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A Contemporary Micropolitics of

IndigeneityMonica DeHart

Version of record first published: 11 Jul 2008.

To cite this article:Monica DeHart (2008): A Contemporary Micropolitics of Indigeneity, LatinAmerican and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 3:2, 171-192

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Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies

Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2008, pp. 171192

A Contemporary Micropoliticsof Indigeneity

Monica DeHart

Contemporary studies of the relationship between indigeneity and neoliberalism in Latin

America have focused primarily on how indigenous groups have negotiated thecontradictory effects of political decentralization and multicultural reforms, which both

recognize and yet continue to exclude indigenous subjects. In order to more fully

comprehend the nature and the implications of these transformations in governance, as

well as their relationship to different kinds of indigenous subjects, I argue that we need

an analytical approach that takes us beyond the frame of national politics to shed light

on the micropolitics of indigeneity. An analysis of micropolitics asks how the shifts in

governance associated with neoliberal multiculturalism have brought into question

forms of authority and governance within the indigenous community. Specifically,

this approach illuminates how the forms of knowledge and identity that have been

validated by state and international development policies articulate with pre-existing

forms of difference within the indigenous community to authorize new configurations of

indigenous knowledge and authority. In this article, I draw on ethnographic encounters

among Guatemalan Maya activists as well as local indigenous community leaders in

order to illuminate the contours and the stakes of a micropolitics approach.

Keywords: indigenous; identity; micropolitics; neoliberalism; Latin America;

Guatemala

Analyses of the ambivalent relationship between indigeneity and neoliberalism have

dominated a new generation of anthropological research in Latin America. Much of

this analysis has been focused on how neoliberal policies such as state decentraliza-

tion, economic privatization, and market deregulation have created new relationships

between states and indigenous communities, qualitatively transforming the nature

and stakes of indigenous organizing (Postero & Zamosc, 2004; Postero, 2007; Sawyer,

2004; Sieder, 2002; Warren & Jackson, 2002). Working primarily through Gramscian

theoretical frameworks that define neoliberalism as a hegemonic project or

philosophy,1 these studies ask what new forms of governance characterize neoliberal

global and state regimes and what implications these forms bode for indigenous

communities. In particular, they ask how these forms enable and/or preclude

ISSN 17442222 (print)/ISSN 17442230 (online)/08/02017122 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/17442220802080618



substantive development and national belonging for indigenous communities.

Through rich ethnographic analyses of community life, regional politics, and

activism, these authors demonstrate how indigenous communities have experienced

neoliberal state politics and responded to them by both opposing the intensification

of exploitation and inequality, while also taking advantage of new spaces for political

participation.

Neoliberal state policies in Latin America provide a unique context for indigenous

communities because of the way they have paired free-market economic policies

with political reforms that stress the development of civil society and social capital,

as well as the collective rights of culturally disadvantaged groups (Hale, 2005, p. 12).

Thus, rather than seeing political decentralization and constitutional reform as

promoting equality or empowerment, anthropologists have asked how state

multicultural policies have reinscribed and deepened racist and class hierarchies

even as they have endowed indigenous subjects with new rights. The double-edgedsword of neoliberal multiculturalism, as this new regime of governing has

increasingly been called, involves the production, recognition, and protection of

cultural difference by both state and international actors in ways that essentially

neutralize opposition to the state and re-entrench economic and social inequality

(Hale, 2005, p. 13; see also Garcia, 2005; Postero, 2007; Sawyer, 2004; Speed, 2005).

These contemporary analyses build upon a tradition of scholarly analysis that has

posited the stateindigenous relationship to be the primary modern political dialectic

in Latin America (Smith, 1990a; Urban & Sherzer, 1991; Warren & Jackson, 2002).

Consequently, one of the most compelling contributions of recent studies has been

the ability to provide comparative analyses that discern certain patterns of

indigenous experiences of and resistances to state-specific neoliberal development

politics in places as diverse as Bolivia and Mexico, Guatemala and Peru (Postero &

Zamosc, 2004, p. 4). For example, these studies help to explain the ascendance of

indigenous leaders, like Bolivias president Evo Morales, to state power, highlighting

how indigenous mobilization has evolved out of and/or articulated with other

sectors of civil society (Postero, 2007). Furthermore, they allow us to scrutinize the

new conditions for belonging that neoliberal multicultural policies have extended

to indigenous groups, and to evaluate them in relation to other citizens rights and

experiences (Hale, 2006). Yet, while the national lens allows us to discern thechanging lines of power between state and indigenous communities, I argue that it

also leaves much out of the picture.

The neoliberal shifts in governance that recent studies identify that is, the

devolution of state power, the promotion of participatory community development,

and the implementation of citizenship regimes that justify this transfer in

responsibility point to increasingly diffuse and localized, or even individualized,

forms of rule.2 The current context thus reflects qualitatively different arrangements

of power than earlier, corporatist and authoritarian forms of governance in Latin

America (Alvarez et al., 1998; Yashar, 2005). These new arrangements frequently

operate through such rubrics as participation (Keating, 2003; Paley, 2001), local

power (MacLeod, 1997; Galvez Borrell 1998; Ochoa Garcia, 1993), and ethnodevel-

opment (Davis, 2002; Kleymeyer, 1994; van den Berg, 2003) that reposition the

172 M. DeHart



indigenous community as an important organ of governance and a source of

development knowledge. Rather than being defined exclusively by the state, these

arrangements are also enacted through engagement with a wide range of

international and non-governmental entities including the World Bank, multi-

national corporations, and independent aid organizations that play a major role in

articulating the conditions for and the implications of indigenous agency.3

In order to more fully comprehend the nature and the implications of these

transformations in governance, as well as their relationship to different kinds of

indigenous subjects, I argue that we need an analytical approach that takes us beyond

the frame of national politics to discern how the forms of knowledge and authority

promoted by neoliberal governance are negotiated within the multiple sites

where governing happens and the subject forms through which they work.

Specifically, I am interested in how the changes in governance associated with

neoliberalism bring into question forms of authority and governance within theindigenous community.

