In his preface, John Watanabe remarks that over the years, some of his colleagues have grown impatient with him for taking so long to finish this monograph on the Mam-speaking inhabitants of Santiago Chimaltenango (Chimbal) in highland Guatemala. It has been worth the wait, for in this book we have a polished gem that sets a new standard for ethnographic studies of native Mesoamerica.
Watanabe’s main interest is how people in Chimbal define their ethnic distinctiveness, a quality that is inseparable from community life. Life in a community, according to Watanabe, involves “participation in local contexts of conventional discourse … and commitment to an investment in the concerns of that discourse” (p. 15). He defines conventions as regular acts of symbolic communication that require “interlocutors” to particularize symbols in reference to ongoing events and make the events recognizable. The Mam of Santiago Chimaltenango “identify and engage” one another through a “formal language of community” made up of “saint and witz, souls and soul-loss, and public recognition and community service” (p. 129). At the same time, Watanabe’s perspective allows him to emphasize the open-ended, emerging, and creative dimensions of communication, as opposed to the constraints it places on actors. He thereby demonstrates that although the institutional forms we traditionally associate with the Maya have disappeared from Chimaltenango—in the wake of what earlier we might have called “acculturation”—the people of Chimbal remain Maya and maintain their community, albeit not the Maya of the past or the same community as when Charles Wagley worked there in the 1930s.
A measure of the book’s ethnographic richness is the way it allows us to pose questions for the author. Why, for example, does the symbolism of affinity seem to play no part in the Chimalteco “formal language of community” when, Watanabe tells us, these people are highly endogamous? Similarly, if Chimalteco identity is prominently defined by an opposition to ladinos, why do the dialectically, even ethnically, distinct Maya of surrounding communities, with whom the Chimaltecos have had land disputes, play no discernible role in this definition?
The overtly historical section of the book is part 3, wherein Watanabe uses Wagley’s work as a baseline and ably charts ensuing social and economic changes in Chimbal. In contrast to the first two parts of the book, which are concerned with Chimalteco conventions of community, we do not learn much about local theories of history or how Chimaltecos discuss their past. This is consistent with what Chimaltecos say being Chimalteco is—the capacity to act in an appropriate way, no matter what that might be at any particular time. Thus the past, including developments like the lapse in ancient Maya ritual practices, is not of much concern. Yet we might ask, do Chimaltecos really feel no sense of loss, and is no one left behind?
In his conclusion, Watanabe grounds his discussion of community in the universal of small-group cooperative life. While this perspective is useful, and it conforms to his emphasis on the normative dimension of social relationships, this reviewer was disappointed that Watanabe did not expand the conceptual problem of “community” for Mesoamericanists. If, for example, a group defined by joint ownership of property and the capacity to act as a legal person (that is, the corporation) evokes for us an image of the organic unity of the body, what does it evoke for the Chimaltecos? Such questions may allow us to let go of the vague and romantic term community, the way ethnographers working on other places have let go of the term tribe.
These admittedly specialized points aside, I want to reiterate that Watanabe’s work, in its combination of theoretical analysis and ethnographic sensitivity, surpasses anything that has come out of the field of Mesoamerican studies in quite some time. It should be essential reading for students of the region, and it will make for a good undergraduate teaching tool.
