Jennifer Burrell

"Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war culminated in peace accords in 1996, but the postwar transition has been marked by continued violence, including lynchings and the rise of gangs, as well as massive wage-labor exodus to the United States. For the Mam Maya municipality of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, inhabited by a predominantly indigenous peasant population, the aftermath of war and genocide resonates with a long-standing tension between state techniques of governance and ancient community-level power structures that incorporated concepts of kinship, gender, and generation. Showing the ways in which these complex histories are interlinked with wartime and enduring family/class conflicts, Maya after War provides a nuanced account of a unique transitional postwar situation, including the complex influence of neoliberal intervention.
Drawing on ethnographic field research over a twenty-year period, Jennifer L. Burrell explores the after-war period in a locale where community struggles span culture, identity, and history. Investigating a range of tensions from the local to the international, Burrell employs unique methodologies, including mapmaking, history workshops, and an informal translation of a historic ethnography, to analyze the role of conflict in animating what matters to Todosanteros in their everyday lives and how the residents negotiate power. Examining the community-based divisions alongside national postwar contexts, Maya after War considers the aura of hope that surrounded the signing of the peace accords, and the subsequent doubt and waiting that have fueled unrest, encompassing generational conflicts. This study is a rich analysis of the multifaceted forces at work in the quest for peace, in Guatemala and beyond.
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This article takes anticorruption activism as a starting point for analyzing how young activists unequally experience the inequalities produced by corruption, as well as the bureaucratic and financial weight of anticorruption and audit culture. Against the back-drop of Guatemala's now-defunct pioneering anticorruption commission, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), we utilize the concept of the anti/corruption continuum to analyze the contradictory positions of young people fighting against and depending on corruption for their economic survival. Gender, age, and class dynamics and young people's economic precarity make clientelism difficult to avoid and often curtail participation in movements for change. While most discussions of the CICIG's work focus on the national level, this is a unique view on how national-level politics reverberated locally in a Mayan community. [Guatemala, corruption, impunity , generation, politics] R e s u m e n Este artículo parte del activismo en contra de la corrupción para analizar cómo ac-tivistas jóvenes experimentan de manera dispareja las desigualdades producidas por la corrupción, así como el peso burocrático y económico de la cultura de la auditoría y la lucha en contra de la corrupción. En el contexto de la vanguardista y ahora disuelta

46 Mercedes Doretti and Jennifer Burrell of forensic work was initially embraced and fostered by human rights organizations and not by academic departments and universities. For these reasons, forensic anthropology applied in the service of human rights offers a unique ...

Vigilantism and security-making ask that we both acknowledge the importance of legal pluralism (and its lived, and often contradictory, experiences), and that we recognize its limits. They insist that we acknowledge statecraft as a process engaged in by state and non-state actors, and that we rethink the contours of the contemporary state and the role of law within it. In imagining how anthropologists, lawyers, and legal scholars might think through these issues collaboratively and productively, this chapter suggests that legal pluralism can only take us so far. Ethnography is crucial to understanding how people engage, often simultaneously, various domains of law and how those domains themselves are also objects for scrutiny and investigation. Bringing these insights to policymaking and legal reform across various emerging fields, I suggest that vigilantism asks us to think about violence and to examine the roles and receptions of security-making and their integration into legal do...

Vigilantes and organised vigilantism are a growing phenomenon, as this book amply demonstrates. From Northern Ireland to West Africa, from Bombay or Moscow, vigilante movements and ideologies have widespread appeal. Whether as localised 'self-policing' of crime and other forms of social behaviour, or as surveillance of drug trafficking or terrorism, vigilantes patrol the frontiers that emerge as transnational global flows meet real or imagined political borders. "Global Vigilantes" is the first book to offer a comprehensive overview of contemporary vigilantism in its relation to different members of society and to state authorities. It explores how vigilantes produce and reproduce themselves within shifting climates of hate and fear; it addresses their historical antecedents; explores the cults and cultures of conflict associated with vigilantism, and analyses the modes, meanings and methods of vigilante vilolence.

This article reviews the recent and emerging post–Cold War sociocultural anthropology research on Central America, defined as the five countries that share a common colonial and postcolonial history: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Following a consideration of the foundational literature widely engaged by scholars to theorize regional processes, three sections reflect major themes of investigation in the area: political 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 Central America has made key contributions to disciplinary analyses and debates, especially in the fields of political and economic anthropology and in terms of furthering studies of violence, migration, neoliberalism, and postconflict democracy. Anthropologists working in the region have been at the forefront of public and “...

