'Peace processes': Power, politics, and conflict after war in Todos Santos Cuchumatan, Guatemala

In December 1996, a final peace accord was signed, officially ending the thirty-six year Guatemalan civil war and the post-war period officially began. This dissertation is an ethnography of relationships and a typology of the different kinds of conflicts that community members have with each other and with the state in the post-Accords period. In it, I consider local struggles, shifting alliances, and the role of conflict in constitution of community. Among the processes I examine are the contestation of dominant historical narratives in response to cultural revitalization, economic strategies like migration, political tactics such as intermittent state engagement, and decision-making processes in the resolution of community disputes. I employ the concept "peace processes" to show how these are convergent and overlapping processes whose foregrounding is central to understanding the intermingling of politics, economics and everyday rural life and struggles in this period. Examining them together ties the economic and cultural agendas of neoliberalism to the political trajectories and maneuvers of the post-Accords transition period, providing a broader view of how the post-Peace Accords era is experienced locally than possible by analyzing any of them individually. I direct this understanding to an analysis of emerging postwar forms such as lynching and rural gangs.; By showing how the violence Todosanteros frequently direct towards each other in relation to these processes is as much a result of the past as the present, I suggest that conflict is an essential element to understanding culture, one that vastly enriches how we might explore cultural dimensions of identity and economic exigencies of livelihood in relation to hierarchies of power and visions of politics and political futures.; This dissertation is based on thirty-six months of fieldwork between 1994--2002. A number of innovative and locally inclusive methodologies inform it, including a mapmaking workshop (1994), a local translation of Maude Oakes ethnography The Two Crosses of Todos Santos from English to Spanish (1999), and a series of history workshops (1999--2000.)...