The Rhetoric and Revival of the Word: Genocide

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric Of Motives. New York : Prentice-Hall, 1952 [c1950]. Print.
Denich, Bette. "Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of Genocide" (1994)

What do we mean by "genocide"?  How do our terms color our conceptualization of an idea, event, an act? How do we appropriate a term for our rhetorical purposes? Is it deceptive?

Burke writes that the basic function of rhetoric is  the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents.  In place of rhetoric might be science. Science is a semantic or descriptive terminology for charting the conditions of nature from an impersonal point of view, regardless of one's wishes or preferences.  If, however, there is a "wish," it is more than descriptive but hortatory. "It is not just trying to tell how things are, in strictly 'scenic' terms; it is trying to move people" (41). The statement(s) might include particular details or information, but the call is not scientific but rhetorical.  Thus, if scientific language is a preparation for action, rhetorical language is inducement to action(or to attitude, attitude being an incipient act).

The word "genocide" while immersed in scientific vocabularies is rhetorical and thus appropriated "to move people."   This word, coined by Rafael Lemkin in 1944, represents physical aspects of genocide in The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide formally presented on December 9, 1948 and ratified in 1951. "Genocide" is any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

  "Genocide" represents a history and a future. It names atrocities and appropriates historical imagery for future political, economic, and social action. Burke writes of "the future"  as "not the sort of thing one can put under a microscope, or even test by knowledge of exactly equivalent conditions in the past." And so the term lies outside strictly scientific vocabularies of description and is situated in the frame of political exhortation. Burke tells us,"For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols" (43).  However, the problem with  "genocide,"  and the reason why the phrase "Never Again" is an empty assertion, is because for a symbol to induce action, the beings in the exchange must be equal. As a term used by one symbol-using entity to induce action in another of equal status, "genocide" is an example of rhetoric between beings of unequal status; one being is not free to act. The word's rhetorical function is no longer wholly realistic but idealistic in this realm of inequality.  Thus, when one appropriates the term "genocide," there is inherently a rhetorical and perhaps deceptive motive -- one that is the antithesis of Rafael Lemkin's intention to make "genocide" real, measurable, identifiable, and thus capable of preventing and punishing. It is an term that while it does induce pity and disgust, it does not wholly moving people to prevent or punish (although I think we can consider the ICC as taking steps towards this).The guerrilla movement, however, appropriate the term genocide for their own cause. Predominantly middle class students, activists and former government workers, the guerrillas cultivated an image of solidarity with the peasants (Maya and poor ladinos). While there were some peasants who took up arms with the guerrillas, most were stuck in the middle of the conflict between the government and the guerrillas.

If we think about the "genocide" in Guatemala in the 1980s, we can see why "genocide" worked as an idealistic rhetoric rather than realistic.  When Pamela Yates produced When Mountains Tremble in 1982 showing "the acts" -- the Guatemalan government killing of members of indigenous groups, the Maya;  causing serious bodily harm to members of a group, the Maya; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction; and imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group -- she was not free to prevent or punish the acts. She used the term genocide in her movie to set up a rhetorical situation to induce action. But what sort of action? What the documentary represented was a common logic of structural exclusion in which a nation's control over territory is taken to mean the literal absence of others. In this case the nationalist ideology of primarly Ladino land owners were exclusive in a symbolic and real sense defining the relationship between the state/landowners and indigenous peoples. What Yates showed went beyond the symbolic exclusion to the literal excision of Maya from the body politic.

The members who signed The Convention are the ones obliging their governments to prevent and punish, yet the dynamics between members and the accused are not equal. One being is not free to act.  The word "genocide" has an idealistic rhetorical function when we see it being used in the media for policy and philanthropy. When Colin Powell used the word genocide to name the atrocities in Darfur in 2004, the Illinois Senate wrote a mandate requiring all public schools to teach and additional unit on genocide (in addition to, not with or instead of a unit on the Holocaust). What, then, was the function of the word "genocide" in this other document, an educational mandate? What rhetorical value would the word carry between the a state senate and school districts, between school districts and teachers, between teachers and students. What rhetorical value would that word carry in the curriculum industry?

