Kevin Lewis O’neill
Biographic Data
| ID | 87072 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin Lewis O’neill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin Lewis |
| FAMILY NAME | O’neill |
| SIGNATURE | O’NEILL K L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6880-9146 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 229 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Donde están? Pretrial detention and the practice of forced disappearance in Guatemala
Cold War counterinsurgency campaigns pioneered the practice of forced disappearance during Guatemala's genocidal civil war (1960–1996). It was a systematic practice of violent repression that did not necessarily end with the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords. Today, more than a quarter century later, criminal organizations, drug cartels, and transnational street gangs not only disappear people in the dead of night but also experiment with ever mo…
Islands, Enclaves, and the Offshoring of Clerical Sexual Abuse
Between 1952 and 1968, a Roman Catholic religious order known as the Servants of the Paraclete sought, bought, and finally sold several small islands in the Caribbean for priests said to be unable to stop “sin[ning] repeatedly with little children.” This article, in response, details the Servants of the Paraclete’s mid-twentieth-century efforts at offshoring sexually abusive priests in and then beyond the Caribbean. It is an historical account th…
More as a sin rather than a crime: Clerical Sexual Abuse and Jurisdictional Pluralism
Audrey Watters, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning
Audrey Watters' Teaching Machines is an account of the birth, rebirth and re-rebirth of an idea: personalized learning (read: self-paced, not self-directed) for school-aged children, organized via machines designed based on psychological research.Her book demonstrates how teaching by machine is repeatedly presented as new, when it in fact dates back at least to the 1920s and the work of Dr. Sidney L. Pressey of Ohio State University.Teaching mach…
Architectures of discretion: Autohoteles and the fortified enclaves of Guatemala city
Autohoteles in Guatemala City are mid-market, pay-by-the-hour hotels designed for sexual encounters. Folding quietly into the landscape of Central America’s largest metropolitan region, these establishments provide middle-class Guatemalans with the opportunity to evade (even if only for an afternoon) the very regimes of surveillance that they have come to expect from fortified enclaves. Autohoteles have walls but no windows, guards but no guest b…
On the Impracticality of Lists
Lists of Roman Catholic priests form the documentary infrastructure of clerical sexual abuse. Based on an ethnography of one such list-a document compiled deep inside a Central American prison by a convicted cleric-this essay argues that such lists are, formally speaking, impractical. Impracticality names the way in which some lists may appear to be flat and referential but in fact are more concerned with evoking affects. It is an ambiguity that …
What undergraduates say about choosing an online or in-person course: Qualitative results from a large-sample, multi-discipline survey
Undergraduate students often have a choice about the modality in which they complete a particular course (in-person or online), and their decisions can be more complex than scholarship suggests. Most studies of modality choice have relied exclusively on closed-form, quantitative surveys; and this approach has denied students the opportunity to correct or complicate researchers’ assumptions about their decision-making. We present findings from one…
Moral failure: A jeremiad of the war on drugs in Guatemala
The current consensus among social scientists and political pundits is that the war on drugs failed, with a raft of failed programmes, failed interventions, failed policies, and even failed states. But these critics have tended to overlook a more existential form of failure that plays a key role in the ongoing effects of the war on drugs. This failure, which anthropologists of Christianity are well positioned to understand, is the perceived failu…
Eat or be eaten: Motorcycle taxis in Guatemala City
Motorcycle taxis in Guatemala City are a form of transportation in which the customer pays to ride as the pillion. For a modest amount of money, Guatemalans can avoid road traffic by riding in between idling cars. Clients and drivers alike call this maneuver “eating traffic.” The colloquialism captures a reversal in which commuters dominate traffic rather than traffic dominating them. This article, in response, assesses ethnographically the affec…
Terminal velocity: The speed of extortion in Guatemala City
Guatemala City is racked by the practice of extortion: the act of obtaining goods and/or money through the threat of force. Transportation workers are a particularly vulnerable population, with a homicide rate four times the national average. While social scientists, policy experts, and asylum advocates rightly observe that extortionists control territory, lost in this literature is an appreciation for how these violent actors also govern victims…
Voices at the gate: Faculty members’ and students’ differing perspectives on the purposes of the PhD comprehensive examination
The comprehensive examination is a customary, yet relatively unexamined, requirement in North American doctoral education. This case study explored the purpose of a comprehensive examination as perceived by faculty members and students in a Faculty of Education program, at a Western Canadian University. We found that, in addition to the traditional gatekeeping function of the examination, other purposes emerged. Contrasting views about whether th…
