Review by Choice Review
Carlsen provides a vivid, complex, and concise portrait of cultural continuity, social cohesion, and conflict in a town of Tzutujil Maya-speaking people of Guatemala. His study was provoked in part by a startling turn of events in 1990--the attempted assassination of the principal shaman of the town, Santiago Atitlan, a massacre of protesting townspeople, and the withdrawal of the local Guatemalan military garrison. Carlsen launches into an exploration of the capacity of these people to persist through centuries of oppression and of the culture to survive and regenerate even under circumstances of extreme violent repression. Central to the work is a chapter coauthored with Martin Prechtel that provides one of the most comprehensive discussions available of Maya notions of regeneration through death and rebirth, the symbolism of which pervades diverse aspects of the culture of highland Mayas. This book provides a novel and eminently readable approach to local-level social and cultural history, and is comparable in scope, though quite different in approach, to Robert Carmack's recent study of another Guatemalan town, The Rebels of Highland Guatemala: The Quiche-Mayas of Momostenango (1995). All levels. P. R. Sullivan formerly, Yale University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