By proposing this conceptual shift, I am raising more than simply a substantive

question for example, what is the nature of indigenous knowledge and authority

within the community? I am not merely suggesting a modification in scale so as to

capture a lower point on some vertically organized, scalar organization of global,

national, and local spaces (Ferguson & Gupta, 2002). As noted previously, it is not a

local or ethnographic perspective that is missing from current analyses. Instead,

what I call amicropolitics of indigeneitydenotes a new analytical stance that asks why

particular forms of knowledge are authoritative within the indigenous community,

howthey work through particular kinds of subjects, and howthey relate to neoliberal

forms of rule.

Since 1995, my research on indigenous development initiatives in Guatemala has

focused primarily on the dynamic intersection between neoliberal development and

indigenous identity politics. In this context, I have been especially interested in how

forms of authority and knowledge, relationships between different locales and agents,

and identities are presupposed and transformed by different practices of governing.4

A rich tradition of community studies in Guatemala provides a nuanced panorama

within which to situate this kind of inquiry. These studies have documented how

diverse formulations of Maya culture articulate with changing national and globalpolitical economic contexts. Collectively, they highlight certain continuities in Maya

culture that is, the primacy of knowledge and practices identified as community

custom, the centrality of the physical space of community, and the enduring

sense of an essential Maya cosmology. They also document the shifting terms of

intra-community debates over the relationship between indigenous identity and

modernity for example, religious affiliation, land ownership, political party

membership, age, community service, and ritual conduct in relation to particular

historicalstructural configurations of power in Guatemala.5

What distinguishes a micropolitics approach from these previous studies of

community debates over modernity is the particular context provided by

neoliberalism as it has shaped the ways knowledge is being defined and debated

within the space of community. Because neoliberal arrangements of power work

A Contemporary Micropolitics of Indigeneity 173



through local strategies of governance that have privileged ethnic difference, they

increase the stakes of claims to indigeneity. In other words, convincing configura-

tions of indigenous knowledge and authority become an important vehicle for

accessing development funds and political recognition both within and beyond the

community. Therefore, these changing practices of governance require that we

analyze how pre-existing inequalities in the community shape the terms through

which the authenticity and authority of the diverse forms of knowledge are evaluated.

In this paper, I examine two debates over indigenous authority that are reflective

of broader patterns within my research on community-based ethnic development

initiatives.6 One encounter consists of debates among different development groups

within a rural Maya Kiche community in Totonicapan and the other features

discourses on authentic culture within the Guatemalan pan-Maya movement. In each

of these encounters, Maya community leaders draw on situated, contingent forms of

knowledge and authority in order to lay claim to authentic indigenous culture andthe material resources and social status that indigeneity affords them within the

neoliberal development context. The devolution of development practice to the

community level and the privileging of ethnic difference define this particular social

and political economic juncture. The diverse forms of knowledge mobilized in these

debates originate in self-designated communitycostumbre(custom), including ritual

community service, consensus, and reciprocity. They also draw on formulations

associated with neoliberalism, including calculative choice, technical expertise,

rationalized data collection, modern budgeting, and social entrepreneurship.

I examine how emerging and often contradictory forms of authority deriving from

these disparate forms of knowledge and practice intersect with pre-existing

inequalities within the community, especially along the lines of class.7 These

moments thus provide a sense of what a micropolitics of indigeneity might look like

and what it might reveal about transformations in governance and authority under

neoliberal multiculturalism.

Community, Consensus, and Corporate Responsibility

Accounting for Community Development

Located in the mountainous, forested highlands of Totonicapan, Guatemala, theMaya Kiche community of San Pedro8 is a relatively prosperous rural community of

about 5,000 residents. San Pedros much talked about development success was

evident in the high proportion of successful merchants and artisans among its

population (a fact well-documented by Smith, 1984, 1990b), as well as its

construction of a modern community hall to house many thriving development

programs.

Within the community, two institutions were centrally responsible for this local

development process. One was the community council a group of residents who

were affiliated with a local Kiche umbrella organization, the Cooperacion para el

Desarrollo Rural de Occidente (Cooperation for Rural Development of the West)

(CDRO) (to be described more fully below) which ran development programs

in the areas of healthcare, infrastructure, microcredit, artisan enterprises, and

174 M. DeHart



womens issues. Council members were elected by their fellow program participants.

Nonetheless, despite the councils demographic diversity, its board of directors

was constituted by middle-aged men who were considered among the community

economic elites. As fairly successful small-time entrepreneurs and merchants,

many of these council members had a direct interest in acquiring microcredit funds

made available through CDRO to buttress their business pursuits. Furthermore,

their class privilege enabled them to send their young sons to college and then draw

upon their sons new technical knowledge (e.g. grant writing, accounting) to enhance

their pursuit of new development opportunities.

The other institution that held sway over development was the local political body.

This political institution was constituted by the local authority structure that had

defined community governance in Totonicapan communities since colonial times

vis-a-vis the civil-religious hierarchy9 (a history to which I shall return). Authorities

were elected to serve one-year terms of office to satisfy ritual service obligations to thecommunity, and they were responsible for the daily governance of the communities

in positions ranging from alcalde communal (community mayor) to town clerk to

guardian of the communal forest. In terms of demographics, they reflected a broad

spectrum of age, vocation, class status, and religious difference, including both

neophytes to political office as well as elders with a long history of ritual prestige and

service. As Cancian demonstrated in his 1965 analysis of Maya cargo systems, the

degree and manner of a mans participation in the hierarchy is a major factor in

determining his place in the community (Cancian, 1965, p. 2). Consequently, what

political authorities potentially lacked in economic capital, they compensated for in

the form of the social capital or prestige derived from their service.10

A climactic meeting among these two groups and community members in 1999

illustrated the growing tensions that had emerged over who had authority to control

community development decisions, and on what basis. Although momentous at the

time, this type of event proved not to be an isolated incident, but rather came to be

a frequent feature of community development politics in Totonicapan over the

following years as local councils became more successful in recruiting development

resources. Indeed, I attended another of these meetings in a neighboring community

in 2006 that revealed similar issues. The San Pedro meeting, like those that followed

it, was meant to constitute a conciliatory gesture reflecting both an effort tobridge the gap between council and authority development efforts as well as to forge a

new consensus on community development methods and goals. At stake was who

could legitimately claim ownership of authentic indigeneity, and the economic and

social value derived from it, both within and beyond the community. As I

demonstrate, the neoliberal context shaped the parameters of this debate both in

terms of the kind of knowledge mobilized and the social significance attached to it by

the community at large.

