Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala is the final volume of the quadrilogy that grew out of the anthropological field school for Brigham Young University undergraduates that John Hawkins and the anthropologist Walter Randolph Adams conducted in two predominantly K'iche’ Maya communities in Guatemala from 1995 through 2003. It is a massive and comprehensive study, divided into three parts, of religious change in Guatemala.
The first section consists of student-written ethnographic essays on Maya religion—traditional practices, cofradias, orthodox Catholicism, Catholic Action, and, above all, Pentecostalism—in the grand old style of rich, thick description. It is mercifully jargon-free; Hawkins and Adams have done an excellent job of integrating these essays into a single coherent voice and assuring that they all engage with a common theoretical framework, mainly derived from Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. The essays date from the field schools that took place between 2002 and 2003, so their data are...
