In 1992, a Guatemalan peasant named Rigoberta Menchú received the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in pressing the civil rights claims of her country's indigenous peoples. A decade earlier, her memoir, I, Rigoberta Menchú, had appeared, and it was immediately welcomed in the nascent canon of multicultural literary and anthropological writings that has since become standard in the academy. In that memoir, Menchú gives a highly specific account of the then-ruling military government's war against tribal, rural people, making claims that she held a leadership role in the resistance, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. In a work certain to incite controversy, Middlebury College anthropologist David Stoll questions the veracity of those claims, interviewing many of the people who appeared in her memoir and offering contrary testimony. "In a peasant society ruled by elders, where girls reaching puberty are kept under close watch, it would be very unusual for a person of her age and gender to play the leadership role she describes," Stoll writes. Neither, he argues, was she monolingual and illiterate, as she claimed to be; her presentation of self as "noble savage," he continues, gave her an unwarranted moral authority when she presented stories that she had heard from others as if she had been a participant. His findings, Stoll notes, do not discount the real violence visited by the Guatemalan government on its subjects, although they certainly might give comfort to apologists of the regime. (Interestingly, he notes, Menchú has since disavowed portions of her memoir as the work of the French anthropologist who recorded them.) --Gregory McNamee
From Library Journal
Rigoberta Mench#'s autobiography, I, Rigoberta Mench# (LJ 11/1/84), told the story of a Guatemalan Indian family who suffered horrific oppression from the Guatemalan military and elite. That book and Mench#'s subsequent activities propelled her into international prominence in the fight for the rights of the poor and oppressed. Mench# became a symbol for the Left throughout the world and subsequently received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Based on ten years of research by Stoll, a somewhat controversial scholar and professor of anthropology at Middlebury College, this book questions the veracity of Mench#'s autobiography, specifically aspects of her family background, her childhood, land questions, and violent acts against her family. This volume will be important for Stoll's analysis of how the academic and political Left functions and uses symbols to idealize victims of oppression. A landmark publication that most academic and large public libraries should acquire.AMark L. Grover, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, UT
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
An anthropologists (Middlebury Coll.) critical reexamination of the phenomenon of Rigoberta Mench, the Guatemalan peasant awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. I, Rigoberta Mench, her 1983 memoir, achieved international acclaim; it helped focus worldwide attention on the oppressive actions of the right-wing Guatemalan government and on the plight of the peasants, who were forced to join guerrilla movements to protect their lives and property. Both the book and Rigoberta became powerful symbols of the struggle of indigenous peoples against repressive anti-leftist regimes. While remaining sympathetic to Rigobertas general message and to the plight of the Guatemalan peasants, Stolls book attempts to unveil the manner in which the elevation of Menchs book to the status of myth does violence to the complexities of historical reality. Using tesitmony of local residents and archival sources, in seeking to discover what has been filtered out of Rigobertas heavily ideological account of recent Guatemalan history, Stoll focuses on what he reads as a discrepancy between the revolutionary fervor of the guerrillas and the voices of ordinary Guatemalan peasants. He characterizes the average peasant response to events as feeling ``caught between two armies''a far cry from the awakening into revolutionary consciousness described by Rigoberta in her book. Stoll employs possible inaccuracies within Rigobertas text to destabilize the unity of her version of events. In particular, he questions her account on two historical points: Was the guerrilla movement defeated in the early 1980s a popular struggle expressing the deepest aspirations of Rigobertas people? Was it an inevitable reaction to grinding oppression by people who felt they had no other choice? Stolls book is not an attempt to debunk Rigobertas story, but to serve as a warning that elevating one version of history to cult status inevitably silences a multitude of others. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
About the Author
David Stoll teaches anthropology at Middlebury College. His other books include Is Latin America Turning Protestant? and Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala.