As I entered the San Pedro community hall early on Saturday morning,

I immediately sensed that this meeting would not be like the other events I had

attended there. Because it was the weekend, the community hall was free of the

shouting school children that usually filled this multi-purpose centers inner salon.

Instead, a nervous silence hung in the air, punctuated occasionally by the loud




squeal of a chair being dragged across the floor. I took a seat in one of the back

rows of folding chairs and wobbly benches that had been set up along both sides of

the room. This seating was oriented toward the front of the room where a large

stage had been mounted, housing an overhead projector and screen and a podium.

As the hour progressed, several young council members and some of the CDRO

main office representatives slowly took their seats along the right side of the room.

At about 9:30, the mayor and accompanying authorities, each wielding his

ceremonial cane, solemnly exited their upstairs office and proceeded down to the

inner hall. They took their seats along the left side of the room. When they were

settled, two young community members initiated what, indeed, proved to be an

unprecedented meeting.

In many ways, it was remarkable that the function was held neither in the councils

office nor in the authorities office the two places where a meeting might otherwise

be held. Usually matters of general community politics, like elections, were debatedin the office of the local authorities. There, the local mayor presided over the

meeting, and a general assembly of community members would discuss the issues

until a consensus was achieved. As a deeply valued community norm, consensus was

an essential pre-requisite for collective action and decision-making within the

community.11 Community assembly discussions usually proceeded in Kiche but,

due to increasing bilingualism, were interspersed with some Spanish. Nonetheless,

ritual prestige, age, and moral reputation figured prominently in evaluating each

speakers views. Council development issues, on the other hand, were usually dealt

with in the separate office where the San Pedro council held its weekly meetings.

In making its decisions, the council often solicited data and advice from the young

community semi-professionals that made up the councils support team. These

young participants generally spoke more Spanish than Kiche, a fact often lamented

by their parents as a sign of cultural decay. For todays meeting between the two

parties, however, the community halls inner salon had been prepped as a literal

middle ground.

The meeting commenced as a council member came forward to ritually introduce

the parties and moderate the event. Speaking in Kiche, he noted that the purpose

of the meeting was to reach a consensus on community development issues. The

council member then proceeded to call up a series of council members to describethe councils activities. One young college student placed several flow charts onto

the overhead projector as he explained in Spanish the status of the communitys

microcredit funds, procured from CDRO. He highlighted the source of the

revolving funds, the amount of credits allocated to community members, the

interest received on those loans, and the status of the councils overall account.

An older gentleman with an architectural background used table graphs to explain

the various phases of construction for the community hall, including the purchase

of materials, the justification for structural design, and the buildings overall space

allocation.

While these men talked, another council member walked around the room, passing

out a spiral-bound report that summarized the information presented to each of the

meetings participants. The materials included computer-prepared summaries of the

176 M. DeHart



councils organizational structure, a systematized classificatory schema highlighting

areas of institutional focus as well as the scope/function of specific offices, and

detailed spreadsheets enumerating program beneficiaries and budgetary allocations.

This was exactly the kind of documentation that the council, or any other local

development organization, would submit alongside grant applications. It evidenced a

universally recognizable, rationally organized institution with rigorous, empirically-

proven evaluative mechanisms of the kind validated by neoliberal norms. I wondered

immediately about the significance of these materials for the unevenly literate

population in attendance at the meeting.

The presentations by council members continued uninterrupted until, after a brief

recess, they opened up the floor to general questions. It was only at this point that the

authorities spoke up, and a prolonged debate about community development

commenced.

The community authorities immediately took issue with the councils databecause, for them, the empirical, rationalized nature of the councils evidence raised

a red flag. Although the authorities were suspicious of the supposed self-evidence of

the councils facts, they were even more troubled about the introduction of this

mode of argumentation into the debate. Far from demonstrating transparency, for

them the reliance on rationalized classificatory schema, empirical audits, and

enumeration reflected a powerful association with Western modernity (Hacking,

1982) that seemed to only confirm the councils distance from the forms of

knowledge that defined the indigenous community. The fact that the council was

made up of more privileged community members primarily the successful

merchants and their increasingly college-educated children made this distance even

more dubious. So, while council members deployed technical, professional data as

a sign of their development efficacy and transparency, the San Pedro authorities

interpreted this form of knowledge as a sign of that the council was an outsider,

motivated by an interest in privatizing and usurping resources that rightly belonged

to the community as a whole.12

Customary Critiques

The authorities argued their critiques of the council through an insistence on the

custom of community consensus and the role that age, lineage, ritual prestige, and

personal virtue play in structuring authority within that process. Rather than

empirical fact and transparency as governing principles, the authorities reiterated the

importance of a Maya moral economy based on responsible, virtuous behavior

enacted through practices of collectivism and ritual service. It was adherence to this

particular set of rules of conduct that operated as the means for establishing authority

and evaluating the effectiveness of development actions. Based on this configuration

of moral authority, the authorities argued that they were the only entity fit to

supervise and administer local development resources.

In citing this Maya moral economy as the basis for their power, the authorities were

invoking a tradition of local governance that situated particular forms of indigenous




knowledge and practice such as consensus and ritual prestige as timeless,

authentic foundations for indigenous authority. However, these representations

elided the fact that the entire local political structure was, itself, the product of

historical shifts in local and state governance arrangements, as well as transformations

in the social meaning that residents applied to those arrangements. According to

local historians, the authority of the community mayor was a relatively recent

development, and one that evolved from a long chain of other authority structures

that is, from the principales (elders) whose authority was based on age, lineage, and

spiritual knowledge, through theempricowhose authority was based on his ability to

serve as a liaison to the state civil registry by providing an inventory of community

births and deaths (Tzaquitzal, Ixchu, & Tu, 2000, pp. 5455; see also Asturias de

Barrios, 1998a, 1998b). Consequently, the forms of knowledge and practice that

authorities summoned as the basis for local authority were themselves a reflection of

historically-situated shifts in the forms of governance. The neoliberal context wassignificant here both as a unique moment within this historical trajectory as well as

for the particular way that it framed the debate about indigenous knowledge, in terms

of who or what was seen to embody it and how it was juxtaposed to non-community

forms of authority and governance.

