Across Guatemala, Mayan peoples are struggling to recover from two decades of cataclysmic upheaval - religious conversions, civil war, military repression. How have these events affected people's traditional, community-based sense of identity and the religious values from which it grew? To find out, Richard Wilson spent the late 1980s living among Q'eqchi'-speaking Mayas in the province of Alta Verapaz. In this book he offers a sensitive exploration of the ways in which Q'eqchi's have responded to profound social dislocations by attempting to revive their ancestral ways.Traditional Q'eqchi' identity is grounded in the community and in the mountain cult that anchors each community firmly to a geographical place and its spirit "owner." Wilson explores the vital role the mountain spirits, or tzuultaq'a, play in agricultural production and human reproduction, giving us richly detailed analyses of Q'eqchi' rituals of fertility and healing.During the 1970s, Catholic and Protestant evangelism convinced many Q'eqchi's to abandon their traditional beliefs. A whole new generation of Catholic "catechists" rebelled against the mountain cult and promoted new, extracommunity bases of identity such as class and universal Catholic brotherhood. In so doing, they facilitated a widespread, class-based insurrection against Guatemala's economic elite and its military.Now an ethnic revivalist movement is under way among the Q'eqchi's, again led by the Catholic lay catechists. They seek to renovate the earth cult in order to create a new pan-Q'eqchi' ethnic identity where none existed before. Because this new identity is expressed through reworked versions of the old symbols of community, any explanation of the indigenist movement is inseparable from local conceptions of history and tradition. Different groups, both local and national, presently compete over the same religious icons, in an attempt to shape their meaning to their own interests. Read Less