Description
In 1999, US anthropologist David Stoll published a critique of Mayan K’iche’ activist and Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum’s personal account of experiences of violence endured by herself, her family and community during Guatemala’s internal armed conflict and genocide. The critique, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, alleged factual inconsistencies and a political agenda behind Menchu’s claims, which are highlighted in her acclaimed autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Stoll’s critique generated significant controversy amongst the academic community of (predominantly US-based) anthropologists, many of whom responded in support of Menchu and the work she has done for indigenous and human rights and justice.
In this contribution, I focus on the meanings, representations, and implications for understanding violence and its memory as collectively felt and held. I first ask, what structures of power are instituted and reinscribed in the critiques of Menchu’s accounts of violence, and how are they challenged, not only by Menchu, but also by those who defend her? Secondly, how can researchers ethically assemble, protect and engage with collectivist accounts and testimonies of violence, like that shared by Menchu? Informed by communitarian feminist and feminist postcolonial and decolonial critiques, and the concept of testimonio, I highlight the emancipatory epistemic and ontological possibilities for understanding violence in relation to collectivist framings and community. I contribute a reading of violence that aims towards a transcendence of linear conceptualisations of time and space, and considers the representations of violence and its recollections as political and dynamic. I argue that violence recounted through means such as testimonio, and in relation to collective experiences and memory, pushes feminists to broaden understands violence as existing across various registers, whilst simultaneously engaging with the contentious and inevitably political aspects of recording, naming and recognising violence in its diverse manifestations.