In response to the authorities challenges, the council members attempted to

redefine the terms of legitimate indigenous knowledge to more closely reflect the

basis of their authority within the broader development community. The council

members noted that community residents had authorized them to serve as custodians

of the development process when they had entrusted them to solicit resources on

their behalf. Indeed, strategic plans and grant proposals drafted by the council

articulated the objective of developing the organized community of San Pedro.

The fact that the council had been quite effective at acquiring those resources, with

the very building they were standing in as material evidence of their success, further

validated their authority in their own minds.

While council members argued these views, they frequently referred back to the

documented data and reports. These texts were presented as written facts whose

authority hinged on both their apparent neutrality as well as on their uninterpret-

ability by this unevenly literate audience. Council members would simply refer to

the tables and say, See. Every penny is accounted for. These actions implied thatwhat made council members legitimate representatives of the community was not

their individual morality or virtue as demonstrated through social conduct within the

community, but rather their ability to justify their behavior in abstract accounting

terms and material resources.

In relying on these data to make their argument, the council members were

enacting a notion of professionalism that had earned them considerable recognition

within the development arena. There, the success of the council was determined both

by the empirical accuracy of its bottom line and also its claim to be working on behalf

of the indigenous community, as opposed to as a particular group of individuals.

Its ability to provide professional, rationalized data on the development process

marked the council as having both the managerial expertise and the auditing abilities

to perform as efficient ethnic entrepreneurs (DeHart, n.d.). Indeed, it was through

178 M. DeHart



these particular practices, and the value attributed to them by neoliberal development

norms, that the council members established their authority over community

development. Therefore, this particular mode of argumentation reflected the

councils growing material and professional power as a development broker, and

its ability to parlay particular configurations of indigeneity into essential resources

from state and international development institutions.

Adams (1970) analyzed this articulatory function of power brokers as they

translate interests from one level of power to another dynamic in his study of the

national social structure in Guatemala. Importantly, however, Adams argued that a

brokers power at each of the two levels depends on the success of his operations

at the other level (1970, p. 321). In the case of the San Pedro, we see the council

achieving success in the development arena based on its ability to speak for the

indigenous community and to embody certain forms of knowledge that were

recognizable and authoritative according to neoliberal conventions specifically,enumerated empirical data and rationalized evaluative mechanisms. However,

rather than this development success translating into greater authority within the

community (as was the case of young Chimalteco brokers described by Watanabe

& Fischer, 1990, p. 194), we see something more complex and contentious

occurring.

The authorities could not reject the councils authority out of hand; after all, they

as other community members did benefit from the development resources captured

by the council. Nonetheless, because of the dubious correlation the authorities

perceived between the kind of knowledge mobilized by the council and the class

identities of the council members who articulated it, the authorities stigmatized the

councils argumentative methods and the particular formulation of indigenous

knowledge upon which they based it. Authorities argued that because the resources

had been solicited in the communitys name, the council had a moral obligation to

place these resources at the disposal of the entire community and to act according to

the communitys interests (represented through the authorities). In other words, the

councils professionalized development knowledge and practices were only valid to

the extent that they were put to the service of the community. To the extent that the

council failed to do so, its authority remained suspect.

A Contemporary Micropolitics of Consensus

The San Pedro consensus story demonstrates how community efforts to capitalize

on the development opportunities and correspondent legitimacy provided by

formulations of indigeneity that had been validated by state and international

development agencies provoked new debates about community authority and

governance conventions as well as produced new indigenous subjects. Consensus

between the authorities and the council was essential to ensuring that development

was interpreted and administered as a genuine community initiative, both within the

community and beyond. However, changes to the form and method employed in

reaching consensus highlight the dynamic and contentious nature of the relationship




between multiple, situated forms of authority within the indigenous community.

This tension was productive in that it authorized new types of knowledge and written

modes of expression that is, development proposals, professional budgets and

technical reports as well as privileged new types of development actors namely,

younger professionals rather than older men with a long history of community

service and social prestige. Nonetheless, the value of those new forms had to be

subjected to scrutiny and debate vis-a-vis more traditional consensus procedures.

Furthermore, they had to be re-situated within community morality so that even to

the extent that council members were feared to reflect capitalist entrepreneurial

interests, those interests were harnessed by an invocation of the need for corporate

responsibility.

The authorities use of a capitalist critique to discredit the council highlights the

importance of analyzing, rather than naturalizing, a market/non-market distinction

within neoliberal politics.13

As mentioned above, Smiths analysis of pettycommodity producers in Totonicapan has highlighted the fact that this region

exhibits no antimarket or anti-capitalist counterhegemony (1990b, p. 217).

Therefore, as Fischer (2004, p. 267) also notes, In this context, trying to disentangle

capitalist activities or mindsets from non-capitalist ones is pointless. The capitalist

critique is thus significant not for the palpable difference it references in terms of

subject type, but rather for the role that it plays in articulating the boundary between

authentic versus inauthentic community values and practices.

As this point illustrates, a micropolitics approach enables a substantive analysis of

the nature and stakes of the neoliberal forms of governance that are increasingly seen

to define indigenous politics. While many scholars have speculated about the

ubiquity of hegemonic neoliberal rationalities as a force that infuses all domains of

social, political, economic, spiritual and cultural life (see, for example, Comaroff &

Comaroff, 2000; Harvey, 2005), a micropolitics pushes us to distinguish which

practices or forms of knowledge are identified as specifically neoliberal, how they

work through particular subjects, and why they may or may not gain authority

(Hoffman, DeHart, & Collier, 2006). In the San Pedro case, the councils

mobilization of neoliberal development norms interjected new forms of knowledge

and claims to authority into the debate over authentic indigenous identity, making

visible new kinds of development actors. However, the hegemony of these empirical,rationalized forms of knowledge and development practice in broader development

contexts did not guarantee the authority of these techniques within the community.