Just as the ideology of nationalism does not in itself induce political action, the naming of an act does not in itself induce action. The transformation from idea to action involves a series of symbolic processes that mediate communication between leaders and people invoking them to think, feel, and act collectively according to the premise of the ideology.  Such symbols as we see with the word genocide have emotional and cognitive meaning, so the transmittal of nationalist ideologies (as with Aryan, Serbian and Croatian,Hutu, Turks) from "the intellectual sphere to that of mass politics can be seen as involving the manipulation of symbols with polarizing emotional content " (Denich 369). Denich, in her article "Dismembering Yugoslavia" explains WWII ethnic conflict as something deliberately minimized by the Tito regime by suppressing symbolic reminders (like The Pigeon Cave production that explored Serbian nationalism) and then revived  with symbolic presentations that dismembered Yugoslavia in the late 1980s. During the Tito regime, survivors of the WWII massacres had to quietly remember the dead by visiting pigeon caves and other unmarked burial sites. The Tito regime did not want to commemorate the burial sites because it did not want reminders of the nationalist ideologies of WWII.  Not long after the suppression of the performance of "The Pigeon Cave," came an outburst of art, literature and scholarship on national themes portraying Serbian history and the context of the WWII genocide. The Serbian nationalist revitalization appropriated "genocide" for their cause to secede from Yugoslavia as its own state. Both Serbs and Croats turned to formulations of nationhood, the excision of ethnic groups from territory, and thus resurrected a framework that had culminated in the pigeon caves, the Ustasha massacres of Serbs by Croats in 1941: genocide 

In this case, we see how genocide is used to argue for a homogenous state. Denich writes, " In order to 'avoid in the future the great suffering with the Serbs' neighbors inflict upon them whenever then have an opportunity to do so,' the Chetniks proposed a 'homogenous Serbia'" ( 375).

Transfers and exchanges of population, especially of Croats from the Serbian and of Serbs from the Croatian areas, is the only way to arrive at their separation and to create better relations between them, and thereby remove the possibility of a repetition of the terrible crimes that occurred even in the First World War, but especially during this war, in the entire area in which the Serbs and Croats live intermixed, and where the Croats and Moslems have undertaken in a calculated way the extermination of the Serbs. (Quoted by Tomasevich 1975: 167; see also Milovanovic 1986: 261-275)

 On July 25, 1990 the new government of Croatia took office as a real action of division and ethnic opposition. Still symbolic was the exclusion of non-Croat when the Utasha flag was raised. Serbs knew the coat-of-arms symbol represented the very nationalism that massacred Serbs years ago. Denich argues that "the reappearance of the symbols associated with genocide must be examined in light of memories that had been both individually and collectively repressed and, in light of their transformation, over a half-century, into a cultural artifact of a particular sort" (381). Vuk Draskovic, a Serbian novelist wrote, "If war comes, I fear most for the fate of the Croatian people. In Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia there isn't a Serb to whom the Croats don't owe several liters of blood. There isn't a house in which someone wasn't massacred....So I understand why Serbs, if war comes, would like to fight against the Croats" (Borba 1991). Denich clarifies that the modern Serbs had not experienced the Utasha genocide, and "their wartime suffering had come at the hands of the Germans...rather than Croats"; however, the pigeon caves were exhumed literally and figuratively. Both Serbs and Croats used the narratives of genocide from their ancestors in 1990 for their own nationalist agenda by conducting a memorial ceremony in 1990 to exhume collective graves and reintement the remains with Orthodox burial rites.

Okay, here we might talk about what is happening in the Highlands of Guatemala as we speak with the exhumation of mass graves and the Spanish courts to charge Rios Montt with genocide. There is a Pan-Maya revival happening, but I don't think this is nationalist in the same way as the Serbs and Croats appropriated the term.

