tilley (2005) seeing indians. reseÑa

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Review Author(s): Les W. Field Review by: Les W. Field Source: Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Feb., 2007), pp. 214-216Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4491804Accessed: 27-02-2015 15:37 UTC

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214 Reviews

the beginning the 'memory as salvation' of the regime's partisans is counterposed to 'memory as an unresolved rupture' and 'memory as persecution and awakening' of those who suffered or resisted it, at the same time forging a memory of their struggles for democracy. Somewhat later arises a 'memory as a closed box', formed by the convergent efforts of negationists of the regime itself and of 'realists' among the democratic opposition that are fearful of opening a Pandora's Box.

Stern succeeds in giving a convincing historicity to these emblematic memories in their conflict, interaction and metamorphosis, but his first book of the trilogy also provides fresh and acute insights into a range of aspects of recent Chilean historical experience. He achieves this through an original way of organising his text, following each chapter of research and reflection with an 'afterword' that both complements and raises questions about what has come before. He also offers extensive notes full of suggestive reflections and ends the volume with an essay on his sources for the full trilogy.

Stern makes a quantitative estimate of the vast scale of repression under the Pinochet regime: between 3,500 and 4,500 dead and disappeared; between 50o,ooo and 200,000 arrested for political reasons, of which some ioo,ooo were tortured; to which are added between 200,000 and 400,000 exiles, in a country of o0 million inhabitants in 1973.

In the conceptual realm he suggests 'policide' as a way to characterise the Chilean case, defined as 'a systematic project to destroy an entire way of doing and under- standing politics and governance' that 'includes systematic killing of specific tar- geted groups', together with other actions 'designed to generalize the terror' and build 'a culture of fear and fragmentation' (p. I8o). Through such a 'regime of systematic violence and fear [...] the old [democratic] ways [...] could be annihilated and replaced by technocratic and authoritarian governance' (p. 3 i).

Finally, it is worth emphasising Stern's vision of state terror in Chile as a national case of what he calls 'a central disturbing issue of twentieth-century world history' (p. xx) or a 'Latin America's example of the "German problem"' (p. xxv): the descent of a country admired for its culture and enlightenment into massive, or- ganised acts of barbarism 'so extreme that they defy the normal realm of the punishable and forgivable' (p. 178). In this way Stern links his careful examination of the Chilean experience with a historical and ethical reflection of global scope. Instituto de Historia Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

A1 FIRFIDi)() RIQ U) F 'LNII,

/. Lat. rAmer. Stid. 39 (2007). doi:io.io17/Soo02zz26Xo645342 Virginia Q. Tilley, Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation and Power in El Salvador (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005oo), pp. xviii + 297, $22.95, pb.

Among certain social scientists, human rights activists, would-be explorers, news- paper publishers and a broad section of the public in many countries, there is a certain fascination with peoples that have been labeled - by other scholars, explorers, media and governments - 'extinct'. For those who perpetrate and those who consume it, this 'last of his/her kind' trope has provided an irresistible narra- tive as applied to colonised indigenous peoples. But there are also scholars and


Reviews 2z 5 others for whom the 'extinction sentence' and its particular narration of colonialism and indigeneity instead delivers an invitation to disprove the sentence of extinction. Such scholars attempt to show that whatever historical trauma a particular indigenous or aboriginal people may have endured, someone - actually a group of someones - survived, reproduced and carried that people's identity into the present and out of the terminal category of extinction.

The indigenous peoples of El Salvador have been relegated to the 'file of extinct peoples' for most of the twentieth century, at least according to both successive Salvadorean governments and the vast majority of the scholarly work written about that country both by Central American and North American scholars. Bureaucrats, scholars and the salvadoredo man and woman in the street seem to agree that El Salvador's indigenous peoples disappeared in the wake of the 1932 massacre known as La Matanza. This vicious period of bloodletting occurred in the wake of an uprising in the western part of the country that was led by communist political and union organisers and did indeed involve significant participation by native communities. But even though elite and non-elite salvadoredos profess that after 1932 the indigenous population ceased to exist, there is paradoxical and simul- taneous agreement that indigenous communities persist even now in the certain areas, including the western zone of the country where the Matanza took place. This peculiar twist resonates with a similar paradox in neighbouring Nicaragua, which historian Jeffrey Gould has called 'the myth of Nicaragua mestiza,' and which I ethnographically documented in the provinces of Masaya and Carazo in that country.