Instead, these new governing practices worked through specific subject positions

whose legitimacy and authority were evaluated relative to multiple, overlapping

standards in this case comprised by alternate understandings of indigenous

knowledge and also class considerations. Therefore, the councils legitimacy as an

authentic, professional Maya development agent within state and global development

circles did not guarantee increased authority at home; instead, it actually undermined

the councils power and made it subject to increasing scrutiny by community

authorities. This example highlights the contingent, unstable nature of these new

formulations of knowledge and authority and the importance of extant class

differences in determining their legitimacy.

180 M. DeHart



Indigeneity within the Maya Revitalization Movement

As the San Pedro experience illustrates, debates over which forms of knowledge and

types of subjects represent authoritative configurations of indigeneity emerge not

only through debates with the state. Therefore, while much analysis of neoliberalgovernance and its effects on indigenous communities is conducted through the

national lens, a micropolitics approach is essential to revealing how neoliberal norms

are negotiated across the multiple sites and processes where governing happens.

Principally, it seeks to show how neoliberal arrangements of authority problematize

forms of knowledge and authenticity within the indigenous community, shaping the

way indigenous knowledge is defined and deployed by different actors. While the

neoliberal context and its privileging of the indigenous community has heightened

the stakes of claiming authority over the community (making authentic local

knowledge the source of political and economic value), a micropolitics suggests that

the success of specifically neoliberal configurations of authority is nonetheless

contingent, based on the way that they work through differently-situated individual

subjects.

To further illustrate this point, I turn now to discourses of indigeneity from within

the pan-Maya movement in Guatemala. I demonstrate how one Maya institution in

particular attempted to redefine authoritative forms of indigenous knowledge in

ways that both reflected and challenged the neoliberal politics with which it was

engaged. Importantly, these formulations of indigeneity were produced in relation to

overlapping, competing forms of indigeneity articulated within the Maya commu-

nity. In other words, they reflected efforts to negotiate legitimacy in the eyes of and inrelation to other Maya organizations. They highlight the contentious relationship

among community practice, the market, and state politics as alternate spaces for

formulating indigenous identities and politics.

In the early 1990s, indigenous activists in Guatemala gained international attention

for their efforts to redefine Maya indigenous identity and its place within Guatemalan

national culture.14 Actors in the movement articulated Maya identity not simply in

terms of local community affiliation, as had historically been the case (and as was

forcefully displayed in the San Pedro example), but in terms of a national or even

transnational Maya community. Collectively, these activists projected indigeneity as apowerful repertoire of cultural traditions, forms of spirituality, and deeply-felt

community identifications, as well as an important source of resistance to centuries

of racism and state violence.15 This formulation was often visibly embodied in both

national and global media in the image of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta

Menchu. Within Guatemala, however, no single icon encapsulated the movements

nature or goals; instead, the movement was defined by an ongoing discussion among

diverse indigenous intellectuals and activists over the meaning of indigeneity and its

relationship to the Guatemalan nation-state and Western capitalist modernity more

generally.16

CDRO is a prominent Kiche development organization in the Western

Highlands of Guatemala that gained enthusiastic support from both the

Guatemalan state and also international development agencies for its particular




formulation of indigeneity.17 CDRO is a grassroots organization created in 1986 by

local activists and intellectuals from the same rural, indigenous communities of

Totonicapan that the organization serves. A core group of these activists/intellectuals

forms CDROs current administration, while the majority of the institutions

employees are younger university students or graduates with semi-professional or

technical skills.

CDRO gained notoriety during the 1990s for its innovative efforts to operationalize

Maya culture as a tool for development, utilizing indigenous forms of knowledge and

everyday community practices such as collective ownership (of property and

production), mutual support, and horizontality, as concrete development meth-

odologies (CDRO, 1997). Indeed, it was exactly this innovation that drew me to begin

my own research with the organization in 1995. The organization deployed its

indigenous methodology through both social programs directed towards education

and healthcare, as well as productive enterprises including artisan exports, microcreditloans, and an herbal medicine processing plant. All projects were designed and carried

out by local councils in each of CDROs affiliate communities such as the one

discussed above in San Pedro so as to position the indigenous community as

a collective protagonist of local self-development. CDROs prominence in state

and international development circles derived from the authentic cultural difference

from Western modernity it invoked, and the way that that difference was channeled

toward international norms of development efficacy and sustainability (DeHart,

2008). Despite this status, CDROs relationship to the broader Maya movement was

a topic of frequent debate. I argue that these debates within the Maya movement

were central to defining authentic forms of indigenous knowledge and authority

and their relationship to changing forms of governance.

My study of CDROs development program involved ongoing discussions with the

institutions administrators, employees, and community affiliates about their notions

of indigeneity. Because the organizations general advisor, Benjamn Son Turnil,

played such a central role in articulating CDROs institutional ideology, he was one

of my most frequent interlocutors on this topic. Son Turnil is a Totonicapan native

with a degree in economics and an especially keen sense of politics an organic

intellectual in every sense of the word. The combination of his indigenous activism,

charisma, and intellectualism had earned him much respect, as well as extensiveconnections to state officials and international organizations. Therefore, his

interpretations of Mayanness carried much authority both within the CDRO

institutional setting and the rural communities in which it worked, as well as in state

and international development circles. During one of our almost daily conversations

in 1996, Son Turnil provided a telling portrait of CDROs positioning within the

broader Maya movement. In this narrative, Son Turnil articulated how the meaning

of indigeneity was being called into question by recounting a visit to a neighboring

Maya organization:

One day I went to visit a non-governmental organization in Chimaltenango. The nameof the organization was written in Cakchiquel,18 and upon entering the office, I saw a

desk covered with tpica (indigenous) fabric, there were expressions from the Popol

Wuj19 . . . everything appeared to be indigenous. But when I spoke with the director,

182 M. DeHart



I encountered an administration that was eminently Western, capitalist. So the external

was indigenous, but the internal was not. What that approach communicates is that the

only valuable thing we have is something that can be photocopied. This isnt right

because in the rural communities Ive found many ideas about how to manage

emergency situations, how to mutually support one another, how to attend to problemsof public welfare, how to help each other with production, how to administer

resources . . . We are throwing away the most substantial part of our culture, and were

orienting ourselves toward the past without trying to confront the present.

