Although scholars often stress the economics of development, Sarah Foss shows how it is an historically contingent process. Her book focuses on a dramatic span of Guatemalan history that brackets the Guatemalan Revolution—la violencia (the Guatemalan Civil War)—and post-peace struggles and how social, political, and economic development played a transformational role on multiple scales. Foss tacks among the local, regional, national, and global scales to demonstrate the throughline of ideas of indigeneity and Indigenous peoples, development, and the state. Foss's cogent and well-grounded study questions the framing of the idea of development—what does development mean, for whom?—and intended and unintended consequences of those framings. Parts of three of the chapters appeared previously in anthologies and an article; however, the book is coherent.
Foss introduces the reader to the place, time, and people with vivid “snapshots” that link to larger issues of indigeneity, community social and political currents, and the constant thrum of violence. Her writing juxtaposes outsider, top-down improvement schemes versus residents’ hopes and struggles, what Foss phrases as “development on their own terms” (4). She uses an expansive, active definition for “the state” as a dynamic, contested process of negotiating power relationships at all levels of society. Foss highlights how the state aimed for development programs to reify or reorganize social hierarchies for political ends; yet, in the face of these hegemonic forces to control, indigenous citizenry, over and over again, were central actors rather than passive recipients and seized upon opportunities to turn the state's own discourses to locally relevant ends, challenging the project of modernization. The active role of Indigenous populations affected not just national politics but also the global Cold War.
The introduction lays out key concepts and how her array of methods (archival, oral history, and visual analysis) and focus compare to previous work. The subsequent chapters follow chronologically, beginning with the creation of the National Indigenous Institute of Guatemala (IING, in Spanish) in 1945 as a key moment in relationships of the national government with Indigenous communities. Foss outlines the antecedents in the early 1940s to address socioeconomic inequality and racism in Guatemala, particularly the Indigenista movement and the role of Action Anthropology. The WWII/Guatemalan Revolution moment encouraged two strong counter currents: Indigenous integration without assimilation versus outsider creation of the “permitted Indian.” In chapter 2, Foss analyzes text content and imagery of literacy campaigns during this period to elucidate the racial imaginaries of the “permitted Indian.” State actors aspired to control newly gained indigenous voting rights by defining the scope and elements of indigeneity and prioritizing experts’ (often outsider anthropologists) over local knowledge.
The rest of the book focuses on local realities. Chapter 3 is a view into counter-hegemonic efforts during the Second Revolutionary government (1951–1956). The Arbenz government valued Indigenous peoples as one of the country's greatest unrealized potentials, but battles over land and agricultural production reconfigured the meanings of citizenship for Indigenous peoples. The Counterrevolution (1954–1960; chapter 4) radically shifted the position of intermediaries between the state and indigenous community members. Foss carefully contextualizes how the careful and deliberate collaboration between the state and IING and the indigenous community of Tactic later shifted to development as an avenue for authoritarian state surveillance and material dependency, characteristics that persist in subsequent examples. In development projects during the 1960s to 1970s (chapter 5), race and US concerns about communism came into play even more. Foss emphasizes psychological tactics, aims, and effects. Chapter 6 turns to the horror of Ixcán Grande (1968–1982). Foss describes the hopeful Maryknoll beginnings, the entrance of the Guerilla Army of the Poor, and then the radical turn toward state suspicion and relentless violence.
Chapter 7's visual analysis is the pinnacle of the book. Ross richly contextualizes the images spanning the military campaigns of the early 1980s and the 1996 Peace Accords; text is more bountiful than images, including descriptions of photographs too fragile to reproduce. Foss parses the images of Comunidades de población en resistencia (CPR), not only calling out individual items but also reading people's emotions. The post-peace final chapter emphasizes that discourses and practices of development continue to shape social categories and efforts to achieve the hopes of the Peace Accords. I wonder what pictures of those same photographed communities would show now.
