Traversing the Q’eqchi’ Imaginary

Bibliographic Data

ID20046670
AuthorsHilary E Kahn (corresponding author)
Year2003
Pages33-54
Publication date2003-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueCrime's Power (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9781403980595_2
OpenAlexW2489120675
ISBN9781403980595
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited14

I remember the day a young Garifuna man committed suicide in Livingston. He was a popular youth and the funeral was too emotional to be translated into ethnographic text. My fieldnotes simply read, “so much wailing, crying, agony, fainting.” The town mourned this tragedy. The next day I spoke with Q’egchi’ people who told me that the young man had raped a woman and that the police were after him. To avoid going to jail, he killed himself. This was not true. For a moment I was angry and repulsed. After experiencing the deep emotional pain at the funeral the day before, I then saw the cold manner in which my Q’egchi’ friends defined this young man as another criminal, un laclron. The way in which they explained this incident demonstrated their cultural construction of crime. It revealed how defining crime is a process that blocks compassion. Although sometimes the result of this process is an utterly arbitrary explanation and assignment of blame, crime is determined within the same cultural and historical webs that identify selves and others. The sharp juxtaposition spurred me to investigate just how these cultural beliefs surface

Art · Blame · Compassion · Crying · Ethnography · Fieldnotes · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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