities in Costa Rica.

Athens: Ohio Univ. PressSanford V. 2003. Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. New York: Palgrave MacmillanSharp E. 2015. Vigilantes, gangsters, and alcohol: clashing citizenship regimes in postwar Guatemala. J. Citizsh.

Stud. 19:200–13Sieder R. 2011. Contested sovereignties: indigenous law, violence and state effects in postwar Guatemala. Crit.

Anthropol. 31(3):161–84Silber IC. 2010. Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador. New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. PressSmith CA, ed. 1990. Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540 to 1988. Austin: Univ. Tex. PressSmith CA, Boyer J. 1987. Central America since 1979: part 1. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 16:197–221Smith CA, Boyer J, Diskin M. 1988. Central America since 1979, part II. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 17:331–64Smith TJ. 2009. Democracy is dissent: political confrontations and indigenous mobilization in Solola. See

Little & Smith 2009, pp. 16–29Smith-Nonini S. 2010. Healing the Body Politic: El Salvador’s Struggle for Health Rights—From Civil War to

Neoliberal Peace. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. PressSpalding RJ. 2014. El Salvador: horizontalism and the anti-mining movement. In Rethinking Latin American

Social Movements: Radical Action from Below, ed. R Stahler-Sholk, HE Vanden, M Becker, pp. 311–33.Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield

Sprenkels R. 2014. Revolution and accommodation: post-insurgency in El Salvador. PhD Thesis, Utrecht Univ.Steusse A, Manz B, Oglesby E, Olson K, Sanford V, et al. 2013. Sı hubo genocidio: anthropologists and the

genocide trial of Guatemala’s Rıos Montt. Am. Anthropol. 115(4):658–63Stoll D. 1999. Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder, CO: Westview PressStoll D. 2011. The obligatory Indian. Dialect. Anthropol. 35:135–46Stoll D. 2012. El Norte or Bust! How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin

American Town. Lanham, MD: Rowman & LittlefieldStonich S, Murray DL, Rossett PM. 1994. Enduring crises: the human and environmental consequences of

nontraditional export growth in Central America. Res. Econ. Anthropol. 15:239–74Taylor M, Moran-Taylor MJ, Rodman Ruız D. 2006. Land, ethnic, and gender change: transnational migration

and its effects on Guatemalan lives and landscapes. Geoforum 37:41–61


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.

http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/072386a.htm

http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/072386a.htm


Thomas K. 2012. Intellectual property law and the ethics of imitation in Guatemala. Anthropol. Q. 85(3):785–814

Torres MG. 2015. In the shadow of the razor wire: class and insecurity in Guatemala’s urban core. Antropologica57(1):127–37

Torres Rivas E. 1971. Interpretacion del desarrollo social centroamericano. San Jose, Costa Rica: EDUCATorres Rivas E. 2011. Revoluciones sin cambios revolucionarios: Ensayos sobre la crisis en Centroamerica. Guatemala

City, Guatem.: F&G EditoresTucker C. 2008. Changing Forests: Collective Action, Common Property and Coffee in Honduras. New York:

Springer AcademicTucker C. 2013. Honduras’s smallholder coffee farmers, the coffee crisis, and neoliberal policy: disjunctures

in knowledge and conundrums for development. See Burrell & Moodie 2013, pp. 163–80Tula MT, Stephen L. 1994. Hear My Testimony: Marıa Teresa Tula, Human Rights Activist of El Salvador.

Boston: South End PressTully SR. 1997. Nicaraguan memories of sacrifice: visual representations and contested histories. Visual An-

thropol. 9:301–23Vanthuyne K. 2009. Becoming Maya? The politics and pragmatics of “being indigenous” in postgenocide

Guatemala. PoLAR: Polit. Leg. Anthropol. Rev. 32(2):195–217Velasquez Estrada RE. 2015. Grassroots peacemaking: the paradox of reconciliation in El Salvador. Soc. Justice

41(3):69–86Velasquez Nimatuj IA. 2008. Pueblos indıgenas, estado y lucha por tierra en Guatemala: estrategias de sobrevivencia

y negociacion ante la desigualdad globalizada. PhD Thesis, Univ. Tex., AustinViterna J. 2013. Women in War: The Micro-Processes of Mobilization in El Salvador. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ.

PressVivanco L. 2006. Green Encounters: Shaping and Contesting Environmentalism in Rural Costa Rica. New York:

BerghahnVogt W. 2013. Crossing Mexico: structural violence and the commodification of undocumented Central

American migrants. Am. Ethnol. 40(4):764–80Ward TW. 2012. Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang. New York/Oxford:

Oxford Univ. PressWarren K. 1998. Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton Univ. PressWay JT. 2012. The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development, and the Making of Modern Guatemala.

Durham, NC: Duke Univ. PressWeld K. 2014. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. PressWiltberger J. 2014. Beyond remittances: contesting El Salvador’s developmentalist migration politics. J. Lat.

Am. Caribb. Anthropol. 19(1):41–62Wolseth J. 2011. Jesus and the Gang: Youth Violence and Christianity in Urban Honduras. Tucson: Univ. Ariz.

PressYarris K. 2011. The pain of “thinking too much”: dolor de cerebro and the embodiment of social hardship among

Nicaraguan women. Ethos 39(2):226–48Yarris K. 2014. “Quiero ir y no quiero ir” (I want to go and I don’t want to go): Nicaraguan children’s

ambivalent experiences of transnational family life. J. Lat. Am. Caribb. Anthropol. 19(2):284–309Yates-Doerr E. 2012. The weight of the self: care and compassion in Guatemalan dietary choices. Med.

