Premium
Everyday forms of state decomposition: Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 1954 ⋆
Author(s) -
Grandin Greg
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
bulletin of latin american research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.24
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1470-9856
pISSN - 0261-3050
DOI - 10.1111/j.1470-9856.2000.tb00109.x
Subject(s) - indigenous , agrarian reform , politics , state (computer science) , class conflict , agrarian society , identity (music) , identification (biology) , sociology , political economy , everyday life , political science , gender studies , law , aesthetics , history , ecology , philosophy , archaeology , algorithm , biology , computer science , agriculture
This essay explores how Guatemala's 1952 agrarian reform played out among Quetzalteco K'iche's. Much of the academic writing on the revolution is concerned with the way the agrarian reform affected indigenous communities. These studies either view the reform as creating bitter political conflicts within the community, thereby weakening or destroying local institutions of communal politics and identification, or else they understand the reform as deepening incipient class divisions. In all of these studies,‘conflict’is understood to be something antithetical to‘community’. Yet conflict is as essential to communal formation as are more visible identity markers, suggesting an intriguing correlation: the greater the degree of communal conflict, the greater the level of communal identification.