Jennifer Burrell continues in the long and rich tradition of anthropological work in Guatemala by examining how the micromacro struggles of everyday life in Todos Santos are differentially affected by culture, multiple forms of violence, security, and governance, after a thirty-six year civil war. She reveals a transition filled with uncertainty, anxiety, hope, and ambiguity amid physical reminders of death and violence. Her ethnographic work spans twenty years and reflects a complex analysis of the process and implications of adapting and co-opting culture, neoliberalism and poverty, massive wage labor migration, and local and national conflict. The organization of the book lends itself more to an ongoing analysis of how conflict is framed and resolved between community members as well as how the negotiations between community and state are managed and affect Todosanteros. Throughout the book, Burrell brilliantly demonstrates how the ‘‘fault lines of historical conflict run deep’’ (p. 37), specifically in terms of how the state’s desire to combat post-war violence through security patrols and other policies often led to an increase in violence, leaving many Todosanteros feeling that little had changed during the transition to democracy. The three main findings she garners from her grounded ethnographic work include intergenerational conflict, the differences between urban and rural spaces, and how culture is repressed and revitalized. In the first three chapters she centers how history structures the present. For example, she discusses at length how the past is silenced and reconstructed by the state leading to loss of history and culture, as well as revitalization efforts from indigenous groups as a survival strategy. By showing how cultural practices such as Fiesta, in Chapter Four, have transformed over time, Burrell shows that culture is not fixed. She also pays heed to the fact that the Mam Mayan, when negotiating justice, are often fearful because in the past they have been met with genocide and currently face an instability of their rights. Furthermore, in Chapter Five she interrogates the murder of tourists in Todos Santos and uncovers how the national government was unresponsive and ineffective. The Guatemalan state, along with other international accounts, blamed the incident on the indigenous and in effect rendered Todosanteros backward in order to fulfill a national promise of progress and stability. This is partly explained by her analysis of how rural areas like Todosanteros continue to experience exclusion based on proximity and ethnicity. Burrell also explains how massive migration and remittances change the local landscape and how return migration has shaped local governance. For example, return migrants frequently have a large influence on the cultural traditions such as Fiesta, Corrido de Caballos, and Baile de los Conquistadores that she argues, ‘‘allows us to examine yearly reinvisioning of community across borders’’ (p. 96). These accounts seem to parallel much of the work on how transnational migrants affect local spaces and, in this case, lead to the migrants participating in order to reconnect to their homeland. But what is her most convincing and nuanced analysis comes in Chapter Six where she addresses the role of gangs in regards to culture, intergenerational conflict, and the paramilitary style of security. Here she eloquently challenges that violence begets violence and that gangs specifically did not represent the unsavory people of the town. Burrell reveals how the anxiety and desire for the townspeople to quell the gangs resulted in security committees with paramilitary training that often led to more violence. By tracing the life of and killing of Alfonso she gives personhood to someone who has been stripped of humanity because he is considered a threat to ‘‘progress.’’ Here, Burrell indicates the deep generational cleavages that were expressed through criminalization and impunity. In sum, Burrell states: ‘‘Instead, current generations are defined by the historical moments that have shaped their lives: Reviews 39

This conclusion to the In-Focus Issue on generation and politics in Central America places the concept of generation in dialogue with an intellectual genealogy emanating from JLACA's twenty-five years of publication, recent debates about decolonization within anthropology, and personal reflections from the coauthors. [Central America, generation, politics] R e s u m e n Esta conclusión a la presente edición In-Focus sobre generación y política en Cen-troamérica, pone el concepto de generación en diálogo directo con una genealogía in-telectual surgida a partir de los veinticinco años de publicación de JLACA, así también, presenta debates recientes sobre la descolonización dentro de la antropología y expone reflexiones personales de las co-autoras. [América Central, generación, política] Tracing an intellectual genealogy of decolonization within anthropology, Jafari Allen and Ryan Jobson contend that to invoke the language of generations is to "indulge the 'structures of conjuncture'" (2016, 130). They thus emphasize the temporal experiences and societal exigencies of a particular moment. This

El artículo aborda el acceso a los servicios de salud de la población migrante; las disparidades que existen en el terreno del suministro de estos servicios a los trabajadores migrantes transnacionales;
y finalmente, cómo las prácticas diarias y procesos,
donde se intercalan el poder y la política, producen categorías y clasificaciones que tienen que ver con diferencias ideológicas, en torno a la salud y el acceso a los servicios de salud que existen en México y Estados Unidos. Estas diferencias insertan a los migrantes dentro de dos escenarios radicalmente diferentes. En ambos,los migrantes tienen que hacer frente a impedimentos estructurales y desarrollar estrategias para acortar el camino hacia la obtención de estos servicios.
Palabras claves: Migrantes, México, Estados Unidos, cobertura del sistema de salud, acceso a la salud.