Doing Fieldwork on Religion and Ethnicity

Ethnicity and religion cause highly charged debates within society. It is because of this that I feel I owe the reader some information about my background to forestall speculation about it. Maybe most importantly, I am not an Evangelical, Pentecostal, or neo-Pentecostal Christian. In other words, I am not a ‘born-again’ Christian, nor am I a fervent believer in God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. I was raised in rural North West Germany as a Protestant, with a leaning that in the United States one might call ‘progressive Lutheran.’ In sociological terms, I can see myself in José Casanova’s description of secularized European Christians. He wrote, following Danièle Hervieu-Léger, that European Christians possess “an implicit, diffused, and submerged Christian cultural identity.”³ Having said that, if I were to choose between Hervieu-Léger’s “belonging without believing,” ⁴ or Grace Davies’s “believing without belonging,”⁵ I am much more inclined to view myself through the lens of the French scholar.

I have to confess that my background, which is so different from Pentecostalism, neo-Pentecostalism, folk-Catholicism, and traditional Mayan spirituality (if one is able to differentiate between the latter two), is one of the very reasons I was compelled to carry on with this intellectual enterprise.⁶ In other words, I find religions and worldviews that are very different from my own fascinating. It is like entering a world of meaning and symbols that has very little to do with the rationality and matter-of-fact Protestantism in which I grew up. Put differently, I can identify with German sociologist Max Weber’s description of himself as “religiously unmusical.”⁷ Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism are full of spirits, hidden forces, and demons, but also blessings, joy, and drama. The comparison to learning a new language is probably the best way to explain the combination of fascination and hard work. In the beginning it is a riddle, and one can only understand bits and pieces here and there. I felt it was necessary to quite literally learn a new religious vocabulary and inventory. In the end, however, a new scenario unfolded. In sum, this project was for me never about belief proper, but rather about religion in the way Max Weber understood it, that is, how other people make sense of the world around them. I have been enthralled by a kind of ‘making sense’ that is so entirely different from how I see and interpret the world.

To enter this new world and to better prepare myself for field research in Guatemala, I sought contacts with Protestant churches, workers in non-governmental organizations, people from religious communities, and friends and acquaintances who are part of the solidarity movement for Guatemala.⁸ One woman who lived in Guatemala for several years working for a German development agency told me to contact a woman who, in her view, was a member of an Evangelical church in Quetzaltenango. The former German development worker told me that she knew this woman very well and had been invited to her wedding. The wedding was typically Evangelical, she said, in that no alcohol was served and no dancing permitted. However, when I contacted this woman later in Guatemala, it turned out that she was not a member of a Protestant-Evangelical church, but rather a passionate, staunch Catholic who belonged to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement. I mention this anecdote to illustrate what I very often experienced in Guatemala and elsewhere: many people, including those with close ties to Guatemala, never set foot in an Evangelical church or a Charismatic service, but have settled opinions about so-called Protestant sects and their political and social implications. Later, while traveling in the countryside, I learned that many Catholic Charismatic prayer groups that meet in private houses are virtually indistinguishable from Evangelical home prayer groups. Both use loudspeakers and practice clapping, speaking in tongues, and laying on of hands in their meetings.

That said, there is another ‘confession’ I have to make. Despite my own religious and ideological background, through the work in Guatemala I developed a stronger sympathy with Guatemalan indigenous Pentecostals than with members of the Maya movement. This might sound astonishing because, in the ‘human rights scene,’ of which I consider myself to be a part, it is not only that people usually have no sympathy for Pentecostals at all, but that they detest them and often see them as the cause of social divisions in the Guatemalan Mayan communities. A strong Marxist perspective which interprets religion as the ‘opium of the people,’ prevails – a perspective that I myself shared for a long time, in particular with regard to Latin American ‘evangélicos.’⁹ In other words, researchers and activists with a leftist agenda often used arguments that denied agency to Pentecostal groups, because they considered Pentecostals to be focused on spiritual instead of social issues.¹⁰

I want to explain a little bit more where my sympathy with Mayan Pentecostals and my ‘trouble’ with the Mayan movement stem from. The first issue deals with the class status of Mayan Pentecostals and Mayan activists. Mayan Pentecostals usually live in great poverty, while the Mayan intellectual elite occupies ‘nice’ offices in the capital. It was, moreover, the combination of living a life in deep poverty but nevertheless with great dignity, and sharing literally their last morsels of food with the German Canche,¹¹ which impressed me deeply.

