David Stoll

Afterword to the 2008 Edition A Parallel Universe

City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (review)

Americas, 2011

ABSTRACT I first heard about the El Shaddai Church when its pastor, Harold Caballeros, announced ... more ABSTRACT I first heard about the El Shaddai Church when its pastor, Harold Caballeros, announced a national campaign to liberate Guatemala from Satan. It seems that Caballeros was building a new temple next to an aqueduct when he ran into trouble with his construction permit. The aqueduct dated to colonial times and was built atop a serpentine pre-Columbian earthwork. Equal to the occasion, Caballeros announced that the earthwork had been built to dedicate the entire country to the Plumed Serpent, the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, but now he would lift a curse of centuries by mobilizing an army of prayer warriors. In the twenty years since, Guatemala has not lacked for prayer. The largest of the Central American republics seemed like a deeply Catholic country until the 1970s and 1980s when evangelicals multiplied to a third of the population. Most were Pentecostals practicing baptism in the Holy Spirit. Pentecostalism was so appealing that it spread to the Catholic Church through charismatic renewal. Today as many as 60 percent of Guatemalans could be involved in Pentecostal and charismatic worship. Kevin O’Neill has produced an ethnography of the most flamboyant of the Protestant denominations, El Shaddai, and its founder Harold Caballeros, a boy-wonder who has also built up a network of radio stations and whose next ambition is to be elected president of Guatemala. Not coincidentally, El Shaddai is a neopentecostal megachurch because of its upbeat health-and-wealth gospel, which teaches that God wants his people to prosper in this world as well as the next. Like other operations of this ilk from the Sunbelt to Central America to Brazil, Shaddai’s capacity for mounting spectacles has outshone older Protestant denominations as well as the Catholic Church. O’Neill is an effective storyteller and strays into academic thickets only occasionally—chiefly the Bois Foucault. As a cultural anthropologist, he immersed himself in Shaddai and shows us why Guatemalans are attracted to such churches. They offer hope, entertainment, community and survival logic, step-by-step procedures for protecting oneself and one’s family from a dog-eat-dog society. The risk-averse essentials include staying off the street, avoiding confrontation, and investing one’s hopes in prayer—what O’Neill calls “policing the soul” (p.60). Unlike traditional Pentecostals, neopentecostals like Caballeros do not confine themselves to saving sinners; they also aim to save an entire society that, judging from the newspapers as well as their fulminations, is drowning in violence and corruption. “When men start acting like fathers,” Caballeros reasons, “then Guatemalans will start acting like citizens” (p120). Like Foucaultians preoccupied with social construction, Caballeros and his followers believe that they can think, pray and fast a decent society into existence. O’Neill argues that Shaddai and the like are heaping moral responsibility for social problems onto the shoulders of the believer, reducing the time and interest they have to participate in more traditional modes of citizenship. This could be. But I think O’Neill is underestimating the collectivity-building implications of congregational life. Certainly evangelicals see themselves in the first person plural as well as singular, and that helps explain why their churches have become such a refuge. When I looked at prayer warfare in the 1990s, I wondered whether it might motivate political activism. Judging from O’Neill’s fieldwork, this is not very likely because, for Shaddai members, prayer warfare is not a spur to act on the principle that God helps him who helps himself. Instead, prayer warfare is a substitute for action, in the hope that God will intervene through someone other than the prayer warrior. The neopentecostal approach to Christian citizenship sounds like a cop-out. One other caution: while O’Neill has a fine eye for urban Guatemalan existence, he could have done a better job of explaining the different kinds of evangélicos. No one has been more scandalized by the thaumaturgical excesses of neopentecostals than rival Protestant church leaders. O’Neill should also have emphasized that Guatemala has already experienced three governments associated with neopentecostal churches. Each was a national disgrace. Harold Caballeros invites sufficient skepticism that there will be an evangelical bloc vote when he runs for president in 2011...

Alejandro Tsakimp: A Shuar Healer in the Margins of History

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, Dec 31, 2003

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Efraín Ríos Montt Should Have Been Prosecuted for Command Responsibility for War Crimes, not Genocide: Response to Marc Drouin

Journal of Genocide Research, Mar 31, 2022

Vicente Menchú and the Committee for Campesino Unity

Is Latin America Turning Protestant?

