| This dissertation interrogates what is “ethnic” about ethnic development in the context of the innovative programs of CDRO (Cooperación para el Desarrollo Rural de Occidente ) in the rural indigenous communities of Totonicapán, Guatemala. CDRO is an explicitly Maya K'iche' organization that creatively combines traditional cultural practice and modern technologies to construct a unique development model. Through this structure, CDRO seeks to cultivate local power relative to the Guatemala state and the global market. My research provides a detailed analysis of how CDRO uses specific components of local culture—namely, the pop (“woven mat”) organizational system and the community as a collective actor—as concrete tools for the development process. However, I problematize the notion of a stable, pre-existent ethnic identity as the starting point for ethnic development by putting CDRO's notions about culture in conversation with local perceptions of ethnicity in three Totonicapán communities. Based on my ethnographic study of one model CDRO community and two non-CDRO communities, I argue that “authentic” ethnic practice is constantly redefined within the development process. Dynamic interpretations of local culture and its relationship to development provide a means through which the rural communities strategically organize and project their collective identity in their articulations with broader political and economic arenas.; This study also examines the concepts of “local” and “ethnic” in the context of two of CDRO's most compelling development projects: it's gender program and its goal of cultivating poder local (local power). I analyze attempts to develop a gender policy that complies with international development gender priorities, but which is grounded in local cultural tradition rather than Western feminist theory. Additionally, I demonstrate how emphasizing the “local” offers CDRO a powerful political tool that is simultaneously attractive to the rural ethnic community, global capital, and the development system, yet also reveals ways in which CDRO's project has been formulated in conversation with the larger processes it appears to oppose. Throughout the study, I point to how ethnic development functions as an important vehicle for subverting traditional development priorities and for laying claim to new identities that disrupt the historical associations between local/ethnic and development. |