Yet there is more to it, particularly regarding my German background and how it intersects with the Maya movement. The goal of the Maya movement is to seek recognition of cultural diversity within the nation-state (including Mayan spirituality), a greater role for indigenous politics in national culture, a reconsideration of economic inequities based on ethnicity, and a wider distribution of cultural resources such as education and literacy in indigenous languages. ¹² When I returned to Germany from fieldwork in Guatemala, this description of the civil engagement of the Maya movement turned rather bleak. Back in Germany, I continued to interview Guatemalans whenever I could. One afternoon I had the chance to speak with a young indigenous lawyer who is part of this revitalization movement and tries to push the issues of Mayan culture in the political arena.¹³ His family had suffered under government repression; his uncle was killed in an incredibly cruel act of what was obviously political violence. In the interview he explained his ideas about the ways the Mayan population should revitalize their culture. One of his ideas was to prevent interracial mixing by forbidding marriages between indigenous and non-indigenous couples. He used terminology that to me resembled the horrible German past, e. g., he emphasized the importance of using this measure to keep genes pure. The Nazis used exactly the same argument: cultural differences parallel an immutable biological heritage. In the German case the goal was to eliminate another ethnic group, the Jews.¹⁴

Ultimately, there are two issues that made his argument particularly disturbing for me. First is the fact that the Mayan population itself, such as his uncle, was the victim of a state policy and government repression that carried the devaluation of human existence to an extreme: genocide. Second are his suggestions and also the language that this lawyer and some of the leaders of the Maya movement propose and use.

It is a fact that state policies and military repression caused the death of approximately 200,000 people, 83 percent of them indigenous Mayans, between 1960 and 1996.¹⁵ Without doubt, racial and ethnic discrimination prepared the ground for the violence and massacres, even though the official explanation and justification was to eliminate the insurgency. At the same time, and this leads to the second part of the Guatemalan ‘race’ issue, there are no phenotypic or genotypic differences in Guatemala, but rather settlement patterns and cultural ascriptions and self-ascriptions that divide society into indigenous and non-indigenous. Overall, differences are cultural, which makes it possible for indigenous people to pass through ethnic boundaries and become non-indigenous, and vice-versa, even though such a transition might take several generations. Non-indigenous Guatemalans have also crossed the ethnic boundary to become indigenous, though this happens to a much lesser extent. In this regard it is important to note that full acceptance within an ethnic group, which is not the ethnic group of origin, usually takes a whole generation to complete – a discovery I made while living in indigenous villages doing field research. There I met an indigenous Guatemalan peasant who married a non-indigenous Ladina from the coast. She moved to live with her indigenous in-laws in the hamlet of her husband and became totally integrated into his family, learning the indigenous language and culture. Furthermore, the non-indigenous and indigenous populations look mostly the same, contrary to the view of some U.S.-Americans that only indigenous people have an olive brown complexion.¹⁶ I met indigenous people from rural areas that had a very light skin. In a nutshell, a simple look does not tell you if a person belongs to a certain ethnic group, and ethnic distinction is not a matter of ‘blood,’ but of culture.¹⁷ Language and clothing should also be mentioned, because the indigenous population has preserved many of the pre-colonial languages; in particular, indigenous women have often preserved the colorful woven garment typical for their village. Thus women are recognized as indigenous by their clothing. If they dressed differently, as some of them did during political exile in Mexico City and elsewhere, they would be indistinguishable from other ethnic groups or nationalities.

