Editor's Preface to Tecpán Guatemala
We are constantly reminded by media pundits,
academics, and business leaders that the world is a much smaller place than it once was.
As proof, we simply have to look around us: overnight delivery and e-mail have accelerated
the pace and expanded the possibilities of social and commercial interaction; the Internet
has spawned long-distance friendships and collaborations than seamlessly span continents
and time zones; most of our clothing and other consumer goods are assembled abroad. We
have a good idea of what all of this means to us, but what does it mean to them, those who
live at the periphery of the globalized economy? And what can we learn from anthropology
about this rapidly changing world?
To address these questions this book looks at
the case of Tecpán, a predominately Maya town in the Guatemalan highlands. Carol
Hendrickson and I examine the historical longue durèe as well as contemporary economic
and political contexts in which Tecpanecos constantly and creatively remake their lives.
Our goal is to present Tecpanecos not as exotic Others but as individuals living their
lives under very different (although interrelated) social and material circumstances from
our own. We look at change as well as continuity--not just how Tecpanecos react and adapt
to circumstances imposed from afar, but how they assert their own culturally informed
interests. We document the workings of cofradías and traditional Maya religious
ceremonies as well the arrival of an Internet café in town and a switch from growing corn
to producing export crops for the global market. In short, we try to convey the vast
complexity of life in this small town, the contradictions as well as consistencies of
being Maya in the modern world. We juxtapose elements of the modern with the traditional
in our descriptions (a strategy visually captured in the cover photograph). In a way, this
plays to our own postmodern attraction to such seeming ironies, but we must keep in mind
that the irony is ours, not theirs–the Tecpanecos we describe are earnestly living
their lives, doing the best they can under trying circumstances.
Ethnographic fieldwork is a dialectic process. Anthropologists build analytic models based
on observed behavior and informant explications. These are constantly constructed and then
just as quickly broken down by the endless diversity of observed experience. As
anthropologists, we attempt to make sense of the word we observe, but this is not, as was
once thought, a matter of mastering a finite set of data and working out rules of
interrelationships. "Culture" is more a process or a space of interaction than a
thing or a static body of knowledge. And so, even as we try to figure out the workings of
the world around us, the very rules of the game are subtly changing. As good as our tools
of analysis may be, we are always one step behind contemporary events. One never masters
the field in ethnography.
What we present here is an incomplete and
biased look at Tecpán culture, coming from our unique experiences working there over a 20
year period. We focus on Kaqchikel Tecpanecos, devoting little space to the lives of
non-Indian (or ladino) residents. This presents a biased perspective, but accurately
reflects our interests and the strengths of our data. It also reveals our self-positioning
in the politicized context of Guatemala's inter-ethnic relations. While sympathetic to the
plight of ladino Guatemalans, we feel that our primary obligation is with the Maya people,
and especially those individuals who have so selflessly opened their lives to us. Our
greatest desire is for our work, in some small way, to benefit the people we study by
increasing awareness of their situation.
Tecpán Guatemala is the first volume in the
new Westview Case Studies in Anthropology series. This book, along with the other volumes
in the series, seeks to build on the traditional strengths of ethnography while rejecting
overly romantic and isolationist tendencies in the genre. This series brings the short
ethnography format up to date in terms of data, theory, and representational style while
retaining the unique and invaluable perspective built up from the observed complexity of
on-the-ground experience.
Anthropology, like other disciplines, has
become increasingly specialized over the last decades. As a result, monographs are
reaching ever decreasing audiences. The works in this series resist this trend by making
important contributions to ethnographic description and social theory available in a
format which will appeal not only to other specialists but to educated audiences in
general.
The individuals, communities, and cultures examined in these case studies are portrayed
not as the exotic isolates of an earlier era but as active agents enmeshed in global as
well as local systems of politics, economics, and cultural flows. There is a focus on
contemporary ways of life, forces of social change, and creative responses to novel
situations as well as the more traditional concerns of classic ethnographies. In
presenting rich humanistic and social scientific data borne of the dialectic engagement of
fieldwork, the books in this series move toward realizing the full pedagogical potential
of anthropology: imparting to the reader an empathetic understanding of alternative ways
of viewing and acting in the world as well as a solid basis for critical thought regarding
the historically contingent nature of ethnic boundaries and cultural knowledge.
Edward F. Fischer
Vanderbilt University
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