“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again” is the motto of this book. Nevertheless Richard Adams and his students (all of whom receive generous credit for their contributions) have made a heroic effort to put Guatemala back together again, at least conceptually. To do so they have drawn on Adams’ experience of Guatemala spanning almost a professional lifetime, on the abundant published material and above all on the results of a series of studies covering the entire country, carried out under a project sponsored by the University of Texas. The resulting collection of essays is intended not only to help us understand Guatemalan society but also to show how anthropologists can grapple with the problem of studying something like a nation without sacrificing the specificity that they value so much.
In his long introduction on the anthropological study of complex societies Adams argues that the nation is the most useful framework for such analyses. He further suggests that they be organized around the central concept of power. He discusses at some length the unusual way in which he applies the term power structure and shows with examples how he proposes to analyse the Guatemalan situation in terms of power domains. He then presents background material necessary for the appreciation of power domains in Guatemala and identifies certain trends in power relationships over the period 1944-1966. This is followed by chapters on the military, the church and the “upper-sector interest groups,” on the expansion of cotton cultivation (a fascinating case study in the unintended consequences of development) and a discussion of the problems of access to the instruments of power. The book concludes with essays by Brian Murphy on campesino organizations and Bryan Roberts on low-income urban families.
Anthropologists have long recognised the need for a horizon broader than the little community but, as Adams rightly points out, they have not been too sure what to do about it, so that their ventures into the wider arena are still relatively few and often tentative. They are thus certain to welcome studies like this one which face the problem squarely, set out a paradigm for its solution and proceed to apply it. But the paradigm is likely to evoke skepticism even among those who admire the results it produces. A focus on power relations is, for example, a legitimate and important interest, and the analysis of networks has much to recommend it both theoretically and as an operational tool. But the emphasis on power is best justified in terms of a general theory of society rather than as a heuristic device which generates wide networks for investigation. At the same time Adams’ concept of power structure means roughly the sum total of all the conditions affecting the application of systematic power at any moment. It leads him in his exposition to what one might call an ethnography of power, an attempt to set down all the circumstances affecting the exercise of power in Guatemala over a twenty-year period. Like most good ethnographies it is comprehensive but discursive and leaves the reader at the end feeling well-informed but curiously up in the air. This impression is reinforced by the presentation of the book as a series of essays. The last two chapters, which are excellent in their own right, function as appendices rather than conclusions.
It is thus a book which almost succeeds in defusing its own impact. Almost, but not quite, for Adams systematically dismantles the stereotype of Guatemala as yet another oligarchy run since time immemorial by army, church and landlord. Instead he shows how the landlords and the military competed quite literally for the bodies of the largely Indian citizenry and how the church was until recently marginal to the whole process. Furthermore the interests of these sectors converged only in recent times, precisely when the traditional order was shattered by what some might call “modernization.” It is this series of events which Crucifixion by Tower sets out to document: the revolutionary period which loosened up the society; the efforts to tighten it again by United Fruit and the United States; the impact of the cold war and of modem technology, particularly of improved communications within the country and the greater controlling powers enjoyed by the military; the counter-revolution and its aftermath. The careful and splendidly thorough analyses of domain after domain throughout the book show the importance of a whole array of distinctions which do not usually enter as variables into our theorizing. Moreover the essays do not merely offer an excellent testing ground for current theory. They themselves contain nuggets aplenty for the careful reader. Yet it is as if Adams and his team are too clinically careful to mine the rich lode which their own expertise has made available. They isolate the elements which contribute to the bloody violence now ravaging Guatemala with virtual civil war and still leave the reader feeling like a man who has been shown all the fissures by an expert geologist without an explanation of why the lava is about to come boiling through.
