1999-08-09 You can still tell the bad guys from the good guys!

1) Even though Stoll spends (literally) the whole book parsing Rigoberta's story and explaining why he thinks it's vital to do so, the reader is never quite clear on why the whole exercise is important. If it's to reveal that a narrator's truth, even in the testimony genre, is a fudgy thing, then why the often reproachful tone? If it's to show that testimony is deployed for instrumentalist purposes (i.e. means to an end), the argument is essentially trivial, because we all know that. (Moreover, Rigoberta's purposes are clear to any reader of her book--that was surely her own measure of the narrative's success. She explicitly didn't want the book read for "anthropological insight," but rather for political action.) If it's to show a collective and selective blindless on the left, well, let's leave that one for the next section--

2) Stoll accepts that the Guatemalan army and its local operatives were every bit as nasty as Rigoberta alleges: he faults her for personalizing details (i.e. alleging that what happened to others actually happened to her and hers), but he never downplays or denies the army's murderous abuses. But the cumulative result is a weird and inevitable imbalance: more time and critical gaze are spent on the murderousness of the left--responsible for only a small percentage of total casualties, according to the Truth Commission--than on that of the right, apparently because it's just so obvious what the right was about. It's sort of like (to skip to the hackneyed parallel) doing a book on the Warsaw Ghetto that critiques the Jewish response...it's perhaps worth doing, but it puts an enormous burden on the reader to recall the context, i.e. that the errors (or even crimes) of one side are trivial compared to the crimes (calculated, rather than errors) of the other. The imbalance is the same on the "symapthizer" side: the book deals critically with the reception of the book by the foreign left, which is appropriate given the book's subject, but that foreign left's failings are trivial compared to those of the foreign (read US) right, which sought to expunge any record of military atrocities, and still does. The fact that some Amazon reader-reviewers could take Stoll's book as vindication of the army policies of the 1980s shows the pitfalls of Stoll's engaged-yet-detached (in the sense of "let the chips fall where they may") approach.

Lastly, Stoll could do a little better with his counterfactuals. He faults Rigoberta's book for quite possibly prolonging the conflict and postponing the peace accords, perhaps by as much as 12 years. This is a bit myopic: what kind of peace would the army have accepted in the mid-1980s? Stoll himself says that the army was in no mood to compromise for many years, which flies in the face of his criticism of the book. More broadly, he faults the armed left for creating a situation in which the army could carry out its murderous sweeps; this myopia is partially addressed in my point (2), above, but it also assumes that purely peaceful protest would have been received nonviolently by the state/army. Raise your hand if you believe that!

Don't get me wrong: this is a very impressive book, and I'm very glad that Stoll wrote it. (The core of the book, in the research sense, is very strong: his description of Vicente Menchu's decidedly non-stereotypical career as man-on-the-make.) There's a lot to learn here, for everyone...it's just that some it is in the form of a cautionary tale about the intersection of anthropology and presentist politics!