David Stoll vs. Rigoberta Menchú: Indigenous Victims or Protagonists?
| Author(s) | Rogachevsky, Jorge R. | |
| Date Accessioned | 2016-08-31T02:36:12Z | |
| Date Available | 2016-08-31T02:36:12Z | |
| Publication Date | 2001-07-15 | |
| Abstract | The publication of Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Westview Press, 1999) by the anthropologist David Stoll has unleashed a major controversy. According to Stoll, a lengthy investigation carried out on the ground in Guatemala led him to question some aspects of Rigoberta Menchú’s life as narrated in the text, I, Rigoberta Menchú, a testimonial account of the Nobel Peace Laureate’s growing up in an indigenous community in Guatemala in the midst of poverty and increasing repression and violence. In the media, Stoll’s account has been taken at face value, starting with a front-page exposé-type article by Larry Rohter, published in The New York Times on December 15, 1998, under the title, "Tarnished Laureate". According to the media account of this controversy, Stoll has proven that Menchú lied about significant aspects of her life, and she is dismissed as yet another tarnished idol. This account of Stoll’s text is curious because he tells us that his intention was not to tarnish Menchú’s public stature. Neither was it to dismiss the validity of the account that the Rigoberta Menchú text provides regarding the repression suffered in Guatemala during that country’s thirty-six year civil war. Stoll’s intent is not to question the victimization of the indigenous population, but rather to promote his thesis that the indigenous population was not a class-conscious protagonist in the civil strife. Stoll takes up an analysis of the Menchú family as an emblematic representative of the indigenous community, and, by providing a revised account to the one narrated in I, Rigoberta Menchú, purports to demonstrate that the indigenous population in Guatemala was victimized by both the army and the guerrillas, and never constituted a rebellious class with its own agenda and activism. This paper looks carefully at Stoll’s own language to demonstrate that what is at stake in this controversy is the relative roles assigned to the investigating scholar and the object of investigation within a classical anthropological discourse. The Menchú text presents an active subject within an active community and provides an ideological lens to interpret the recent historical experience in Guatemala. Stoll’s lengthy account attempts to remove the agency represented in the Menchú text, defining indigenous Guatemalans solely as victims, denying their role as protagonists in the social struggles that convulsed their society, and dismissing the ideological lens as representative of an imposed perspective from outside, rather than characteristic of an indigenous perspective. In so doing, Stoll reinscribes the role of the scholar, and in particular the anthropologist, as the guardian of truth claims, and relegates indigenous Guatemalans to the role of objects of study with no legitimate independent role in the creation of historical understanding. Through a careful analysis of Stoll’s revisionist challenge, this paper intends to demonstrate that his account is logically incoherent. | en_US |
| ISSN | 1536-1837 | |
| URL | http://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/19507 | |
| Language | en_US | en_US |
| Publisher | Latin American Studies Program, University of Delaware, Newark, DE | en_US |
| dc.rights | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike | |
| dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ | |
| Keywords | Rigoberta Menchú | en_US |
| Keywords | Indigenous victims | en_US |
| Title | David Stoll vs. Rigoberta Menchú: Indigenous Victims or Protagonists? | en_US |
| Type | Article | en_US |