Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala is the final volume of the quadrilogy that grew out of the anthropological field school for Brigham Young University undergraduates that John Hawkins and the anthropologist Walter Randolph Adams conducted in two predominantly K'iche’ Maya communities in Guatemala from 1995 through 2003. It is a massive and comprehensive study, divided into three parts, of religious change in Guatemala.The first section consists of student-written ethnographic essays on Maya religion—traditional practices, cofradias, orthodox Catholicism, Catholic Action, and, above all, Pentecostalism—in the grand old style of rich, thick description. It is mercifully jargon-free; Hawkins and Adams have done an excellent job of integrating these essays into a single coherent voice and assuring that they all engage with a common theoretical framework, mainly derived from Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. The essays date from the field schools that took place between 2002 and 2003, so their data are now two decades old. Given that, they serve better as ethnographic snapshots of religious beliefs and behaviors in a given time and place than as contemporary studies, but they are certainly valuable as such, given their breadth, depth, and high quality.The remaining two-thirds of the book are entirely the work of Hawkins, who uses his many years of ethnographic observation (heavily supported by secondary literature) to explicate his theories about the expansion of Pentecostalism and (Catholic) charismatic religion, not only in his two communities of study but in Guatemala more generally and, in his final chapter, in the global South. Hawkins is a classicist in terms of the theory he most closely adheres to: Weber, Durkheim, Marx and Engels. Their thinking, especially that of Marx and Engels—more as philosophers than as polemical political theoreticians—thoroughly permeates his work. Most of the supporting secondary literature with which he engages is Guatemala-specific, and much of it is dated, perhaps reflecting the longue durée of this project; that said, the last several chapters reflect a fresher body of more recent scholarly work. Hawkins does not interact much with the world Christianity literature, which is a shame, as it could have done a good bit of his work for him, but perhaps he, like many scholars in the secular academy, remains suspicious of it as a scholarly discipline.I suspect that the time lag in getting this book out explains why some—though by no means all—of Hawkins's claims and findings are already well-established articles of faith in the current literature. For instance, Hawkins's assertion to have identified Pentecostalism as the “fourth genre” of Christianity—which he calls, redundantly, “Christian Pentecostalism” (p. 269)—is indisputable and absolutely worthy of his emphasis, but it is not a new idea, especially in Pentecostal circles. It is voiced, for example, in C. Peter Wagner's Church Quake! The Explosive Power of the New Apostolic Reformation (1999) and the Pew Research Center's Spirit and Power—A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals (2006). Hawkins also claims that Pentecostalism is not “Protestant,” because its “truth and charisma derive from one's sense of being embodied by the Spirit and from being experiential, egalitarian, non-national, revelatory, and directly connected to God rather than having one's access to God mediated by a priest, pastor, or saint” (p. 269). Pentecostalism's unique somatic emphasis, in contrast to classical Protestantism's emphasis on logos or Catholicism's on ritual, is also a distinction well represented in the scholarly literature (see, for example, Paul Freston's extensive oeuvre, dating from the early 1990s). However, Hawkins's argument for Pentecostalism's historical exceptionalism is something new and well worth our consideration.For the Guatemalan Maya, Hawkins swims fiercely against the tide of scholarly and political convention by contesting the claim that the armed conflict was a proximate cause for Pentecostalism's dramatic expansion in the mid- and late twentieth century. He contests this via a careful study of statistical data that he believes indicates that religious change did not correlate to political violence and trauma in different areas of the country during the 1980s and 1990s. This is a provocative and data-driven argument, and readers are free to agree with this assessment, although my own fieldwork, including during the war, lead me to different conclusions.I also initially took umbrage with the book's subtitle, with its reference to “Maya cultural collapse,” a calamity that has not yet taken place despite every effort by the Guatemalan government in the 1980s to provoke exactly that. I am glad that my initial knee-jerk reaction did not deter me from reading what Hawkins actually meant, as this is perhaps this comprehensive study's most important contribution. Via careful use of statistical analysis, demographic studies, changing land-use and ownership patterns, and analyses of agricultural productivity, Hawkins suggests that the “collapse” he refers to is of the production and utilization of corn, which is not merely the main traditional foodstuff of the Maya people but also the material essence of their spiritual lives and cultural integrity. This is a nuanced argument, but the kernel of it is this: “The lower per capita available arable land or corn production across the departments of Guatemala, the higher the number of Protestant/Pentecostal congregations per capita in those departments. The relationship is statistically significant and quite strong” (p. 204). How does this equation affect religious behavior? According to Hawkins, “Pentecostal worship style reflects the tensions, ambiguities, and anxieties of social life in a cultural system based on corn when corn production no longer is sufficient” (p. 210). Channeling Marx, he asserts that “Maya population rise and Ladino predation of indigenous lands were the ‘great social upheaval’ that drove the Maya land and corn shortage and the massive subsequent religious change” (p. 210).This hypothesis has some obvious limitations, which Hawkins frankly recognizes, including how it applies to urban, cosmopolitan Pentecostals in Guatemala City or to Pentecostal populations beyond Guatemala. He does not attempt to spread his theory too thin, although in the final chapter he does try to knit Guatemala into the larger paradigms of religious change in the global South, from India to Brazil, Ghana, and beyond, too much for this overflowing volume. But the real value of Hawkins's corn / religious change model is twofold. It offers a hyperlocal case study of how the loss (or at least the scarcity) of a fundamental commodity can deeply influence and change an entire culture and habitus, causing anomie and psychological unemployment unless a new and meaningful way of being can be found. Equally important, it illustrates at a granular level how the “great historic upheavals” in social organization and modes of production thrust on the Maya people by neoliberalism, globalization, and violence have led to what Hawkins calls “successive ‘revolutions’” in Guatemalans' religious ideas (p. 248). Veering from Marx, he suggests that Pentecostal religion has been a pragmatic mechanism for coping and even thriving in a neoliberal world.This magnum opus is undoubtedly a major contribution to the field, provocative in the best sense. Unfortunately, its monumental size and cost will almost certainly put this book out of reach for classroom use and personal libraries, and that is a shame. Not every reader, especially those familiar with the field, will agree with Hawkins's observations, his treatment of his secondary sources, or the scope of his conclusions. But it is important that we listen and learn

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Citation · Icon · Library science · Maya · Computer Science · History · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies · Philosophy · Religious studies

• A research and publication-oriented undergraduate ethnographic field school

  Open Access•Walter Randolph Adams, John P Hawkins et al.•Annals of Anthropological Practice•2025

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