The effect of publicizing the Ustasha atrocities was to "kindle animosity toward the Croat perpetrators of violence against fellow Serbs and toward the current nationalist government, with its revival of Ustasha symbols." Denich explains that rather than renaming the issue as one of minority rights within Croatia (as the Maya seem to be doing -- although they are not minorities in ethnic numbers but rather an economic minority), it became a call to arms.

David Apter calls this moment in history a "disjunctive moment" when relations of power are transformed through reformulations of ideology that combine theory with power. Denich writes, "The political effect of mythical thinking is to polarize" (382), and I think this is what Burke may mean when he says rhetoric becomes idealistic when the beings exchanging the symbol are unequal. Perhaps the word is mythical -- or magical (I think Burke calls it at some point) -- but genocide is a word that is "used" only for the ideal of nationalism. Serbs, Croats, even the Maya are or have appropriated this word for their ethnic identity or cause and/or power.  The universalistic premise of constitutional democracy was not necessarily the goal. For survivors of "acts," prevention and punishment might have been a motive for appropriating genocide, but I am not so sure that Lemkin imagined that the Serbs would use genocide as an argument for another one. I think the Maya are taking steps for justice, but the the Pan Maya movement has elements of nationalism. 

So I think that as we comply with the mandate to teach a unit on genocide or as we make changes in our curriculum to  build knowledge, enlarge experience, and broaden worldviews. We can see this unit as about preparing to students to participate globally. Instead of teaching about "genocide," a word that I think we have established as being politically charged and even deceptively appropriated, we can teach about globalization and its impact on democratic principles. We can do inquiry into the standard narratives looking for gaps to do inquiry. 

Thom's The Problem of Credibility

Thom, James Alexander. The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction. Cincinnati, OH: Writer's Digest, 2010. Print.

James Alexander Thom was formerly a U.S. Marine, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a member of the faculty at the Indiana University Journalism School. He is the author of Follow the River, Long Knife, From Sea to Shining Sea, Panther in the Sky (for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award for best historical novel), Sign-Talker, The Children of First Man, and The Red Heart. He lives in the Indiana hill country near Bloomington with his wife, Dark Rain of the Shawnee Nation, United Remnant Band. Dark Rain is a director of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Planning Council. The author's Website is: www.jamesalexanderthom.com.

The concern of history and the concern of language, for that matter, is a question of truth. What is true? What is the truth? Language is never ending. An utterance communicated does not end with the last word but moves to the listener, the reader for interpretation and meaning. What was said? What does it mean? I think those are two different questions.   History, like language, is never ending. When an event is recollected, it becomes a history, and even when that remembering seems to end, people are still looking for "the truth" or another history of that event. So I see language and history always being partial to the extent that there is space unaccounted for -- gaps and fissures. How are we to fill in these gaps and fissures in truth? What do we call that which we do to fill in the gaps? I think it is the work of fiction, and I think that because we need fiction to fill in the gaps that we cannot talk about "the" truth but rather "a" truth. And so here, we are getting at how I see the English classroom being something more than literature. I see the English classroom as the place of examining the gaps and fissure of story. Some say everything is an argument (Graff) and some say everything is a narrative (Schaafsma). I think they are one and the same. We tell a story because we are sharing our argument. We make an argument because we have a story to tell.

I began this project thinking about what a novel can do that nonfiction could not. I wanted to think about what a piece of historical fiction like Ben Mikaelsen's Tree Girl  could say about the genocide of 200, 000 Mayas in the Guatemalan Highlands in the 1980s could do that a nonfiction text could not do. I think I can make a good argument for the way fiction can represent a truth and appropriate a metaphor for the purposes of expressing themes of resilience and cooperation so inherent to Maya life and the depict Mignolo's rhetoric of modernity through the logic of coloniality in its characterization while considering its young adult audience.  However, I am beginning to see how this novel leaves fissures in need of further inquiry, and that is why it is important to read -- not for what it does but for what it does not do. It does not tell the truth; it tells a truth. When frame for this story has a beginning and an ending; that which history does not. The language of Gaby's story, the protagonist, stops when the book is closed, but the meaning does not.