On the one hand, Son Turnils critique resonates with a long history of indigenous

debates on modernity wherein, as noted above, indigenous authority has been

articulated in terms of authentic insiders versus capitalist impostors a dichotomy

that elides the pervasive capitalist context in which discussions over indigeneity have

taken place (see again Smith, 1990b; Fischer, 2004; DeHart, 2008). For Son Turnil, an

essential indigenous subjectivity is evidenced through persuasive interpretations of

the meaning and appropriate uses of traditional Maya knowledge and practices embodied here in Maya calendrics, historical texts, artisan production, and the

symbolism upon which all of these were built.

Son Turnils perspective is not a simple reiteration of previous debates; rather,

I argue that the significance of his narrative must also be analyzed in relation to the

specific context of neoliberal practices and policies in which CDRO was situated.

From this angle, Son Turnils critique was not just a claim on the modern, but an

attempt to redefine indigeneity through the accepted terms of localization and

decentralization that characterized neoliberal forms of governance. Furthermore,

because of the primacy of the indigenous community within those practices ofgovernance, there was much more at stake, both within the Mayan community and

beyond, in authoritative assertions of authentic indigenous knowledge.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Latin American development strategies reflected the

confluence of economic liberalization and political decentralization vis-a-vis

community and ethnodevelopment policies that devolved responsibility for basic

development activities to grassroots actors. Ethnodevelopment paradigms recast

ethnic difference as a potential resource for, rather than an impediment to,

community development efforts (Davis, 1993, 2002; van den Berg, 2003). For

development practitioners, being able to lay claim to historically and geographically

distinct forms of authentic cultural difference, understood as discrete local

knowledge, played an important role in making certain indigenous actors more

visible than others as legitimate development agents.20

Returning to Son Turnils critique, we see that he endorsed his version of

Maya culture as embodied in CDROs programs by forefronting an essential

epistemological difference from Western capitalist culture, a foil we encountered in

the San Pedro debate. This difference was manifest in alternative forms of social

welfare, production, and administration of resources within the Maya communities.

In his words, the value of these forms of cultural difference derived as much from

their essential ethnic origins, as they did from their practical efficacy and applicability

as development practice.21 After all, his privileging of the local community was

supported by neoliberal decentralization policies. It was the particular combination




of ethnic difference and its systematization into a coherent development program

that allowed Son Turnil to represent his vision as an authentic and authoritative

source of indigeneity endorsed by both state and global development institutions.

The neighboring organizations exhibition of cultural artifacts only thinly masked

its perpetuation of Western capitalist ways and, thus, could be easily dismissed

as lacking the ethnic substance on which Son Turnils portrait of authentic Maya

identity was sketched.

In a similar conversation in 2006, Son Turnils formulation of what constituted an

authentic source of indigenous authority had shifted in some respects, but also

demonstrated continuity in terms of the primacy attached to community-based

knowledge and practice. Whereas in 1999 it was the economic logic on which

indigeneity was articulated that is, a capitalist mentality that relied upon

commodified cultural artifacts versus a collective, community-based development

orientation by 2006 it was the political positioning of a given Maya institution thatdetermined its authenticity. Specifically, when I asked him in the recent interview

about the status of the Maya movement, Son Turnil lamented that many of its leaders

had been absorbed into the government or become closely affiliated with specific

political parties. One group had aligned itself too closely with the Guatemalan

National Revolutionary Unity (UNRG, the umbrella organization of revolutionary

groups who negotiated the 1996 Peace Accords with the Guatemalan state). Other

indigenous activists had formed part of the right-wing government of Alfonso

Portillo between 2000 and 2004.22 These political associations demonstrated to

Son Turnil a distancing by some indigenous actors from the Maya communities. He

claimed that CDROs continued authenticity in this context was demonstrated by its

lack of political affiliation and its strident emphasis on everyday development

concerns in the rural communities. Consequently, what determined the authority of

ones Mayanness was distance from traditional state politics vis-a-vis bureaucracy

or political parties and engagement in local community development.

Son Turnils effort to define an authoritative vision of indigeneity in relation

to other indigenous formulations reflects how CDROs institutional formulation of

indigeneity interfaced with or built upon multiple, overlapping forms of indigenous

knowledge and practices circulating within the Maya community. His commentaries

show how the neoliberal context produced manifold forms of indigeneity ascommodified cultural artifacts, as political ideology, and as community development

practice. He authorized his own formulation of indigeneity by demonstrating it to be

an essentially local and neutral form of knowledge that could serve as an effective

development tool. This construction illuminates the contentiousness of notions of

Maya indigenous identity among differently situated members of a broader Mayan

community, and the importance of those references for defining the very substance of

indigenous knowledge and practices in relation to neoliberal forms of governance.

Here, we again see the importance of the social positioning of specific indigenous

subjects and institutions for their ability to project and validate particular

configurations of authoritative indigenous identity. One way of establishing the

credibility to provide respected interpretations of this kind was by asserting ones

proximity to the community of origin and conformity to the specific daily practices

184 M. DeHart



and beliefs of that place. Seen in this light, Son Turnil sought to reinforce the

legitimacy of his interpretation through his invocation of its embeddedness in Maya

community life, where Kiche language, calendrics, and traje operated as lived

practice, rather than cultural relic. Despite the politics that we saw surrounding

development in San Pedro, Son Turnils portrait reframed the community as a

non-political space the space of authentic cultural production and development

that should be privileged over more politicized, bureaucratized forms of indigeneity

that had been mobilized within the national space. What was at stake in Son Turnils

formulation of Mayanness in both of these commentaries was not only international

recognition and access to development resources, but also authority within the

broader Maya community.

Conclusions

This contemporary micropolitics of indigeneity has examined how the forms of

knowledge associated with neoliberal forms of rule for example, the rationalization

of information into classificatory schema, the enumeration of development activities,

the production of modern financial audits and empirical evaluative mechanisms

have shaped the ways indigenous community members debate and evaluate authority

within their own communities. This approach has attempted to decenter the role of

the state, showing the significance of the micropolitics of the indigenous community

for understanding the contours and implications of the new forms of governance.

While this decentering is not meant to erase the significance of the state, it has sought

to show why a dialectic approach to stateindigenous community relations is limitedin what it can illuminate regarding the techniques and effects of these specifically

neoliberal power arrangements.