Architectures of Captivity
December 01 2020 Architectures of Captivity Kevin Lewis O'Neill Kevin Lewis O'Neill Kevin Lewis O'Neill is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of City of God (University of California Press, 2010), Secure the Soul (University of California Press, 2015), and Hunted (University of Chicago Press, 2019) as well as the coa…
Home Security: Drug Rehabilitation Centres, the Devil and Domesticity in Guatemala City
Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala City are informal responses to drug use, with these all-male institutions attempting to save drug users from what some Christians call 'the devil'. Of ethnographic interest is that the mothers, sisters and wives not only pay for the capture and captivity of their loved ones but also volunteer their labour to support these centres. This article, in response, assesses not only the Christian impul…
Scam as survival in Central America
This essay explores the intimate details and ethical quandaries of tele-promotion's fraud. Perpetrated from inside Guatemalan prisons using black market cellphones, incarcerated gang members surf the affects of capitalism to create a sensorium of authenticity through which they swindle the unwary. An experiment in genre, this ethnographic essay foregrounds the lived experiences, survival strategies, and virtuosities of those pushed to the very ma…
Building trust, mobilizing security: The making and selling of armoured cars in Guatemala City
Dozens of boutique auto shops in Guatemala City fortify cars against varying levels of threat, from 9 mm pistols to military grade assault rifles. Mechanics line windows, wheels, and even skylights with bulletproof materials, promising an almost impenetrable vehicle amid a decidedly violent Central American city. In response to this growing confidence not just in Kevlar but also the intimacy of artisanal labour, this paper engages the culture of …
The Unmaking of a Pedophilic Priest: Transnational Clerical Sexual Abuse in Guatemala
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Latin America became something of a dumping ground for U.S. priests suspected of sexual abuse, with north-to-south clerical transfers sending predatory priests to countries where pedophilia did not exist in any kind of ontological sense. This article, in response, engages the case of Father David Roney of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. After a career of accusations an…
City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala
In Guatemala City today, Christianity isn't just a belief system--it is a counterinsurgency. Amidst postwar efforts at democratization, multinational mega-churches have conquered street corners and kitchen tables, guiding the faithful to build a sanctified city brick by brick. Drawing on rich interviews and extensive fieldwork, Kevin Lewis O'Neill tracks the culture and politics of one such church, looking at how neo-Pentecostal Christian practic…
Heather Vrana. This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944–1996
Heather Vrana’s This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944–1996 is stunning. This is a history of twentieth-century Guatemala from the perspective of the country’s only public university: University of San Carlos. By reading the country and its capital city through the eyes and lives of its public university students, Vrana elegantly extends three literatures with a history that begins with a revolution in 1944 and…
Some reflections on Levinas and ethics: Response to Alvi
A growing number of essays authored by anthropologists invoke the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The rise of this quiet tide deserves some reflection, not only because anthropological references to Levinas keep coming but also because very few of these efforts ever end up in discipline-specific journals. They tend to get pushed toward philosophical and theological venues. Why is this
Disenfranchised: Mapping red zones in Guatemala City
International fast food franchises, such as McDonald's and Domino's Pizza, have become vital arbiters of security in postwar Guatemala City. They map red zones with a moral authority that even the National Police cannot match. Red zones, or zonas rojas, are neighborhoods in Guatemala City deeply affected by gang- and drug-related violence. While the National Police map these zones by documenting the location of committed crimes, international fas…
La Visita: Prisons and Survival in Guatemala
Based largely on research completed in the North American context, scholars of prisons detail the multiple ways in which carceral practices extend beyond prison walls to transform a wide variety of spaces, ultimately assessing how carceral imaginaries inhabit the most intimate aspects of everyday life. In Latin America, this division between the inside and the outside of prison breaks down even further when read from the perspective of survival. …
A forum on captivity
Amid the retreat of government services and a growing reliance on free market logics, scholarship today tends to imagine a world of weakening social ties, of people and populations left to die. This forum, in response, presents a critical complement to this work by foregrounding those moments when society ties people up rather than lets them go
On the aesthetics of captivity
An anthropology of captivity can theorize beyond the brute reality of enclosures by assessing the aesthetics that contribute to the imprisonment of people. Drawing on Gernot Böhme’s philosophy of atmosphere, this essay engages the carefully curated front offices of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala City
Gangs