Anthropol. Q. 26(1):126–58Ybarra M. 2013. “You cannot measure a Tzuultaq’a”: cultural politics at the limits of liberal legibility. Antipode

45(3):584–601Zilberg E. 2011. Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis Between Los Angeles and San

Salvador. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press


Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.

AN44-FrontMatter ARI 21 September 2015 19:59

Annual Review ofAnthropology

Volume 44, 2015 Contents

Perspective

Some Things I Hope You Will Find Useful Even if StatisticsIsn’t Your ThingGeorge L. Cowgill � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1

Archaeology

Pleistocene Overkill and North American Mammalian ExtinctionsDavid J. Meltzer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �33

The Archaeology of RitualEdward Swenson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 329

Recent Developments in High-Density Survey and Measurement(HDSM) for Archaeology: Implications for Practice and TheoryRachel Opitz and W. Fred Limp � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 347

Biological Anthropology

The Evolution of Difficult Childbirth and Helpless Hominin InfantsHolly Dunsworth and Leah Eccleston � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �55

Health of Indigenous PeoplesClaudia R. Valeggia and J. Josh Snodgrass � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 117

Energy Expenditure in Humans and Other Primates: A New SynthesisHerman Pontzer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 169

An Evolutionary and Life-History Perspective on OsteoporosisFelicia C. Madimenos � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 189

Disturbance, Complexity, Scale: New Approaches to the Study ofHuman–Environment InteractionsRebecca Bliege Bird � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 241

Fallback Foods, Optimal Diets, and Nutritional Targets: PrimateResponses to Varying Food Availability and QualityJoanna E. Lambert and Jessica M. Rothman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 493

vi

Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


Resource Transfers and Human Life-History EvolutionJames Holland Jones � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 513

An Evolutionary Anthropological Perspective on ModernHuman OriginsCurtis W. Marean � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 533

Anthropology of Language and Communicative Practices

How Postindustrial Families TalkElinor Ochs and Tamar Kremer-Sadlik � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �87

Chronotopes, Scales, and Complexity in the Study of Languagein SocietyJan Blommaert � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 105

Linguistic Relativity from Reference to AgencyN.J. Enfield � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 207

Politics of TranslationSusan Gal � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 225

Breached Initiations: Sociopolitical Resources and Conflictsin Emergent AdulthoodNorma Mendoza-Denton and Aomar Boum � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 295

Embodiment in Human CommunicationJurgen Streeck � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 419

The Pragmatics of Qualia in PracticeNicholas Harkness � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 573

Sociocultural Anthropology

VirtualityBonnie Nardi � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �15

Anthropology and Heritage RegimesHaidy Geismar � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �71

Urban Political EcologyAnne Rademacher � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 137

Environmental Anthropology: Systemic PerspectivesYancey Orr, J. Stephen Lansing, and Michael R. Dove � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 153

The Anthropology of Life After AIDS: Epistemological Continuitiesin the Age of Antiretroviral TreatmentEileen Moyer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 259

Anthropology of Aging and CareElana D. Buch � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 277

Contents vii

Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


Anthropology of OntologiesEduardo Kohn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 311

Oil and AnthropologyDouglas Rogers � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 365

The Post–Cold War Anthropology of Central AmericaJennifer L. Burrell and Ellen Moodie � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 381

Risks of Citizenship and Fault Lines of SurvivalAdriana Petryna and Karolina Follis � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 401

SiberiaPiers Vitebsky and Anatoly Alekseyev � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 439

Of What Does Self-Knowing Consist? Perspectives from Bangladeshand PakistanNaveeda Khan � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 457

Addiction in the MakingWilliam Garriott and Eugene Raikhel � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 477

Waste and Waste ManagementJoshua Reno � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 557

Theme: Resources

VirtualityBonnie Nardi � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �15

Pleistocene Overkill and North American Mammalian ExtinctionsDavid J. Meltzer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �33

Urban Political EcologyAnne Rademacher � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 137

Environmental Anthropology: Systemic PerspectivesYancey Orr, J. Stephen Lansing, and Michael R. Dove � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 153

Energy Expenditure in Humans and Other Primates: A New SynthesisHerman Pontzer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 169

Disturbance, Complexity, Scale: New Approaches to the Study ofHuman–Environment InteractionsRebecca Bliege Bird � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 241

Anthropology of Aging and CareElana D. Buch � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 277

Breached Initiations: Sociopolitical Resources and Conflicts inEmergent AdulthoodNorma Mendoza-Denton and Aomar Boum � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 295

viii Contents

Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.


Recent Developments in High-Density Survey and Measurement(HDSM) for Archaeology: Implications for Practice and TheoryRachel Opitz and W. Fred Limp � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 347

Oil and AnthropologyDouglas Rogers � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 365

Resource Transfers and Human Life-History EvolutionJames Holland Jones � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 513

Waste and Waste ManagementJoshua Reno � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 557

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 35–44 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 591

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 35–44 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 595

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology articles may be found athttp://www.annualreviews.org/errata/anthro

Contents ix

Ann

u. R

ev. A

nthr

opol

. 201

5.44

:381

-400

. Dow

nloa

ded

from

ww

w.a

nnua

lrev

iew

s.or

g A

cces

s pr

ovid

ed b

y E

l Col

egio

de

Mic

hoac

an A

.C. (

CO

LM

ICH

) on

06/

08/1

6. F

or p

erso

nal u

se o

nly.

Documents

The Post War Anthropology in Centroamerica