What James Alexander Thom discusses in his book about the craft of writing historical fiction is the problem of credibility, or to be more specific: the problem of too much credibility.  Thom talks about readers being misled by the credibility of the author of historical fiction, but I would argue that readers are often misled by texts more generally, and this, we may see, might be the renewed objective of the new English classroom: to see all texts as both a story and an argument. Indeed, readers can learn a great deal from reading; we can learn "facts" from the writer. Many such texts, specifically historical fiction pieces, contain indexes and bibliographies because writers are great researchers -- a combination of novelist and historian. However, despite bibliographies and even prologues that state "this book is a novel, everything in it is true and can be verified in research references" or "this novel is based on historical events," the writer must draw on inferences to tell a story. There is a certain degree of verisimilitude.

Truth is the aim of inquiry but most of the greatest theories are actually false; however, such inquiry does constitute progress with respect to the goal of truth, so it is possible, according to Karl Popper, for one false theory to be closer to the truth.  And with  literature or creative writing, verisimilitude has the property of seeming true, of resembling reality. As discussed in my post  about Slater's meme, how language makes imitation possible, in order for text to hold persuasive for an audience, it must be grounded in a seeming reality. So we can think about mimesis as evolving into versimilitude rather than being a copy or reproduction of an idea. As we discussed in the post about Slater's meme, a meme is imitated but never copied, so ideas are shared but are never exact thus always alive and taking shape through transmission. Here we cannot talk about history as being true or of a text being "fact" because historical "fact" must be interpreted and then crafted into a story by a writer for a reader who then interprets this new text for "fact" or a "truth."  Of course, inferences are influenced by one's own expectations and personal bias and experiences, but when we come to a text that has any version of the word "history" in it, readers tend to let their guard down and take up the "historical" as "the" truth rather than considering the rendering or fiction that is inherent in any text.

I would like to make a distinction here between verisimilitude as a "likeness or semblance of truth" and something altogether different which would be...what...that which is not at all like the truth or some form of essentializing even. Thom recounts a situation where he read historical fiction, one that had a claim about being true and verified by references. He says that he tried to verify the author's version of some story by finding others who had accepted this author's account, talking to other authorities on the topic and eventually writing his own version in one of his novels.After coming upon some "obscure scholarly refutation," Thom realized he had perpetuated a myth in his novel. The original novelist had started a "false" version, and because of Slater's meme, this idea of history kept recirculating. Is the lesson here to go to the beginning? Where does a story begin? What truth can you verify? No text can be credibly enough, but I don't think that is the point -- whether it is historical fiction or memoir. For a reader to glean any truth, the text must reflect realistic aspects of human life and the writer must be able to render the story to have the credibility that promotes the willing suspension of disbelief in the reader.  The novel, and history, and language, contained in a text (a beginning and an end contained on a page)  is a total illusion of life within itself. It is a closed fictional world (even if it is label nonfiction, memoir, autobiography, biography, essay). The credibility then cannot come from research and "facts" or accounts of an event; the credibility must be seen in terms of the text's own internal logic. While the reader's inference and interpretation pose a problem for mimesis; the answer to this problem is to see verisimilitude as a technical problem to resolve within the context of the novel's fictional world or the memoir's rendering of the writer's world.  The truth of a text is in its internal logic but the verisimilitude of this logic will always be deferred because the text's grounding in the real can always be contested.

A text is always a site of struggle (most of the time a political, social or economic struggle) over the real and its meanings. What is truth? What is verisimilitude? As an English teacher, we can think about these questions in every text we read, but I think that the novel, particularly the historical fiction novels, offer a site of entry for our audience (middle and high school students) to do inquiry. In making sense of the novel's internal logic, the reader is faced with his own ignorance of the past. What is truth? What is fiction? What are the remainders that have settled into the fissures of the narrative waiting further inquiry?

Fain, Perez, and Slater's Educating for Democracy, Changing the World

Fain, Stephen M.,, Slater, Judith J.Callejo-Pérez, David M.,eds. Educating For Democracy In A Changing World: Understanding Freedom In Contemporary America. New York : Peter Lang, 2007. Print.

