Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala

John Hawkins began conducting research with Guatemala’s Maya peoples in 1968, and he has thus seen first-hand the tremendous social transformation that the country has experienced over the past half century. In Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala: Cultural Collapse and Christian Pentecostal Revitalization, he draws on this long-term ethnographic work to explain what may be the most significant change the country has experienced in that time—namely the explosive growth of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. Hawkins interprets this religious transformation as a “pentecostal wail,” evoking Marx’s characterization of religion as at once an expression of distress and a protest against real distress, which in this case is borne out of Maya people’s acute experiences of social marginality, economic hardship, and political violence in the 20^th century. Hawkins contends that mass adoption of the enthusiastic, noisy, and pneumatic style of worship favored by both evangélicos (i.e., denominationally Protestant Pentecostals) and Catholic Charismatics in highland Guatemala, where relatively staider, quieter, and more materialist religious styles associated with syncretic Catholicism once predominated, is the result of Maya people’s efforts to re-articulate their relationship to the sacred in the face of cultural collapse. To make this argument, Hawkins draws on ethnographic data collected with K’iche’-Mayas in two highland towns, careful reassessments of historical data, and several classical theories of religion.

Part 1 of the volume collects twelve ethnographic essays produced as part of a field school that Hawkins led in the towns of Nahualá and Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán in the early 2000s. Each essay is co-written by a student, Hawkins, and Walter Adams (the program’s codirector) and closely focuses on a slice of religious life in the two towns. Collectively, they offer readers glimpses into the religious practices, identities, and imaginaries of people affiliated with traditionalist and neo-traditionalist versions of Maya religion, Catholic Christianity in both syncretic and more orthodox “Roman” forms, pentecostalism among denominationally Catholic and Protestant Christians, and even dissident youths who seem to be opting out of organized religion altogether. These micro-ethnographies vary in scope and tone, but they generally read like very good, very polished senior theses that offer the kind of perceptive, but not necessarily nuanced insights, that short-term participant observation fieldwork tends to foster. One gets a good sense of the kinds of assignments these novice ethnographers did in preparation for their fieldwork, and they all ultimately rely on a Durkheimian perspective of religion as a reflection of the social order. That being said, few books attempt this kind of focused ethnological comparison, and the scope of what is examined through them is invaluable to the book’s larger argument. I will certainly also be showing several of these essays to my own students as exemplary models to follow for their own projects.  

In the second and third parts of the book, Hawkins takes over as sole author, allowing him to fully draw on his decades’ worth of research and strong knowledge of the anthropological and historical literature on Guatemala. In part 2 he lays out the historical sequence of events that led to Maya cultural collapse in the late 20^th century. The argument in this section hinges on recognizing the central importance of maize (corn) in Maya cosmology, and the economic reasons that small-holder cultivation of that sacred crop progressively made that an untenable economic strategy. Without access to adequate land to cultivate maize, Hawkins argues, the basic cosmological covenant between humanity and the deities appeared to be broken. That upended the Maya way of life that had survived the European invasion and had enabled Mayas some measure of social and cultural autonomy into the 20^th century. Hawkins uses census data (which he rightly notes is incomplete in some respects) to show that the erosion of maize cultivation—not other events such as the country’s civil war or the 1976 earthquake—created the conditions of cultural uncertainty that led many Mayas to abandon “tradition” and seek out alternative means of relating to the sacred. The argument here is largely Weberian in that it highlights the multiple imbrications of religious imaginaries and socio-economic orders in driving social change.

In the book’s final chapters, Hawkins sets out to explain why Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity resonated with Mayas in the wake of cultural collapse. Here he draws heavily on Anthony Wallace’s theory of revitalization movements to argue that pentecostalization constitutes a collective attempt to create a more satisfactory social order in the absence of other political options with which to remedy structural injustices. Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity’s emphasis on individual moral reform, its theological focus on spiritual gifts, and its lay-centered organizational structures, Hawkins argues, resonate both with key principles of Maya culture and align them with the demands of life under neo-liberalism.

Hawkins concludes the book by hypothesizing that his findings are generalizable. He sets out to test the model that Pentecostalism flourishes after cultural collapse by reading a selection of studies about Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity elsewhere in Guatemala, Latin America, Africa, and the United States. The evidence he finds in his sampling of the literature certainly lines up with the conclusions he draws from Nahulá and Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán, but his survey of the literature is not comprehensive (material from Melanesia is notably absent and he could have dug into a few more studies about the Catholic Charismatic Renewal), nor does he engage with other anthropological theories of pentecostalization thoroughly enough to make his own argument iron clad. That Hawkins’ theoretical model remains less than fully tested in the end, however, in no way diminishes the quality of the work in the preceding chapters. Hawkins expertly draws on a great deal of both qualitative and quantitative evidence to explain K’iche’-Mayas’ pentecostal wail, and, even if there are parts of his argument that one could quibble with, he makes a compelling and convincing case overall.

Religious Transformation in Maya Guatemala is the kind of book that could have only been born out of extraordinary efforts and circumstances. The fruits of John Hawkins’ long career examining Guatemala’s social and cultural changes at the fin de siècle are on full display here, and one can also intuit the passion and dedication to grounded ethnographic research that he has fomented in his students. Readers interested in global Christianity, Latin American religions, and religion’s role in social change are sure to find a lot that is interesting here.

Eric Hoenes del Pinal is assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Eric Hoenes del Pinal

Date Of Review:

July 30, 2022