I argue that both of the above-described ethnographic encounters highlight

how community members negotiate multiple discourses of indigeneity that are linked

to pre-existing forms of inequality and, therefore, are ascribed different kinds of

value. In other words, these diverse discourses intersect with already formed social

hierarchies, both reflecting and shaping acceptable modes of indigeneity vis-a-vis

different identities, knowledge, and authority. Consequently, we see indigenous

identity emerge not simply as a response to the norms and priorities imposed by stateand global development regimes, but also as a complex negotiation of debates among

diverse indigenous subjects.

A micropolitics is illustrative in this regard because of the way that it highlights the

specific forms of knowledge being defined and deployed within the indigenous

community, the way these forms work through specific subjects and practices, and

their stakes within neoliberal practices that privilege the indigenous community as

a new site/form of governance and development.

In terms of the forms of knowledge being debated, I have focused on how the

neoliberal practices reflect the confluence of rationalized, professional forms of

development practice and authentic indigenous difference as a particular kind of

local knowledge. Diverse configurations of Maya culture produced by community

practitioners and institutional representatives reflected negotiations with and




validation by neoliberal policies that privileged these dual imperatives of local,

professionalized, participatory development, even as they set the terms of new

community debates. In the foregoing examples, both Son Turnil and San Pedro

community authorities grounded their claims to authority in distinct forms of

knowledge whose authenticity was verified by both their traditional origins and

their part of everyday cultural practice. It was their difference from Western

development strategies that made these forms of knowledge legitimate and viable,

and it was their deployment in concrete practices of community life that evidenced

that difference. On the other hand, formulations by both Son Turnil and the

San Pedro council privileged the pairing of a modern education and professional

skills with community membership, indigenous language use, and work on behalf of

the community. These configurations of Mayanness reflected negotiations with and

validation by neoliberal policies that privileged local, professionalized, participatory

development. Therefore, they were not simply formulations of modernity, but ratherof a particular kind of professionalism that was distinct to neoliberal forms of rule.

Importantly, my analysis shows that neoliberal forms of power/knowledge

endorsed by the state are not guaranteed but rather, because of their diffuse forms,

work through differently situated subjects, thus making certain dimensions of their

impact visible only through a micropolitics.23 Therefore, by locating diverse

perspectives within specific constituencies, we begin to see how indigeneity, as a

taken-for-granted organizing principle for community identification and develop-

ment practice, nonetheless has functioned as a central arena for the negotiation of

shifting modes of knowledge and authority.

In San Pedro, different formulations of indigenous authority articulated with

already existing class relations within the community, determining who had access to

what kind of knowledge and what value was attributed to each. Therefore, while

neoliberal forms of knowledge were perceived as powerful for the material resources

they could potentially produce, their authority was not assured by this fact alone.

Instead, their embodiment in elite council members actually worked against the

consolidation of council authority over development. For community members, it

was no accident that the economic and social capital owned by these affluent,

educated community members had made them the privileged local interlocutors with

international forms of indigeneity in the first place. Therefore, they perceived councilmembers to be mobilizing their formulation of indigeneity most significantly in

order to cement their class status and gain access to important material resources.

San Pedro local political authorities, on the other hand, tended to reference a

distinct moral economy based on reciprocity and traditional hierarchies in order to

authenticate the value inherent in their particular formula of indigeneity. Their

insistence on the importance of ritual prestige, age, and morality reflected a notion

of indigeneity that ascribed value to their social status and service, rather than to

economic capital. Furthermore, they represented this particular formulation of

authority through costumbre, understood as a time-tested configuration of local

knowledge and practice. Nonetheless, when situated historically, their argument hints

at the contingency of indigenous customs in relation to a long-documented history

of indigenous community governance. A micropolitics analysis of this deployment of

186 M. DeHart



traditional knowledge thus allows us to better consider the significance of the

broader political economic context in which forms of local governance are enacted.

Class is not the exclusive or even the primary form of inequality that figures in

debates over indigenous authority. As in Son Turnils later commentary, the success

of some Maya activists in the national political scene has made political affiliation an

important new axis for determining authority. Furthermore, in encounters that

I describe elsewhere (DeHart, n.d.), gender difference can be seen to constitute the

measure by which legitimate indigenous knowledge and development authority are

evaluated. A focus on micropolitics is, thus, an important analytical tool for

discerning the contingency of these relationships between forms of knowledge and

authority and the social actors to which they are linked.

Finally, this focus provides an important means of discerning the changing stakes

of indigenous authority. I have argued that neoliberal forms of governance

especially vis-a-vis local power and ethnodevelopment models privilege theindigenous community as a site of governance and development. This reconfigura-

tion of governance clearly evidences a shift in the conditions of indigenous political

agency and belonging within the nation-state. Indeed, Postero (2007) and Sawyer

(2004) have shown how indigenous social movements have appropriated and

subverted these very state development policies and regimes of citizenship in order to

promote authentic indigenous rights and political legitimacy within the nation-state.

Nonetheless, by asking about how shifts in governance bring into question forms

of knowledge and authority within the community, we gain a more nuanced sense of

the effects of this transformation. In the ethnographic encounters described here,

we can see how neoliberal formulations of indigeneity that have been validated by the

international development industry do not represent simply a monolithic, menacing

hegemonic force that intrudes upon, erodes, or simply replaces some more authentic

indigenous form of knowledge. While these neoliberal norms certainly play a central

role in defining indigenous realities, their effects are far from assured. Instead,

hegemonic configurations of appropriate indigeneity24 are actively negotiated and

often reconfigured within the space of community consensus procedures. These

hegemonic forms are mapped onto pre-existing class inequalities, to name just one

example, and they work through shifting understandings of what counts as

authentically indigenous. Ironically, these shifting formulations and their embodi-ment in specific kinds of indigenous subjects could just as soon provide economic

value and status to a certain constituencys views as it could mark that group as

culturally distant and morally bankrupt. Ultimately, therefore, the contradictions

that arise from these overlapping forms of indigenous knowledge highlight the

productive role of indigeneity as the site of tense negotiations over authentic

representations of community authority and development practice.