The story with the Mayan lawyer connects the Guatemalan societal divide, the civil war and genocide, and my own views on racial issues. A few days after the interview, I had an email exchange with a friend from the solidarity movement for Guatemala in Germany, who had spent a whole night talking with the Mayan lawyer mentioned above while he was staying at my friend’s home in Germany. I learned that the Guatemalan lawyer expressed the same beliefs about indigenous revitalization to my friend. My friend, who was hosting the Mayan lawyer, reported this to me and responded to my discomfort by claiming that it is not right to criticize the lawyer, because “he is one of the many indigenous people discriminated against.” The problem of an unspoken censorship – feeling unable to express discomfort about discourses regarding ethnic views stemming from the indigenous leadership – came up on several occasions. Most foreigners, especially those who worked in one of the two truth commissions (i. e., the Catholic Church and subsequently the United Nations) and the broader human rights movement, were very disturbed by it. For me as a social scientist, it is not only a question of interaction in the form of conversations and expressing my point of view. It was this odd, inconvenient mix of having a responsibility to the people I researched, to myself, and to what I had learned through social science, in particular, that “race can never signify anything more than socially constructed ideal types in terms of which people are categorized.”¹⁸ Therefore, what sounded like a solution to this indigenous lawyer, to me contained the societal basis for racist and ethnic policies. From my perspective, his thoughts prepare the ground for a continuous ethnic divide with whatever benefits or disadvantages this might have for the indigenous population.

There is another facet to the ideological issues of ethnicity and academia. It was and is often considered politically incorrect to point to the existing racism and ethnic exclusion within institutions and groups that work in favor of human rights and social justice, including the Guatemalan Catholic Church, some mostly historic mainline Protestant churches, the insurgency, and the popular movement. The killing of Monseñor Gerardi, who presided over the Catholic Church’s truth commission REMHI (Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica), which was an obvious attempt from the still-intact repressive military and political machine to silence those who point to the atrocities of the past, is just one example that raises the question of whether foreigners should be allowed to rub salt in the wound of internal matters of Guatemalan civil activism. The writings of U.S.-American scholar David Stoll¹⁹ have illustrated that it is a highly sensitive issue to criticize a Mayan icon such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú Tum. But other Guatemalans are also criticized for their publications, as in the case of the Ladino scholar, writer, and ex-guerrillero Mario Roberto Morales. The following quotation by U.S.-academic Kay B. Warren goes to the heart of the matter. Although she is addressing only the scholar Mario Roberto Morales, her critique can be applied to the other examples as well:

As a sociologist and former human rights activist myself, who has worked on Guatemalan human rights issues since 1989, I totally agree with the statement, and yet I found the matter more complicated. In fact, I think that it is precisely the quest for what Warren calls adequate framing and engagement with Guatemalan politics that makes the whole matter so controversial. A discussion that only sheds light on the agenda of civil rights movements but leaves out the broader societal context in which these struggles occur is of course much easier, because it underlines the image of the good activist and the bad state and military. Unfortunately, there are some very inconvenient truths related to these struggles, which show that the struggle is neither gratuitous nor innocent, neither completely black nor white. Part of this inconvenient truth is that the existing Maya movement and other religious movements are, in fact, not only a product of an unprecedented state and military repression but are the effects of internal divisions within popular movements in Catholicism and certain segments of Protestantism. These divisions occurred, at least in part, due to existing racism and ethnic exclusion within these groups. To put it differently, sometimes the life of Mayan activists was not only in danger from state and military repression but also from racism and exclusion within groups and movements that were supposed to promote their own norms and values. Moreover, the anecdote about the Mayan lawyer mentioned above documents that the Maya movement is also not free from issues of racial superiority.

In sum, my intention is to provide, in a broader sense, a multi-sided contribution to a field that contains many one-sided debates. My ultimate goal is to provide an understanding of the agendas of religious movements, the reasons for these agendas, and their impact on society at large. Undoubtedly, such a sociological perspective is urgently needed in Guatemala, a postwar country experiencing acrimonious religious competition and a highly contentious debate on religious pluralism. I hope that academics and others find the fruits of my research useful. Both the errors and the mistakes are mine, and I take full responsibility for them.