Testimonial texts of contemporary Mayan educators are at the heart of this study about K ’iche ’ Mayan education in the highland area of Totonicapan in Guatemala. I use Schrag’s (1986) framework of communicative praxis to provide a lens of critical hermeneutics or an informed reading of the filmed and audiotaped testimonies of two contemporary Mayan teachers/daykeepers. I use communicative praxis to provide a method of interpreting texts as discourse: about something, by someone, and for someone. Each of the texts is interpreted using the following questions: What is occurring in this person’s testimony? What is this person’s experience being a Mayan educator in contemporary Guatemala? How is that experience disclosed through the text? The first five chapters outline the historical circumstances and describe some of the cultural practices and traditions within which the teachings of the Mayan educators are rooted. This portion of the dissertation is based on an action research project which I coordinated in 1996. The themes of place and respect arose from interviews I conducted with 15 educators and provide the background for an informed reading of the two texts of the Mayan elders. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on an interpretation of each text, what each person referenced in his 'lived' world, and what their testimonies signify about that world, using the lens of communicative praxis. This section explores the backgrounds of the two educators, what they were saying, and how they were saying it. The interpretation elucidates the Mayan educators’ notions of place and respect for the individual, the community, and all living things, as well as heaven and earth. In poignant testimonies, the elders employed personal stories, poetry, metaphors, and ancient texts which call for the return to a Mayan curriculum that is grounded in spiritual ecology. They question the morality of the Guatemalan state and they make an impassioned plea for the creation of a culture of peace. The study concludes in chapter 8 with an examination of the interface between contemporary Western curricular discourse and that of these K’iche’ educators. / Graduate

This thesis examines the causes and processes of culture change in complex society in ancient Mesoamerica. Facets of political and social change are attributed to the effects of competition for status, power and prestige. The position is taken that, although competition is not directly observable, it is visible in its patterned effects on the material record. Thus, the study examines the uses of material culture in sociopolitical terms, and then attempts to explain socio-political interaction and change using the archaeological remnants of material culture. The archaeological record for Kaminaljuyu and vicinity within the Valley of Guatemala is used as a test case. Essentially, status competition, underwritten by material and consensual support, leads to efforts to promote economic production and population size. Responses to increases in polity scale and complexity lead to political adjustment and change. A processual model is proposed which focuses on change within and between two dominant economic and status support systems, the local subsistence system and the regional wealth trade system. Relevant social variables are linked to archaeological materials to enable operationalization of the theory. Thus political support is represented by aspects of settlement (population size and distribution) and by economic production (land use, craft production). Status demonstration is represented by construction activity and-political maintenance is represented by the provision of administrative space. The main findings for Kaminaljuyu are that: 1) Long-distance wealth trade in commodities and status goods was associated with maximization of all types of economic production, centralization of political power, rural population increase and population dispersal. 2) The local subsistence system was associated with decentralization of political power, localized economic productivity, centralization of population (crowding) and possible social conflict. The method also led to the investigation of and insights into the record for Kaminaljuyu. The analysis demonstrated a two-period cycle of socio-political change, each cycle conforming to the sequence of change proposed in the model. This pattern conforms to well-known cycles of political centralization and decentralization. This approach was useful for investigating the archaeological record for this type of complex polity. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

archives@tulane.edu / This dissertation explores the role of the Guatemalan National Police, from 1954 to 1985, as an institution that in the context of the country’s armed conflict and dirty war, became a key part of the machinery of brutality and violence of the Guatemalan State. The work approaches the police as an institution with its own internal logics, identity and counterinsurgency practices. The dissertation argues that the actions of the Guatemalan police need to be examined as part of a high policing model, where acts of police violence should not be assumed as actions that diverge from the norm, but instead as central to the police function. Especially given the entity’s role in the defense of the status quo and power. The work provides an overview of how the police was structured in a way that blurred lines between the units in charge of everyday policing and political policing. It then provides an ethnographic overview of how the social, economic and cultural condition of the country affected police ranks. The work also examines the relationship between the Guatemalan National Police and the citizens it was expected to serve and protect, to learn how that day-to-day element of community protection led the police to create its own criminal subject and its own notion of the internal enemy beyond the political subversive. The dissertation also sheds lights on the extent to which the police relied on intelligence networks and informants. Showing that citizen collaboration was fundamental to counterinsurgency project of the State. This project begins in 1954, after the U.S.-sponsored coup against democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1951-1954) and ends in 1985, at the beginning of the country’s democratic transition. It begins in 1954, because the coup marked the beginning of the counterrevolution, a period that set the basis for the political actions that defined the structures of Guatemala during the following three decades. For its part, 1985 was supposed to represent a change for the country, but as the work explores, it is still hard to determine whether democratic transitional periods, with the military still at the forefront, can build lasting democratic projects. / 1 / María Aguilar

