Diane M. Nelson

Who Counts?: The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide

In Who Counts? Diane M. Nelson explores the social life of numbers, teasing out the myriad roles math plays in Guatemalan state violence, economic exploitation, and disenfranchisement, as well as in Mayan revitalization and grassroots environmental struggles. In the aftermath of thirty-six years of civil war, to count—both numerically and in the sense of having value—is a contested and qualitative practice of complex calculations encompassing war losses, migration, debt, and competing understandings of progress. Nelson makes broad connections among seemingly divergent phenomena, such as debates over reparations for genocide victims, Ponzi schemes, and antimining movements. Challenging the presumed objectivity of Western mathematics, Nelson shows how it flattens social complexity and becomes a raced, classed, and gendered skill that colonial powers considered beyond the grasp of indigenous peoples. Yet the Classic Maya are famous for the precision of their mathematics, including conceptualizing zero long before Europeans. Nelson shows how Guatemalas indigenous population is increasingly returning to Mayan numeracy to critique systemic inequalities with the goal of being counted—in every sense of the word.

Reckoning the after/math of war in Guatemala

Working from multiple meanings of reckoning (to count, to settle rewards or penalties, to pay a bill, to measure possibilities for the future), this essay explores the post-war in Guatemala and the work of, and struggles over, number in making different people and experiences count. The peace treaty signed in 1996 instituted a truth commission and efforts to bring justice to the victims. The commission’s quantifications of 250,000 dead, 93 percent at the hands of the state, mix in complex ways with the qualitative judgment that those deaths constitute genocide, leading to further quandaries in quantifying forms of repair. The state has begun paying reparations to survivors, but is also compensating civilians who were drafted into para-militaries that carried out massacres. How these para-victimizers count in relation to the aggregate of victims is, in turn, hard to calculate, and I look at some ways Guatemalans are working to make it all add up.

Introduction: Aftermath: Harvests of Violence and Histories of the Future

“Where were you in 1992?” On December 12, 2006, a group of Maya and ladino Guatemalans, with a sprinkling of outsiders, met to ponder this question. They were invited by the Mayan publishing house Cholsamaj and met in the offices of codISrA, a new state agency dedicated to eradicating racism. The first person to answer was en la montaña, serving as a doctor in one of the guerrilla groups of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (urNg). A woman who identified herself as ladina remembered discussing Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s Nobel Peace Prize in school and, for the first time, questioning her assumption that indigenous women should be servants, not international celebrities. A woman in handmade corte and gïiipil, the distinctive Mayan skirt and blouse, said she was a little girl in a Mexican refugee camp and remembered the effervescence and also the deepseated terror as people began organizing to return home. A ladino man remembered the elation of being involved in early peace treaty negotiations: maybe the decades of war would finally end! Francisco Cali, formerly with the Campesino Unity Committee (cuc), now wearing the ponytail and colorful coat showing he identified as Mayan, was in Menchú’s entourage when she received The Call from the Nobel Committee and remembered the delirious joy, the shock, and the dawning realization that something fundamental had changed. Rigoberta Menchú Tum was the first indigenous person to receive the Nobel Prize, and it was not lost on her detractors that in her famous testimonio (1983) she ac-

Spiderwebs of Value and Interest

terialities, and experiences. In addition, not defining sustainable conservation was a methodological strategy, as she explains in her closing chapter. First, the absence of a definition allowed her to construct a multidisciplinary approach alongside her ethnographic account (based on a 14-month period of fieldwork in Calakmul). Her nonconventional theoretical and methodological framework was informed by concepts from feminism, political ecology, state formation, power approaches, and conservation development (pp. 24, 37–38, 174–75). She also calls on assorted theoretical perspectives such as postcolonialism, actororiented theory, subaltern studies, human-environment relations, and political ecology “to bridge cultural barriers and reckon with the power differences” that characterize conservation at Calakmul (p. 175; see also pp. 24–25, 30–36). In Volosinov’s terms (1986, 21), she attempts to build an understanding of sustainable conservation as shaped by both production relations and the hierarchical local and global sociopolitical orders, simultaneously taking into account local people’s historical legacies and experiences that, in turn, shape their encounters/confrontations with state and environmental protection practices (pp. 36, 38). Haenn skillfully complements her discussion with an examination of local people’s diverse existing cultures, as well as ecological and social realities (p. 26). Finally, she refines her theoretical and methodological construction by bringing in fluid and multivocal notions of power and environment as key elements of her analysis. Second, the absence of a formal definition allowed Haenn to construct her own definition of “sustaining conservation” and use it to understand local “people as multidimensional works in progress” in their daily lives (p. 35). This strategy was based on her attempt to show what critical reading teaches about campesino responses to resignification, ambiguity, contradiction, appropriation, and/or resistance to conservation (p. 36). Her definition and, I would add, her methodological approach comprise an openly critical response to conservation development and community-based approaches to natural resources management (p. 174). This view materializes in Haenn’s points of departure: (i) campesinos are not the only ones involved with deforestation; (ii) nature itself lies in the processes of diverse local peoples making social identity and class distinctions on the ground and of cultural dynamics in everyday life, dialogical social and material relationships, and power fields; (iii) local people constantly attempt to influence events and programs, state agents, and, finally, their own destiny and regional future; and (iv) sustainable conservation should be conceived of as a dynamic, coparticipative, and inclusive arena in which everyday struggles bring about alternative forms of identity and power as well as diverse possibilities for resistance, appropriation, and resignification. Consequently, Haenn argues that sustainable conservation must acknowledge local social actors rather than focusing solely on maintaining the power and resources these larger projects provide to national and international elites (p. 175). Therefore, she proposes, this approach should not conceive of natural resources as separate from people’s everyday lives, relationships, symbols, meanings, practices, experiences, materialities, and dynamics of power. Rather, she argues, sustainable conservation should focus on understanding the dialogical interconnectedness between natural resources protection, development, and local people’s everyday lives and on addressing the ways in which these local experiences inform the reconfiguration of management and natural resources conservation practices and programs. This position also explains why her book goes beyond addressing conservation development in terms of a regional approach or just addressing regional and supraregional conservation issues from an actor-oriented perspective (p. 35). In contrast, Haenn’s ethnographic narrative aims to address how diverse people practice conservation in distinctive everyday ways and how day-to-day meanings and experiences impact environmental management strategies and the way local people relate to one another (p. 3). Finally, Haenn does not explicitly aim to show how state and local people’s relationships informed and reconfigured campesinos’ conservation practices, but she skillfully addresses this question in chapters 6 and 7. Furthermore, she explains and illustrates how local actors’ conservation narratives and the practicalities of conservation development should be read in light of the actors’ diverse plans (pp. 36, 139–40). This strengthens her analysis and supports a central contribution of this book—showing why a sustainable conservation program must take people into account and exploring how to do it.