Allison Hellman
Viatori
ANTHRO 201
24 October 2017
Buried Secrets Book Review
Victoria Sanford provides an appreciated examination with her book Buried Secrets on the violence that overwhelmed Guatemala from the late 1970s through the 80s and in the early 90s. As a forensic anthropologist doing her work in Guatemala after the stir of the civil war, she unearthed many of the fatalities that the government would have preferred to have kept hidden from the world. Violence is something everyone would like to keep hidden despite how wrong it really is.
Her work, includes numerous testimonies from witnesses, is a disturbing account of government violence inflicted on Guatemala’s Mayan majority. Her book combines information from several inclusive …show more content…
For the entire book’s emphasis on indigenous accounts, there is almost no reference to an interesting and variegated history of relations between the Guatemalan state and the indigenous community. I feel like there was not a lot to give a good picture of why all this was happening to the indigenous people of Guatemala. For example, were there not times when the indigenous people were favored and thriving? If so, what happened? All the history that came before seems relevant to the early 1980s: a period in which the Guatemalan state successfully stamped out an insurrection that had enjoyed significant support among indigenous Guatemalans. And awareness of this complexity could help explain more recent events in Guatemala and could help us dive deeper into explaining the world. Sanford’s implied belief that the determining factor in the 1980s was brutality, and even genocide, is largely true, but her analysis could have benefited from greater awareness of the complex history. Political factors, especially the state, should also be placed at the center of analysis in discussions of genocide. Understanding of political factors would enrich debate and analysis of genocide. It would also help in understanding why genocide often does not occur even when economic, racial/ethnic, and other societal divisions are predominantly extreme. It also seemed that sometimes the book jumped around a lot which did not help with truly understanding what was going on in Guatemala, but then was also rather redundant at
Viatori
ANTHRO 201
24 October 2017
Buried Secrets Book Review
Victoria Sanford provides an appreciated examination with her book Buried Secrets on the violence that overwhelmed Guatemala from the late 1970s through the 80s and in the early 90s. As a forensic anthropologist doing her work in Guatemala after the stir of the civil war, she unearthed many of the fatalities that the government would have preferred to have kept hidden from the world. Violence is something everyone would like to keep hidden despite how wrong it really is.
Her work, includes numerous testimonies from witnesses, is a disturbing account of government violence inflicted on Guatemala’s Mayan majority. Her book combines information from several inclusive …show more content…
For the entire book’s emphasis on indigenous accounts, there is almost no reference to an interesting and variegated history of relations between the Guatemalan state and the indigenous community. I feel like there was not a lot to give a good picture of why all this was happening to the indigenous people of Guatemala. For example, were there not times when the indigenous people were favored and thriving? If so, what happened? All the history that came before seems relevant to the early 1980s: a period in which the Guatemalan state successfully stamped out an insurrection that had enjoyed significant support among indigenous Guatemalans. And awareness of this complexity could help explain more recent events in Guatemala and could help us dive deeper into explaining the world. Sanford’s implied belief that the determining factor in the 1980s was brutality, and even genocide, is largely true, but her analysis could have benefited from greater awareness of the complex history. Political factors, especially the state, should also be placed at the center of analysis in discussions of genocide. Understanding of political factors would enrich debate and analysis of genocide. It would also help in understanding why genocide often does not occur even when economic, racial/ethnic, and other societal divisions are predominantly extreme. It also seemed that sometimes the book jumped around a lot which did not help with truly understanding what was going on in Guatemala, but then was also rather redundant at