Greaves, Alan M. 2010. The Land of Ionia: Society and Economy in the Archaic Period. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. 269 Pages, ISBN 978-1-4051-9900-1 Cloth ($110).

Abstract

As peripheral states emerged from dictatorships and began to democratize in the neoliberal era, explicitly indigenous organizations and movements began to assert civil and legal rights as citizens. These indigenous movements were not new developments but received renewed attention in a post-dictatorship political atmosphere. The florescence of literature on indigenous politics and social movements that has arisen since the 1970s reflects an intellectual landscape which has broadened to recognize the interrelational characteristics of structurally divided societal groups, including those labeled indigenous. No longer relegated to the background in the intellectual and political fields, indigenous peoples are asserting a right to inclusion in the modern world. As an indigenous intellectual, Emilio del Valle Escalante's presence in academia as a movement scholar and activist challenges modernity's rigid hold on knowledge production.Little has been written explicitly on the Guatemalan Maya movement (with the notable exception of Kay Warren's Indigenous Movements and their Critics, 1998 Princeton). Emilio del Valle Escalante's Maya Nationalisms and Postcolonial Challenges in Guatemala seeks to close this gap in the literature by articulating the unique intellectual character of the Guatemalan Maya movement. Del Valle Escalante does this through a literary analysis of the historical development of knowledge surrounding indigeneity, which at times is underdeveloped, and the ways the Maya movement challenges dominant constructions of indigeneity. Using Anibal Quijano's theory on the coloniality of power, del Valle Escalante provides a textual analysis of several prominent indigenismo intellectuals of Guatemala, both Maya and non-Maya, to highlight the way indigenous peoples struggle to alter hegemonic discourse and at times fall prey to it.The Maya movement in Guatemala is principally an intellectual endeavor, engaged in primarily by journalists and academics that have obtained the social status to disseminate information widely. Writing forms the foundation from which the culturally dominant power in society disseminates information on the native. In turn, the Maya movement appropriates this knowledge in order to reconceptualize discourse on native peoples. Del Valle Escalante recognizes the challenges indigenous intellectuals face in gaining the ability to participate in the mass media and as such highlights the importance of how contemporary capitalism influences the political perspectives of individual authors in the movement.The main questions the book addresses are what kind of nation is being (re)constructed in the challenges posed by the Maya movement and what kind of interethnic relationships does the Maya movement propose for Guatemalan society. Through these questions del Valle Escalante attempts to articulate a conceptualization of indigeneity that considers the indigenous as fully modern peoples whose locus of articulation is on "the other" side of the colonial divide. The Maya movement seeks intercultural ...