The chapters in this edited volume are uniformly good and interesting, making the book well worth reading. The contributions were originally presented at a 2005 conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on the 1954 coup in Guatemala and its consequences, apparently the only such academic conference recognising the 50th anniversary of this critical event. Potential readers should be aware, however, that there is only minimal coverage of the period ‘after the coup’ to be found in the book and few new insights into its consequences. Furthermore, the subtitle should be taken seriously: these are indeed ethnographic accounts, all but one by anthropologists.

Both the conference and volume are additionally noteworthy as they honour the work of two of the pre-eminent Latin Americanists of the last half-century, Richard N. Adams and June C. Nash. Both were in Guatemala during the period before and after the US-organised coup that ended the progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz. Nash draws on her experience to provide the most extensive discussion by any of the contributors about Guatemala during those crucial years. Although much of her chapter compares indigenous state relations in Guatemala with what would become her major research site, Chiapas, to me one of the most fascinating parts of the entire book is her account of coming to Guatemala in 1953 for her first fieldwork. Located then outside Quetzaltenango in Cantel, the site of one of the region's largest textile factories, she provides here a taste of daily life and of the days around the coup itself and the first weeks after.

Adams offers little from his own considerable personal experiences but does provide a masterful concluding chapter. He effectively integrates core contributions from the other essays into his own incisive review of the half-century of Guatemalan history initiated by the 1944 revolution, focused through the prism of the evolution of ethnicity. As a good match, the volume opens with an outstanding introduction by co-editor Timothy J. Smith, notable for its concise analysis of the major themes he finds in the ethnographic/anthropological literature on the period.

This scholarship, Smith rightly contends, too often treats ‘the coup as the alpha or omega for understanding Guatemalan social relations since the midcentury’ (p. 3) instead of as ‘a major event in longer durées of social-historical developments’ (p. 2). Going even further in perhaps the volume's most valuable essay, historian David Carey Jr. points out that for many Maya-Kaqchikel in the San Juan Comalapa (department of Chimaltenango) area of his study, ‘1954 simply marked the end of another government – an event that did not necessarily merit particular attention in their historical trajectory’ (p. 79). Much more important for many of them would be 1944, not because it marked the beginning of the ten-year reform period at the national level but because of the massacre in nearby Patzicía, the primary focus of his chapter. In the uncertain days following the collapse of the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico, fighting broke out in the town between Kaqchikels and ladinos, in the end leaving somewhere between 60 and 900 Kaqchikels dead. No ladino was ever held accountable by the administration of the new democratic president, Juan José Arévalo. For many Kaqchikels, Carey contends, ‘1944 better explains Guatemala's recent tragic past than does 1954’.

In another important chapter, Judith M. Maxwell skips over the period of the coup even more than Carey in her account beginning in 1938 of the increasingly successful efforts to move Guatemala's 22 Mayan languages from the periphery of the educational system into its mainstream. Long deeply involved in this process herself, Maxwell discusses key steps at the governmental level, such as the Education Act (Ley Orgánica de Educación) of 1965, which established bilingual education in four indigenous languages, and the Programa Nacional de Educación Bilingüe (National Bilingual Education Programme) created in 1982 and expanded two years later to incorporate four more Mayan languages. She also highlights important contributions from other actors, such as those involved with the Proyecto Lingüistico Francisco Marroquín (Francisco Marroquín Language Project) and the Academia de las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala). Indicative of the results, Mayas are now involved at all levels of the process up to the top administrative positions, while ladino teachers in 2003 demanded instruction in and on Mayan languages that they had rejected when the idea was suggested two decades before.

After Nash, the contribution paying the most attention to the period of the coup is Christa Little-Siebold's essay on Quezaltepeque in the Oriente department of Chiquimula. Based on her fieldwork across the last two decades, she discusses land, identity and memory during the reform years following the 1944 revolution. Located close to the border with Honduras, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas' ‘liberation’ army encamped in Quezaltepeque upon entering the country. Most fascinating is her brief account of the courageous actions taken by the indigenous mayor of the time to protect his people through a sagacious mix of cooperation but also covert resistance.

Co-editor Abigail E. Adams contributes an intriguing essay on Antonio Goubaud Carrera, the first director of Guatemala's Instituto Indigenista Nacional (National Indigenous Institute, IIN) and then Arévalo's ambassador to the United States, who first came to her attention through their field research at the same sites decades apart: Jocotán (Chiquimula) and San Juan Chamelco (Alta Verapaz). Challenging portraits that others have drawn of Goubaud, Adams argues, based on her considerable research, that he ‘envisioned a Guatemala in which a unifying nationalism could coexist with diverse local cultures and identities’ (p. 37). That cause was seriously set back by the 1954 regime change, which left the IIN destroyed. Goubaud himself was already dead, having died under still confusing circumstances in 1951.

Finally, After the Coup ends with Victor D. Montejo's conference keynote address comparing the revolution of 1944 and the Peace Accords of 1996, which ended Guatemala's three decades of armed political conflict. Ironically, on the very day of his address Montejo was fired from his position in the cabinet of President Oscar Berger.