Abstract
Following the 1996 treaty ending decades of civil war, how are Guatemalans reckoning
with genocide, especially since almost everyone contributed in some way to the violence?
Meaning "to count, figure up" and "to settle rewards and punishments," reckoning promises
accounting and accountability. Yet as Diane M. Nelson shows, the means by which the
war was waged, especially as they related to race and gender, unsettled the very premises
of knowing and being. Symptomatic are the stories of duplicity pervasive in postwar
Guatemala, as the left, the Mayan people, and the state were each said to have "two
faces." Drawing on more than twenty years of research in Guatemala, Nelson explores
how postwar struggles to reckon with traumatic experience illuminate the assumptions
of identity more generally. Nelson brings together stories of human rights activism,
Mayan identity struggles, coerced participation in massacres, and popular entertainment-including
traditional dances, horror films, and carnivals-with analyses of mass-grave exhumations,
official apologies, and reparations. She discusses the stereotype of the Two-Faced
Indian as colonial discourse revivified by anti-guerrilla counterinsurgency and by
the claims of duplicity leveled against the Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú, and she
explores how duplicity may in turn function as a survival strategy for some. Nelson
examines suspicions that state power is also two-faced, from the left's fears of a
clandestine para-state behind the democratic façade, to the right's conviction that
NGOs threaten Guatemalan sovereignty. Her comparison of antimalaria and antisubversive
campaigns suggests biopolitical ways that the state is two-faced, simultaneously giving
and taking life. Reckoning is a view from the ground up of how Guatemalans are finding
creative ways forward, turning ledger books, technoscience, and even gory horror movies
into tools for making sense of violence, loss, and the future.