The anthropology of gangs challenges the early twentieth‐century Chicago school of human ecology to detail the ever‐expanding social relations of gangs around the world. Migrant labor circuits, new regimes of deportation, and uneven efforts at democratization are some of the processes that prompt many anthropologists to understand gangs as transnational assemblages
Captivity: A Provocation
Despite the number of people held at this very moment inside prisons, detention centers, black sites, reformatories, stockades, refugee camps, and even the hulls of ships, there has been surprisingly little self-consciousness about the analytical power of captivity in social thought. This essay foregrounds such a conversation across such varying fields as global prison studies, the history of slavery, and the sociology of debt to provoke a common…
Who is a Christian: Toward a dialogic approach in the anthropology of Christianity
This article aims to contribute to the continued formation of an anthropology of Christianity. We argue that anthropologists should adopt a more dialogic approach to the anthropological study of Christianity, one that shifts the concern from the problems posed by Christianity to anthropology, to the problems posed by Christianity to Christians themselves. In particular, we argue that the problem of determining who and what counts as a Christian i…
Facing Risk: Levinas, Ethnography, and Ethics
This article examines methodological and ethical issues of ethnographic research through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy. Levinas is relevant to a critical analysis of ethnographic methods because his philosophy turns on the problematic relationship between self and other, among other important problems that define and guide contemporary anthropological research, including questions of responsibility, justice, and solidarity. This artic…
Verticality
Anthropological critiques of urban segregation tend to maintain a horizontal frame. Walls and gates keep undesirable people over there as opposed to here. Insightful as this approach has been, this article pairs everyday perspectives with the built form to assess the politics of vertical segregation in Guatemala City. With more than one hundred office towers and condominium complexes constructed in the last decade, Guatemala City presents a vivid…
Left Behind: Security, Salvation, and the Subject of Prevention
In North Carolina, a faith-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization facilitates a child sponsorship program that connects North American evangelical Christians with at-risk children in one of postwar Guatemala City's most violent neighborhoods: La Paloma. Pitched in the name of gang prevention, child sponsors help create a context in which these Guatemalan kids might choose God over gangs. Based on fieldwork in North Carolina and in Guatemala, with…
Armed Citizens and the Stories They Tell: The National Rifle Association's Achievement of Terror and Masculinity
Since 1926, the National Rifle Association's (NRA) flagship publication has without pause featured 'The Armed Citizen,' a column that reports instances in which law-abiding citizens have successfully defended their property, person, and/or family with firearms. These reports are brief (100 to 200 words) and have remained remarkably untouched over the past 80 years with regard to style, diction, and narrative structure. Their rhetorical effect, ho…
There is no more room: Cemeteries, personhood, and bare death
This article addresses the practice of disinterment in Guatemala City's public cemetery. The city has grown too fast and too many people have been killed. The cemetery is now at its limits. There is no more room. This problem of space has meant a reimagining of liberal ideals in the midst of a neoliberal moment, making the cemetery's disinterment policy ever more aggressive. And while disinterment has always been policy, it is the pace of disinte…
The Reckless Will: Prison Chaplaincy and the Problem of Mara Salvatrucha
Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, is a transnational criminal network that originated among Central American immigrants in Los Angeles during the gang wars of the 1980s. Since then U.S. deportation policies have transported MS-13 back to (and helped it expand in) Central America, with the strongest networks forming in the postwar countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Today a range of security officials train their efforts on a curious loop…
On Hunting
But our citizenship is in heaven: A proposal for the future study of Christian citizenship in the global south
For a field whose continual points of departure have been such Christian themes as belonging responsibility, and stewardship, and whose current conceptual framing prioritizes transnational processes and globalization's cultural complexities, astoundingly little has been written in citizenship studies about global Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. In critical response, this article addresses how scholars of citizenship might begin to think…
On Liberation
A will to escape organizes the practice of Latin American Christian liberation while at the same time enacting a new genre of captivity. After a shift in US interdiction efforts, the vast majority of cocaine produced in the Andes for the United States now passes through Guatemala. With this drastic increase has come a spike in the use of crack cocaine, as well as the proliferation of drug rehabilitation centers. Run by Pentecostal Christians, the…
The Soul of Security
Amid unprecedented rates of deportation as well as an ever-growing gang problem, bilingual call centers have become viable spaces of control in postwar Guatemala. They provide deported ex–gang members with not only well-paying jobs but also a work environment structured by Protestant images and imperatives. Be humble. Be punctual. Be patient. These corporately Christian virtues minister to the deported at every turn, inviting them to assume and b…