Rethinking Protestantims in Latin America

Hahr-hispanic American Historical Review, Feb 1, 1995

Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans

Teaching Sociology, Jul 1, 2000

Page 1. Rigoberta MencKu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans DAVID STOLL .» iy ELIZABETH BURGOS... more

City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala. By Kevin Lewis O'Neill. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. xxix, 278. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00 cloth; $21.95 paper

The Americas, 2011

ABSTRACT I first heard about the El Shaddai Church when its pastor, Harold Caballeros, announced ... more ABSTRACT I first heard about the El Shaddai Church when its pastor, Harold Caballeros, announced a national campaign to liberate Guatemala from Satan. It seems that Caballeros was building a new temple next to an aqueduct when he ran into trouble with his construction permit. The aqueduct dated to colonial times and was built atop a serpentine pre-Columbian earthwork. Equal to the occasion, Caballeros announced that the earthwork had been built to dedicate the entire country to the Plumed Serpent, the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, but now he would lift a curse of centuries by mobilizing an army of prayer warriors. In the twenty years since, Guatemala has not lacked for prayer. The largest of the Central American republics seemed like a deeply Catholic country until the 1970s and 1980s when evangelicals multiplied to a third of the population. Most were Pentecostals practicing baptism in the Holy Spirit. Pentecostalism was so appealing that it spread to the Catholic Church through charismatic renewal. Today as many as 60 percent of Guatemalans could be involved in Pentecostal and charismatic worship. Kevin O’Neill has produced an ethnography of the most flamboyant of the Protestant denominations, El Shaddai, and its founder Harold Caballeros, a boy-wonder who has also built up a network of radio stations and whose next ambition is to be elected president of Guatemala. Not coincidentally, El Shaddai is a neopentecostal megachurch because of its upbeat health-and-wealth gospel, which teaches that God wants his people to prosper in this world as well as the next. Like other operations of this ilk from the Sunbelt to Central America to Brazil, Shaddai’s capacity for mounting spectacles has outshone older Protestant denominations as well as the Catholic Church. O’Neill is an effective storyteller and strays into academic thickets only occasionally—chiefly the Bois Foucault. As a cultural anthropologist, he immersed himself in Shaddai and shows us why Guatemalans are attracted to such churches. They offer hope, entertainment, community and survival logic, step-by-step procedures for protecting oneself and one’s family from a dog-eat-dog society. The risk-averse essentials include staying off the street, avoiding confrontation, and investing one’s hopes in prayer—what O’Neill calls “policing the soul” (p.60). Unlike traditional Pentecostals, neopentecostals like Caballeros do not confine themselves to saving sinners; they also aim to save an entire society that, judging from the newspapers as well as their fulminations, is drowning in violence and corruption. “When men start acting like fathers,” Caballeros reasons, “then Guatemalans will start acting like citizens” (p120). Like Foucaultians preoccupied with social construction, Caballeros and his followers believe that they can think, pray and fast a decent society into existence. O’Neill argues that Shaddai and the like are heaping moral responsibility for social problems onto the shoulders of the believer, reducing the time and interest they have to participate in more traditional modes of citizenship. This could be. But I think O’Neill is underestimating the collectivity-building implications of congregational life. Certainly evangelicals see themselves in the first person plural as well as singular, and that helps explain why their churches have become such a refuge. When I looked at prayer warfare in the 1990s, I wondered whether it might motivate political activism. Judging from O’Neill’s fieldwork, this is not very likely because, for Shaddai members, prayer warfare is not a spur to act on the principle that God helps him who helps himself. Instead, prayer warfare is a substitute for action, in the hope that God will intervene through someone other than the prayer warrior. The neopentecostal approach to Christian citizenship sounds like a cop-out. One other caution: while O’Neill has a fine eye for urban Guatemalan existence, he could have done a better job of explaining the different kinds of evangélicos. No one has been more scandalized by the thaumaturgical excesses of neopentecostals than rival Protestant church leaders. O’Neill should also have emphasized that Guatemala has already experienced three governments associated with neopentecostal churches. Each was a national disgrace. Harold Caballeros invites sufficient skepticism that there will be an evangelical bloc vote when he runs for president in 2011...

