Paper Cadavers is a creatively crafted combination of ethnography and historiography that demonstrates the complex process through which academic, national, and personal histories are produced in tandem. Kristen Weld fulfills the promise of interdisciplinarity by expertly combining the engaged anthropology of participants with the historian's concentration on reconstructing narrative. Paper Cadavers is simultaneously about Guatemala's counterinsurgent past and the political and personal negotiations that underlie the construction of the nation's democratic future.
Weld tells the unlikely story of how Guatemala's National Police records, collected during the height of the country's civil war, came to light after decades of neglect and political denials of its existence. It narrates the complicated political process through which the more than 80 million pages of records were painstakingly rescued from bats, vermin, financial scandal, sinkholes, and numerous arson attempts. The story of the archive's survival alone makes Weld's work a thrilling read for those of us who have etched out stories from documents of the past and who, because of this, are drawn by the alluring social life of material culture. Yet, Weld's work offers much more: it explores how documents are used in both the past and present to become essential technologies of rule, through which states and their citizens make themselves.
The work is organized in four sections, narrating first the story of how the National Police archive was found, processed, and nationalized. The second section focuses on the role that the acts and events documented in the archive played in the development of Guatemala's military counterinsurgency program in the 1970s and 1980s. The third and fourth sections are centered on the politics and practices of national reconstruction in Guatemala and the hope that history can come to matter in the constitution of the country as a democratic nation.
Working first in 2006 as a volunteer in recovering the archive, Weld can draw not only on the documents themselves but also on the political and personal struggles of volunteers, staff, and funding agencies involved in making the effectively buried documents once more accessible. In this respect Paper Cadaver is very much enhanced by combining ethnographic methods of participant observation and interviews. Using ethnography, Weld highlights that archives themselves—not just documents housed therein—must be analyzed together with their collections as products of political, economic, and sometimes arbitrarily personal circumstances.
Among the many expected findings within the National Police records are the remnants of civilian informant rings used by the police, military, and paramilitaries to target and kill potential subversives. These oreja (heard, rather than written) reports, shared with other agencies, were all too often death sentences for persons deemed subversive. Raúl, a former guerrilla turned archivist, whose political past made the appearance of his own name in such reports more likely than not, is one of Weld's key informants. Most curiously, Raúl had imagined a National Police archive and himself entering into it, in a dream that preceded by years his knowledge that it had survived. As she narrates his efforts and those of his co-workers the reader comes to understand that for Raúl, Weld, and others who worked to rescue the records of lives lost, the archival work and the making of history are acts of justice and hope for change.
Paper Cadaver is a most welcome historical narrative, and not only because of the inherent excitement of its subject or even because it is accessible and readable to lay and expert audiences alike. Weld's work is of import because it is public scholarship that puts the key questions of historiography and what she terms “archival thinking” squarely into discussions of democratization, post-conflict reconstruction, and nation-building.