Narcotecture
The term narcotecture often refers to grand mansions built with drug money. A blend of the words “narcotics” and “architecture,” the portmanteau evokes florid gated communities in Afghanistan, Africa, and the Americas. Yet, this interest in ostentation strips narcotecture of full analytical purchase. To expand the term's significance, this article samples how the global drug trade interacts every day with the War on Drugs at the level of built en…
La Visita: Prisons and Survival in Guatemala
Based largely on research completed in the North American context, scholars of prisons detail the multiple ways in which carceral practices extend beyond prison walls to transform a wide variety of spaces, ultimately assessing how carceral imaginaries inhabit the most intimate aspects of everyday life. In Latin America, this division between the inside and the outside of prison breaks down even further when read from the perspective of survival. …
Caught on Camera
Across Guatemala City, Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers warehouse users (often against their will) in the name of salvation. This essay, in response, details how pastors deploy digital media to assess a user's relative fitness for a Christian life. Of particular interest is how pastors insist that photographs and videos allow the faithful to read users for signs of the soul. Contributing to the criminalization and mass incarceration of dru…
Delinquent Realities: Christianity, Formality, and Security in the Americas
In response to growing postwar violence in Guatemala, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) cosponsored a reality television show in which ten former gang members were split into two teams, each of which was expected to build a sustainable business within Guatemala's formal economy. This competition modeled a kind of entrepreneurial self-fashioning that relied on Christian images and imperatives to "formalize" the show's …
I Want More of You: The Politics of Christian Eroticism in Postwar Guatemala
The image appeared on the cover of a Sunday bulletin, produced and distributed by one of Guatemala City's most conservative neo-Pentecostal mega-churches. The picture presented the face of a young teenage girl, her eyes closed, lips wet, and skin kissed by a soft, transcendent light; the young woman's head was even tilted to the side in what Jacques Lacan would calljouissance(1998). Across her pink lips read Psalm 4:6: 'In peace, I lay myself dow…
On the Importance of Wolves
What would it mean for pastoralism to be a matter of wolves rather than sheep? Across Guatemala City, Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers provide one possible answer. These are onetime factories and apartment buildings that have been renovated for rehabilitation with razor wire and steel bars. Largely unregulated, these centers keep pace with Guatemala's growing rapprochement with illicit drugs by holding drug users (often against their will)…
Moral failure: A jeremiad of the war on drugs in Guatemala
The current consensus among social scientists and political pundits is that the war on drugs failed, with a raft of failed programmes, failed interventions, failed policies, and even failed states. But these critics have tended to overlook a more existential form of failure that plays a key role in the ongoing effects of the war on drugs. This failure, which anthropologists of Christianity are well positioned to understand, is the perceived failu…
Eat or be eaten: Motorcycle taxis in Guatemala City
Motorcycle taxis in Guatemala City are a form of transportation in which the customer pays to ride as the pillion. For a modest amount of money, Guatemalans can avoid road traffic by riding in between idling cars. Clients and drivers alike call this maneuver “eating traffic.” The colloquialism captures a reversal in which commuters dominate traffic rather than traffic dominating them. This article, in response, assesses ethnographically the affec…
Terminal velocity: The speed of extortion in Guatemala City
Guatemala City is racked by the practice of extortion: the act of obtaining goods and/or money through the threat of force. Transportation workers are a particularly vulnerable population, with a homicide rate four times the national average. While social scientists, policy experts, and asylum advocates rightly observe that extortionists control territory, lost in this literature is an appreciation for how these violent actors also govern victims…
A forum on captivity
Amid the retreat of government services and a growing reliance on free market logics, scholarship today tends to imagine a world of weakening social ties, of people and populations left to die. This forum, in response, presents a critical complement to this work by foregrounding those moments when society ties people up rather than lets them go
Writing Guatemala's genocide: Truth and reconciliation commission reports and Christianity
The truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) now produces an established genre of human rights literature: the TRC report (Hayner, 1994).1 Functioning as machines of documentation, these commissio
Scam as survival in Central America
This essay explores the intimate details and ethical quandaries of tele-promotion's fraud. Perpetrated from inside Guatemalan prisons using black market cellphones, incarcerated gang members surf the affects of capitalism to create a sensorium of authenticity through which they swindle the unwary. An experiment in genre, this ethnographic essay foregrounds the lived experiences, survival strategies, and virtuosities of those pushed to the very ma…
