Gerald Sider coeditor of Between History and Histories: The Making of Silence and Commemorations
Violence--from massive assault to microscopic humiliation--plays a crucial role in the constructions of race, gender, class, and nation. The power and success of Fear as a Way of Life begins with the ways it shows Mayan women building, and constantly rebuilding, lives within and against situations of totalizing and inescapable violence. Equally important, Linda Green maps new ways for anthropology to reach, and to reach out to, people in such circumstances. In situations where just sympathy scarcely matters, this book is a major contribution to the construction of an anthropology able to understand, to help, and to heal.
June Nash author of In the Eyes of the Ancestors: Belief and Behavior in a Maya Community
Now, as forensic evidence from the mountains of the dead in the western highlands of Guatemala adds material evidence to the narrations of terror suffered by Mayas in the twenty years of civil war, Linda Green provides us with an analysis of how it is to live with fear. The new body counts in the low-intensity warfare waged against indigenous peoples must include the 80,000 widows and 250,000 orphans who survived. In her analysis of the reconstruction of their lives and communities, we find new insights into the relations of contradiction between structural and political violence, domination, and resistance of a people who have struggled against subordination of their culture and society for almost five hundred years.