Niklas Luhmann's theory of autopoietic social systems challenges traditional social science by dissolving the individual as an analytical category and replacing it with the functional structures of social systems. The opaque complexity of this model of thought has rendered it extremely difficult to understand and apply, which has obstructed its reception on the part of empirically oriented scholars. This paper investigates the political and military strategy of Guatemala's armed forces during the 1960s-1990s civil war from the perspective of the theory of autopoietic social systems. It thereby illustrates and illuminates Luhmann's highly abstract theoretical framework and demonstrates its scope and limits as an explanatory model guiding empirical research in the social sciences. By the same token, it lends moderate support to the universality claim Luhmann makes for his radical systems perspective and proposes new avenues of thought that could lead to a better understanding of Third World politics. / Master of Arts

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Globalization has facilitated the growth of “market-friendly” religions throughout the world, but especially in developing societies in the global South. A popular belief among these movements is prosperity belief. Prosperity belief has several characteristics which make it compatible with liberal individualism, the dominant value in a globalized society. At the same time, its compatibility with this value may be limited, extending only to economic liberalism, but not to liberal attitudes on social issues. Data from the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life’s 2006 survey Spirit and Power: Survey of Pentecostals in Guatemala is used to conduct a quantitative analysis regarding the economic and social attitudes of prosperity belief adherents in Guatemala in order to examine the potential, as well as the limits, of this belief’s compatibility with liberal individualism. Results suggest that support for liberal individualism is bifurcated. On one hand there is some support for the positive influence of prosperity belief on economic liberalism in regards to matters of free trade, but on the other hand, prosperity belief adherents continue to maintain conservative attitudes in regards to social issues. As prosperity belief and liberal individualism continue to grow along global capitalism, these findings have implications for the future of market-friendly religions and for the societies of the global South.

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This study has focused on the conditions of indigenous entrepreneurs of production in the urban informal sector. In that sense, it is a first of its kind. Eleven Maya entrepreneurs in the city of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, in five different productive activities, were interviewed. In addition a control group of three Ladino entrepreneurs was established and some large formal enterprises were visited. Besides analyzing the general working situation of the Maya entrepreneurs, the study tested two hypotheses on ethnicity. The first put forward the assumption that Maya entrepreneurs use their ethnic network to promote their enterprises, the other that Maya entrepreneurs are active in certain activities of the informal sector and not in others, due to, for example, structural conditions in the ethnically stratified and segregated society of Guatemala. Neither of these hypotheses were substantiated by the data. However, while ethnic segregation was not observed among Ladino and Maya entrepreneurs of production, there is circumstantial evidence of a structural discrimination that forces many Mayans who do not succeed in establishing a productive enterprise, to try their luck in the less economically promising sector of commerce. Besides the ethnic aspects, the study gave conclusive evidence for answers to some of the questions directed towards the informal sector in general, among them, the question whether or not capital accumulation takes place and, eventually, to which extent. The annual capital accumulation among productive enterprises in the informal sector of the city of Quetzaltenango was modeled. The results indicate an accumulation per year of roughly $1.5 million. Recalculations with a sensible variation of some of the crucial assumptions, gave results within a band of $1.35 million - $1.65 million. The capital is accumulated by 258 enterprises, with four or more workers (including the owner), with a total work force of 1,320 workers, out of a total of 1879 enterprises of production. To this author's knowledge, no similar attempt of such an estimation has been reported in the literature before. The study offers calculations on the economic take-home earnings of some of the Maya entrepreneurs and identifies the mechanisms behind the entrepreneurial successes and failures. It concludes that it is necessary to distinguish between enterprises of production and enterprises of commerce due to their different natures. It presents data on the labor wages in the informal sector. It shows that the salaries are, first, closely related to the productivity of the individual worker, and, second, that, probably more often than not, they are tied to fluctuations in the demand of the market for the products of the enterprise. This means that the salary bracket within one economic activity may vary widely throughout the year. Other topics where the study offers new insight on entrepreneurial practice in the informal sector, are on lending conditions and the use of formal loans, on taxation, on the use of different management schemes and the potential of these, and on productivity and profitability within different economic activities. A list of the findings of the study is given at the end. / text

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