Building trust, mobilizing security: The making and selling of armoured cars in Guatemala City
Dozens of boutique auto shops in Guatemala City fortify cars against varying levels of threat, from 9 mm pistols to military grade assault rifles. Mechanics line windows, wheels, and even skylights with bulletproof materials, promising an almost impenetrable vehicle amid a decidedly violent Central American city. In response to this growing confidence not just in Kevlar but also the intimacy of artisanal labour, this paper engages the culture of …
Some reflections on Levinas and ethics: Response to Alvi
A growing number of essays authored by anthropologists invoke the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The rise of this quiet tide deserves some reflection, not only because anthropological references to Levinas keep coming but also because very few of these efforts ever end up in discipline-specific journals. They tend to get pushed toward philosophical and theological venues. Why is this
Family and Farm in Pre-Famine Ireland: The Parish of Killashandra
Writing Guatemala's genocide: Truth and reconciliation commission reports and Christianity
The truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) now produces an established genre of human rights literature: the TRC report (Hayner, 1994).1 Functioning as machines of documentation, these commissio
Facing Risk: Levinas, Ethnography, and Ethics
This article examines methodological and ethical issues of ethnographic research through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy. Levinas is relevant to a critical analysis of ethnographic methods because his philosophy turns on the problematic relationship between self and other, among other important problems that define and guide contemporary anthropological research, including questions of responsibility, justice, and solidarity. This artic…
Armed Citizens and the Stories They Tell: The National Rifle Association's Achievement of Terror and Masculinity
Since 1926, the National Rifle Association's (NRA) flagship publication has without pause featured 'The Armed Citizen,' a column that reports instances in which law-abiding citizens have successfully defended their property, person, and/or family with firearms. These reports are brief (100 to 200 words) and have remained remarkably untouched over the past 80 years with regard to style, diction, and narrative structure. Their rhetorical effect, ho…
Who is a Christian: Toward a dialogic approach in the anthropology of Christianity
This article aims to contribute to the continued formation of an anthropology of Christianity. We argue that anthropologists should adopt a more dialogic approach to the anthropological study of Christianity, one that shifts the concern from the problems posed by Christianity to anthropology, to the problems posed by Christianity to Christians themselves. In particular, we argue that the problem of determining who and what counts as a Christian i…
But our citizenship is in heaven: A proposal for the future study of Christian citizenship in the global south
For a field whose continual points of departure have been such Christian themes as belonging responsibility, and stewardship, and whose current conceptual framing prioritizes transnational processes and globalization's cultural complexities, astoundingly little has been written in citizenship studies about global Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. In critical response, this article addresses how scholars of citizenship might begin to think…
The Reckless Will: Prison Chaplaincy and the Problem of Mara Salvatrucha
Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, is a transnational criminal network that originated among Central American immigrants in Los Angeles during the gang wars of the 1980s. Since then U.S. deportation policies have transported MS-13 back to (and helped it expand in) Central America, with the strongest networks forming in the postwar countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Today a range of security officials train their efforts on a curious loop…
I Want More of You: The Politics of Christian Eroticism in Postwar Guatemala
The image appeared on the cover of a Sunday bulletin, produced and distributed by one of Guatemala City's most conservative neo-Pentecostal mega-churches. The picture presented the face of a young teenage girl, her eyes closed, lips wet, and skin kissed by a soft, transcendent light; the young woman's head was even tilted to the side in what Jacques Lacan would calljouissance(1998). Across her pink lips read Psalm 4:6: 'In peace, I lay myself dow…
Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala
The Passion of Guatemala
This article examines the Roman Catholic concepts, rhetoric, and images that have helped shape histories of progress in postwar Guatemala. The specific interest here is in the Roman Catholic Church’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report and the progress narratives that this report helps to perpetuate. Titled Never Again (1998), the report documents Guatemala’s genocidal civil war by paralleling Guatemala’s passion to Christ’s passion. And w…
Delinquent Realities: Christianity, Formality, and Security in the Americas
In response to growing postwar violence in Guatemala, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) cosponsored a reality television show in which ten former gang members were split into two teams, each of which was expected to build a sustainable business within Guatemala's formal economy. This competition modeled a kind of entrepreneurial self-fashioning that relied on Christian images and imperatives to "formalize" the show's …
Anthropology and Genocide