Faced with this same incongruity in El Salvador, Virginia Q. Tilley, a political scientist at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, has written a lucid exegesis. One option a scholar might take in these circumstances is to take the anti-extinction position outlined above, which explicitly rejects the extinction sentence. Such an argument would need to show that Indians really do still exist in El Salvador, and to marshal data that substantiate this claim. But the only way to make such an argument is to rely on a particular definition of who and what an 'Indian' is - in other words, one needs a check-list, so to speak, of indigenous characteristics or traits, against which to check the data about the group whom one wants to prove are still indigenous. Wisely, Tilley has taken a different course, avoiding the necessarily es- sentialist claims about blood and cultural traits that have come under fire from many different quarters, including both social constructionist anthropologists and indigenous leaders who disavow outsiders' efforts to define 'Indianness'. Instead, Tilley's argument treats the issue meta-discursively: 'shift[ing] away from fruitless efforts to establish objective criteria for who is an Indian ... [i]nstead we can examine how, and under what political conditions, competing sets of criteria [for defining Indianness] took shape.' (p. 17). The main focus of Tilley's book thus becomes the 'domestic and international pressures [that] led Salvadoran nationalists, in the early twentieth century, to orchestrate the Indians' official erasure' (p. 24), a position heretofore accepted by the scholarly community.

Given this approach, Tilley necessarily focuses much of her attention upon the events leading up to, during and after the 1932 uprising in western El Salvador and the Matanza that followed. In so doing she constructively critiques the best known and commonly quoted scholars who have written about Salvadorean history. Tilley demonstrates the historical antecedents and precedence for the 1932 uprising in a far more effective way than previous scholars in my opinion. Her tracing of the


2 16 Reviews

manner in which the post-1932 Salvadorean state statistically 'disappeared' its indigenous population in official documents and discourse is superb. In addition, she contextualises the contemporary meta-discourse about indigenous Salvadoreans in three linked ways.

First, she provides ethnographic descriptions of the current state of those communities in the western region which other Salvadoreans admit retain indigenous populations. Even though Tilley finds indigenous dress and language remain more prevalent in these communities than is acknowledged by either other Salvadoreans or non-Salvadorean scholars, she shows why programmes to revive indigenous dress and language are likely to fare poorly among those populations in coming years. Second, she shows how the extremely successful Mayan social and cultural movement in neighbouring Guatemala has set the standard for what constitutes indigenous identity in Central America. That standard, she argues, has consistently and inevitably made it more difficult for Salvadorean indigenous communities to organise such a movement, given the latter's own peculiar and very different situ- ation. Finally, Tilley underscores how the difficulties currently faced by these Salvadorean communities are made even more constricting by efforts made by both the pan-hemispheric indigenous movement and the international human right movements to help them. On this global stage, the Salvadorean Indians cannot possibly 'perform Indianness' to the satisfaction of interested parties, precisely be- cause of the historical circumstances that shaped their survival into the twenty-first century.

My quibble with Tilley's book is a desire for thicker ethnographic description among the contemporary indigenous communities, not only among the Nahua-Pipil communities of the western region, but among the much less well known (former) Ulua-speakers of the Cacaopera region in eastern El Salvador as well. But Tilley is a political scientist, not an anthropologist. The fact that she wrote this book underscores both how much questions of indigenous identity and survival are of broad scholarly interest these days and that different disciplines can contribute a variety of approaches to these issues.

University of New Mexico IFIS W. FIE LD

J. Lat. Amer. Stiud. 39 (2007). doi:io.IoI7/Soozzzi6Xo6462349 Leslie E. Anderson and Lawrence C. Dodd, Learning Democra"y: Citizen Engagement and Electoral Choice in Nicaragua, I99o-2ooi (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. xvi + 370, $24.00, pb.

Through their examination of the singular case of Nicaragua, Anderson and Dodd aim to contribute to theoretical debates about democratisation, presenting new (and provocative) hypotheses that contradict some of the commonplaces that transitologia has turned into unquestioned certainties.

For this they develop a highly heterodox strategy based on the combination of, on the one hand, a rigorous analysis of electoral data (especially of the 'critical' elections of I990) and, on the other, the rescue of historicist interpretations of political de- velopment that invoke the profound transformations which revolutionary processes entail. The authors have based their electoral analysis on sophisticated theories of voter choice (applying theories of 'retrospection' and 'prospection'), with the aim of explaining how and why Nicaraguan voters made the electoral decisions we have


Article Contentsp. 214p. 215p. 216

Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Feb., 2007) pp. i-iv+1-226Front Matter [pp. ](De-)Mobilising the Marginalised: A Comparison of the Argentine Piqueteros and Ecuador's Indigenous Movement [pp. 1-29]Rethinking Race and Culture in Brazil's First Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934 [pp. 31-54]Women out of Place? A Micro-Historical Perspective on the Black Feminist Movement in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil [pp. 55-80]Growth with Inequality: Living Standards in Mexico, 1850-1950 [pp. 81-105]'Depoliticisation' in the Reform of the Panamanian Security Apparatus [pp. 107-132]CommentaryEvo Morales, the 'Two Bolivias' and the Third Bolivian Revolution [pp. 133-166]

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Books Received [pp. 221-225]Back Matter [pp. ]

tilley (2005) seeing indians. reseÑa

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