Acknowledgments

The research for this study was generously supported by the National Science

Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, the US Department of Education vis-a-vis

a Fulbright-Hayes research grant and a Foreign Language and Areas Studies (FLAS)




grant and institutional support from Stanford University and the University of Puget

Sound. The present paper evolved out of and benefited greatly from, a panel discussion

on Latin American indigenous politics at the 2006 American Anthropological Association

meetings. The author thanks Nancy Postero, Brandt Peterson, Patrick Wilson, and Jason

Pribilsky for their productive intellectual engagement in that dialogue. Special thanks alsogo to Lisa Hoffman and Jennifer Hubbert for their keen intellectual insights, which

significantly enhanced the quality and clarity of the argument. Finally, the author is

grateful to Wolfgang Gabbert and three anonymous reviewers at Latin American and

Caribbean Ethnic Studies for their helpful substantive and analytical recommendations.

Notes

[1] Sawyer (2004) provides a notable exception to this rule.

[2] See Rose (1996, 1999), Barry, et al. (1996), Dean (1999), and Lemke (2001) for further

analysis of how these particular forms have been called forth to define neoliberal regimes ofgovernance.

[3] See, for example, Brysk (2000), Garcia (2005), and Speed (2005) for studies of the role of

international non-governmental development organizations, and Sawyer (2004) for the

impact of multinational corporations and international financial institutions. Escobar (1995)

provides a lengthy analysis of the role of the World Bank.

[4] Dean (1999, p. 30) identifies this focus as part of an analytics of government that places

practices at the center of analysis and seeks to discover their logic. For more, see Gordon

(1991).

[5] See, for example, Wagley (1949) and Tax (1964) for foundational studies of indigenous

community culture and its relationship to Guatemalan society. See Grandin (2000) for a

historical analysis of the relationship between Maya culture and Guatemalan nationalism.See Brintnall (1979) and Arias (1990) for studies of modernization debates in the context of

cooperative production and Catholic Action activism. See Tedlock (1973) and Watanabe

and Fischer (1990) for studies of the significance of time and place in Maya culture.

See Wilson (1995), Smith (1990a), Carlsen (1996), Carmack (1988), and Manz (1988) for

state violence. See Fischer (2001, 2004, 2006), and Little (2004) for the relationship between

Maya communities and global capitalism.

[6] This article builds on 22 months of field research in Totonicapan between 1996 and 2000,

as well a month-long follow-up study in 2006.

[7] I focus specifically on the role of gender in legitimating community development authority

in another paper (DeHart, n.d.).

[8] The name of this community has been changed so as to allow a degree of anonymity for its

residents.

[9] The civilreligious hierarchy, or cargo system, refers to the structured sequence of offices

within religious societies and community civil posts through which men in the community

could fulfill ritual service obligations and, thereby, prestige (Cancian, 1965). While the

municipio-wide cargo system was effectively dissolved in Totonicapan in the 1920s (Smith

1990b, p. 220), the tradition of community service continued through the local authority

structure. Indeed, Totonicapan authorities wielded enough power that they were sometimes

seen as a threat to local municipal authorities who attempted to supersede their decision-

making power through an appeal to national (rather than consuetudinary) law (Tzaquitzal,

Ixchu, & Tiu, 2000).

[10] Hereafter, I will refer to these two main groups as the council and the authorities.

[11] This emphasis on consensus is not unique to the Kiche community. Montejo (2004, p. 252)

reiterates the importance of consensus in Jakaltek communities as well, lamenting its

increasing abandonment as a result of the armed conflict.

188 M. DeHart



[12] This perspective reflects Brasss argument that debates over power within ethnic

communities are often articulated in terms of authentic insiders versus culturally different

alien invaders (Brass, 1991, p. 33).

[13] My thanks to Lisa Hoffman for emphasizing this point. See Hoffman, DeHart, & Collier

(2006) for a further elaboration of the importance of an analytical deconstitution ofneoliberalism. For further analysis of the role of the capitalist critique within community

development politics, see DeHart (2001, 2008).

[14] While this moment certainly did not represent the beginning of indigenous mobilization in

Guatemala, the early 1990s was momentous for the public coalescence of indigenous

organizing it reflected, especially around ostensibly non-politicized issues such as linguistics

or community development. Paralleling the historical trajectory documented by other

anthropologists (Arias, 1990; Nelson, 1999; Smith, 1990a; Wilson, 1995; Fischer & McKenna

Brown, 1996), indigenous activists that I worked with from Totonicapan situated the

emergence of a pan-Maya movement in the early 1980s, when indigenous communities in

the western highlands felt the full force of state violence and, simultaneously, began to realize

the inability of class-based ladino insurgencies to address specifically indigenous issues.

[15] For more on this, see Warren (1998), Nelson (1999) and Cojti Cuxil (1991, 1994).

[16] See Bastos and Camus (1993), Fischer and McKenna Brown (1996), and Warren (1998) for a

discussion of the diverse organizational forms, goals, and identifications articulated within

the Maya Movement. Also, see Nelson (1999) for an analysis of the diverse and contentious

meanings attributed to Rigoberta Menchu within Guatemala.

[17] See DeHart (2003) for an analysis of how CDROs Maya development project fits within

global neoliberal development priorities, and also how they articulated with Guatemalan

state decentralization policies.

[18] One of the 21 Maya languages spoken in Guatemala.

[19] The Popol Wuj is the sacred text of the Maya. Written in Kiche during the 16th century,

it documents the mythological and historical foundations of the Kiche people.

[20] See Nygren (1996).[21] Importantly, CDRO did not rely upon a rigid notion of ethnic difference; rather, it

legitimized the ongoing reformulation of ethnic identity in response to situated and shifting

understandings of what was valuable about Maya culture and how it could be productively

applied to address emerging development dilemmas. Within the neoliberal context, this

formulation of Maya culture as an efficient, effective tool for achieving sustainable, equitable,

and local development helped CDRO to authenticate its claim to cultural authenticity and

development power.

[22] See also Hale (2004) for further discussion of this critique of Maya activists.

[23] This is essentially what Foucault has called a microphysics of power.

[24] Hale (2004) uses the term indio permitido to denote limitations on structurally acceptable

forms of cultural difference prescribed by neoliberal multicultural regimes.

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Monica DeHart is at the Department of Anthropology, University of Puget Sound, 1500 N.

Warner, Tacoma, WA 98416, USA (Email: [email protected]).

192 M. DeHart

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