In this timely and important book, Diane Nelson interrogates the politics of counting in postwar Guatemala. She frames the work by exposing the duplicitous nature of numbers to both humanize and objectify individual and communities’ losses, deaths, disappearances, murders, and threats to well-being in the context of colonialism, genocide, and everyday forms of violence that saturate life for Maya people in Guatemala. She draws on three decades of ethnographic work to show how various forms of accounting can never be removed from the production of power and responses to it.
The book has nine chapters (numbered from −1 to 7 in accordance with Nelson’s efforts to disrupt naturalized Western notions of counting); it is best conceptually approached through the broader organization of its four major sections. Part 1 sets up the ethnographic and political context of post-genocidal Guatemala, a place and time where everyday violence produces the levels of human...
