Ostensibly a volume of contributions edited by Hawkins, this book reads like a monograph. There is a good reason for this: except for the foreword, Hawkins is credited as sole or contributing author on all chapters. The result is a coherent and coordinated manuscript of considerable scholarly value. The preface does an apt job of summarizing the work to follow, emphasizing the multi-site approach, introducing the context of data collection, and identifying potential sources of bias, while a couple of introductory chapters establish the scope of the study and its overarching themes. Specifically, the volume seeks to investigate and explain the religious variety and religious transformation among the K'iche’ Maya living in several closely related communities. Hawkins's thesis for the change centers on maize as it systematically impacts subsistence, culture, and economy. As population increases out of pace with the availability of new viable agricultural land, traditional economies are faced with a shortage in their primary resource, maize. The result is a collapse that sees a casting off of traditional cultural systems, including Maya Traditionalism and Roman Catholicism.
The maize crisis, in turn, leads to a cultural crisis, which leads to a religious crisis that has precipitated religious change on a massive scale and in parallel with systematic external social and economic exclusion. “Convert by convert and sometimes community by community, Mayas move from relatively sedate Maya Traditionalism and thoroughly sedate Ortho-Catholicism to various forms of trance-inducing, tongues-speaking, bodily animated, electronically hyper-amplified ecstatic Christian Pentecostalisms” (2). More importantly, as much of the data presented in subsequent sections is drawn from ethnographic field observations, presumably collected without this volume in mind, Hawkins’ introductory material serves to contextualize potentially divergent narratives in such a way as to allow for the subsequent coherent analysis.
The very substantial remainder of the volume is organized into three primary sections. The first section consists of a selection of monographs, collected as part of Hawkins and Walter Randolph Adams's long-running undergraduate ethnographic field school in the municipios of Nahualá and Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán, Department of Sololá, Guatemala. Though each article is co-authored by Hawkins and Adams, all the articles are written in first-person singular and chronicle the personal experience of the lead authors (students). The chapters in this section are deftly arranged to insinuate (however accurately) a sense of change: Traditionalism to Neo-Traditionalism, Neo-Traditionalism to Orthodox and Charismatic Catholicism, Orthodox and Charismatic Catholicism to Evangelical Protestantism (with the latter serving as a major influence in the development of charismatic forms of the former). The middle or second section places the modern Maya religious landscape in a historical context. The third section is a series of sole-authored chapters that synthesize and analyze the dataset put forth in the first section, which is the most varied in tone and content.
Diverse in its dataset, sweeping in the scope of its analyses, both ethnological and ethnographic (and indeed, ethnohistoric), the book offers a glimpse of a religious, social, and economic world on the brink of change. The volume, however, has value beyond this specific study. Adroitly historicized, it avoids framing religious transformation exclusively as the continued victimization of a colonized people and makes space for simultaneously seeing it as the continuation of a well-established cultural tradition characterized by adaptation and resilience. Although the “Pentecostal wail” may be drawn from feelings of angst and insecurity, the sense of the volume is somehow and at the same time optimistic.
