A01=Diane M. Nelson
anthropology
Author_Diane M. Nelson
body politics
Category=JHM
Category=JHMC
Category=NHK
Category=NHW
civil war
cultural studies
domestic labor
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gender and sex
gender studies
government and governing
guatemala
guatemalan history
indigenous peoples
ladino guatemalans
latin american history
mayan cultural rights activism
mayan indigenous peoples
mestizaje
military rule
neoliberal economics
nobel peace prize
postcolonial nation state
postcolonialism
psychoanalysis
sexual conquest
site of struggle
social change movement
subject position
transnational
united nations
violence
Product details
- ISBN 9780520212855
- Weight: 771g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 1999
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Many Guatemalans speak of Mayan indigenous organizing as 'a finger in the wound'. Diane Nelson explores the implications of this painfully graphic metaphor in her far-reaching study of the civil war and its aftermath. Why use a body metaphor? What body is wounded, and how does it react to apparent further torture? If this is the condition of the body politic, how do human bodies relate to it - those literally wounded in thirty-five years of war and those locked in the equivocal embrace of sexual conquest, domestic labor, mestizaje, and social change movements? Supported by three and a half years of fieldwork since 1985, Nelson addresses these questions - along with the jokes, ambivalences, and structures of desire that surround them - in both concrete and theoretical terms. She explores the relations among Mayan cultural rights activists, ladino (nonindigenous) Guatemalans, the state as a site of struggle, and transnational forces including Nobel Peace Prizes, UN Conventions, neo-liberal economics, global TV, and gringo anthropologists.
Along with indigenous claims and their effect on current attempts at reconstituting civilian authority after decades of military rule, Nelson investigates the notion of Quincentennial Guatemala, which has given focus to the overarching question of Mayan - and Guatemalan - identity. Her work draws from political economy, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, and has special relevance to ongoing discussions of power, hegemony, and the production of subject positions, as well as gender issues and histories of violence as they relate to post colonial nation-state formation.
Diane M. Nelson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Lewis and Clark College.