This article explores the relationship between anthropology and genocide. Anthropology is the study of culture — the attitudes, behaviours, and practices that constitute a given community. The anthropology of genocide lends analytical clarity and empirical rigour to a range of issues, including truth, memory, and representation in post-genocidal spaces. Anthropology's growing interest in genocide has a number of roots, including a continued inter…
Pastor Harold Caballeros Believes in Demons: Belief and Believing in the Study of Religion
Introduction: Further Explorations in Theory and Practice
The Soul of Security
Amid unprecedented rates of deportation as well as an ever-growing gang problem, bilingual call centers have become viable spaces of control in postwar Guatemala. They provide deported ex–gang members with not only well-paying jobs but also a work environment structured by Protestant images and imperatives. Be humble. Be punctual. Be patient. These corporately Christian virtues minister to the deported at every turn, inviting them to assume and b…
There is no more room: Cemeteries, personhood, and bare death
This article addresses the practice of disinterment in Guatemala City's public cemetery. The city has grown too fast and too many people have been killed. The cemetery is now at its limits. There is no more room. This problem of space has meant a reimagining of liberal ideals in the midst of a neoliberal moment, making the cemetery's disinterment policy ever more aggressive. And while disinterment has always been policy, it is the pace of disinte…
Strengthening Methods for Assessing Students’ Metahistorical Conceptions: Initial Development of the Historical Account Differences Survey
To prepare students for participation in a pluralistic, democratic society, history curriculum should help them develop mature ideas about why multiple accounts of the same events exist. But how can we know if we are successful? In this article, we describe work on the design, validation, and piloting of a paper-and-pencil instrument called the Historical Account Differences (HAD) survey. It is intended to add to the tool set that researchers and…
Left Behind: Security, Salvation, and the Subject of Prevention
In North Carolina, a faith-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization facilitates a child sponsorship program that connects North American evangelical Christians with at-risk children in one of postwar Guatemala City's most violent neighborhoods: La Paloma. Pitched in the name of gang prevention, child sponsors help create a context in which these Guatemalan kids might choose God over gangs. Based on fieldwork in North Carolina and in Guatemala, with…
Verticality
Anthropological critiques of urban segregation tend to maintain a horizontal frame. Walls and gates keep undesirable people over there as opposed to here. Insightful as this approach has been, this article pairs everyday perspectives with the built form to assess the politics of vertical segregation in Guatemala City. With more than one hundred office towers and condominium complexes constructed in the last decade, Guatemala City presents a vivid…
On Liberation
A will to escape organizes the practice of Latin American Christian liberation while at the same time enacting a new genre of captivity. After a shift in US interdiction efforts, the vast majority of cocaine produced in the Andes for the United States now passes through Guatemala. With this drastic increase has come a spike in the use of crack cocaine, as well as the proliferation of drug rehabilitation centers. Run by Pentecostal Christians, the…
Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala
"I’m not perfect," Mateo confessed. "Nobody is. But I try." Secure the Soul shuttles between the life of Mateo, a born-again ex-gang member in Guatemala and the gang prevention programs that work so hard to keep him alive. Along the way, this poignantly written ethnography uncovers the Christian underpinnings of Central American security. In the streets of Guatemala City—amid angry lynch mobs, overcrowded prisons, and paramilitary death squads—mi…
Narcotecture
The term narcotecture often refers to grand mansions built with drug money. A blend of the words “narcotics” and “architecture,” the portmanteau evokes florid gated communities in Afghanistan, Africa, and the Americas. Yet, this interest in ostentation strips narcotecture of full analytical purchase. To expand the term's significance, this article samples how the global drug trade interacts every day with the War on Drugs at the level of built en…
Exiled Home: Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence by Susan Bibler Coutin
Reviewed by: Exiled Home: Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence by Susan Bibler Coutin Kevin Lewis O'Neill Susan Bibler Coutin, Exiled Home: Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 288 pp. Susan Bibler Coutin concludes Exiled Home with a memory. It is 1982, and she is an undergraduate student at the University of California in Berkeley. Eating cereal and milk and abou…
Caught on Camera
Across Guatemala City, Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers warehouse users (often against their will) in the name of salvation. This essay, in response, details how pastors deploy digital media to assess a user's relative fitness for a Christian life. Of particular interest is how pastors insist that photographs and videos allow the faithful to read users for signs of the soul. Contributing to the criminalization and mass incarceration of dru…
On Hunting
Sociology (43 works) · Political science (32 works) · Law (29 works) · History (26 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (15 works) · Archaeology (15 works) · Art (14 works) · History (14 works) · Politics (14 works)