El Norte or Bust!: How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town

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The Politics of the Spirit: The Political Implications of Pentecostalized Religion in Costa Rica and Guatemala. By Timothy J. Steigenga. Lexington Books, 2001. 202 pp. Cloth, $56.00

Social Forces, Mar 1, 2003

LEXINGTON BOOKS Published in the United States of America by Lexington Books 4720 Boston Way, Lan... more

The Rigoberta Menchu controversy

Choice Reviews Online, 2001

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How the Guatemalan civil war became a genocide: Revisiting the 2013 trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

The 2013 trial of Efraín Ríos Montt cemented Guatemala's reputation as a land of genocide. Mo... more The 2013 trial of Efraín Ríos Montt cemented Guatemala's reputation as a land of genocide. Most of the survivors who testified about army crimes during his 1982–1983 regime came from the Ixil Maya town of Nebaj. Oddly, some Nebajenses credit Ríos Montt with ending army massacres and saving their lives. This article focuses on the genocide debate in the municipio of Nebaj. It concludes that command responsibility for war crimes would have been a more effective indictment than genocide.

The Story of All Poor Guatemalans

Alejandro Tsakimp: A Shuar Healer in the Margins of History ‐ by Rubinstein, Steven

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2009

Human Rights, Land Conflict, and Memory of the Violence in the Ixil Country of Northern Quiché

Duke University Press eBooks, Dec 5, 2008

Remittances as Rents in a Guatemalan Town Debt, Asylum, the U.S. Job Market, and Vulnerability to Human Trafficking

Exporting labor to the United States has become the principal industry of Guatemala, El Salvador,... more Exporting labor to the United States has become the principal industry of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Central Americans have been moving to the United States in large numbers since the 1980s, but how they gain entry has shifted thanks to the interplay between the migration industry and border enforcement. Many Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans are paying smugglers to deliver them to U.S. border agents so they can apply for asylum. The Trump administration's harsh reactions have energized asylum advocates, who argue that applicants are fleeing dislocation by neoliberal capitalism. Migrant households in the Ixil Maya municipio of Nebaj, Guatemala, express an optimistic interpretation of this situation that they call their American Dream. Their wish for high wages in the United States can be seen as the latest in a series of "hope machines" that interpret disadvantageous relations of exchange as the path to a better future. Such hopes are based on the irrefutable buying power of the dollar, but migrant remittances to their families conceal the extraction of rents. U.S. asylum advocates understandably stress that the most important challenge facing irregular immigrants is their legal status. However, with or without legal status, the underlying issue for migrants will continue to be their position in the U.S. job market, because this generates household indebtedness that increases vulnerability to human trafficking.

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How the Guatemalan civil war became a genocide: Revisiting the  trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt

The 2013 trial of Efraín Ríos Montt cemented Guatemala's reputation as a land of genocide. Most o... more The 2013 trial of Efraín Ríos Montt cemented Guatemala's reputation as a land of genocide. Most of the survivors who testified about army crimes during his 1982-1983 regime came from the Ixil Maya town of Nebaj. Oddly, some Nebajenses credit Ríos Montt with ending army massacres and saving their lives. This article focuses on the genocide debate in the municipio of Nebaj. It concludes that command responsibility for war crimes would have been a more effective indictment than genocide. K E Y WO R D S Mayas, truth commissions, war crimes, racism, counterinsurgency Resumen El juicio de 2013 contra Efraín Ríos Montt consolidó la reputación de Guatemala como tierra de genocidio. La mayoría de los sobrevivientes que testificaron sobre los crímenes del ejército bajo la administración de Montt (1982-1983) pertenecían al pueblo maya ixil de Nebaj. Curiosamente algunos nebajenses dan crédito a Ríos Montt por poner fin a las masacres del ejército y salvarles la vida. Este artículo se centra en el debate sobre el genocidio en el municipio de Nebaj a través del análisis concluye que la responsabilidad de mando por crímenes de guerra habría sido una acusación más efectiva contra Ríos Montt que el genocidio.

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Rigoberta and Redemption

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