Chapter 11, "Language of the Curriculum: Memes of Practice," Judith J. Slater

Judith J. Slater is a co-author of Higher Education and Human Capital: Re/thinking the Doctorate in America (2011), Collaboration in Education (2010), The War Against the Professions: The Impact of Politics and Economics on the Idea of University (2008), Teen Life in Asia (Teen Life Around the World) 2004), Pedagogy of Place (2003), The Freirian Legacy (2002), Acts of Alignment: Of Women in Math and Science and All of Us Who Search for Balance (2000), and  Anatomy of a Collaboration: Study of a College of Education/Public School Partnership (1996).

Educating for Democracy (2007) is a response to the events of 9/11 and argues that while the Bush administration further militarized the United States to protect the country, he carried this movement of regimenting systems to what Cintron calls a "discourse of measurement," a discourse that brought on initiatives such as No Child Left Behind. The ever-increasing threats to our nations security began a self-inflicted threat to freedom in and with Americans.  The irony is that freedom, as a requisite condition for democracy, became part of a discourse of measurement that redefined democracy. Democracy in America has become something much more narrow and controlled -- a thin democracy. And this trend has threatened the education in America -- equating learning with test scores and democracy with capitalism. The authors caution Americans and ask that we be more aware of the practices of the state alerting readers to instances of abridgement of our freedoms and pointing to what is influencing such practices.  As I am considering critical pedagogy and the practices of teachers in middle and high school, I am looking at how Slater, in particular, considers the rhetoric of curriculum. What is the logic at work here?

Slater begins her chapter talking about the use of language. Of course, in the field of education, mass beliefs and behaviors about education and schooling are communicated through language, and such beliefs are duplicated as that language makes its way through district offices, then faculty meetings, and then the classrooms. We, the education community, make certain assumptions about this language, this semantic environment, and for the most part, the assumptions are that this is what we "should" be doing, especially if it is "research-based." The language, however, is based on an ideology about what education and schooling is supposed to be and do. What is this ideology? "What allows this transformation of idea to language to occur? More importantly, what ideational representations do we place out there in print and between people and institutions that lead to action or inaction, to political, social and economic predispositions that permeate the common agreements that we have about who we understand and misunderstand each other and the institutions that we create to enforce and perpetuate them" (144).  Slater considers the mechanism of  memetics here.

Citing Richard Dawkins (1989) who coined the term memes to represent those elements of culture that are passed on by imitation, Slater  explains that by naming things and ideas, we given them a "boost in their quest for imitation and replication, building more and more memes around theme that are maintained and grow in size and complexity...for example, standardized testing takes on a new meaning within and without the original context that it was designed to represent" (145). Because memes are what Slater calls "second replicators unique to human beings," they vary as they are passed on, never passing exact copies, from person to person. We think, act, and learn through imitation and instruction as we evolve personal ideas that are in the interest of the replicating memes, according to Blakemore (1999). For example, the movement from A Nation at Risk to the legislation of  No Child Left Behind demonstrate how ideas were copied from site to site across the country and how classrooms began to look more and more alike as they taught to the test. Teachers stopped talking about what the text is doing and began talking about how to select the best answer because of the spread of memes. But what is it about the language or our minds that explains why some minds imitate and others resist replication? Does the memes need to be more easily imitated in order for it to spread? When I did some research last semester comparing the discourse of two mandates, it was clear that the "standards mandate" was followed and replicated over the "genocide mandate" primarily because the language was more "thin" or easily to replicate.

Slater asks, "How can less spreadable memes be sustained and compete concerning decisions about curriculum and instruction? What conditions would create environments for alternative memes to penetrate the discussion about education?"

If we first think about the functionalist use of language as a form of social control,we can think of language for transmission of information to establish relationship among people. The language itself may not be what controls, however, but rather the interpretation of the language. Slater says that the most powerful meme is democracy, but what meme of democracy is being imitated? Whose version of democracy should be imitated and how is this communicated? Slater writes, "The communicative function uses of mass media, the press, movies, television, and the Internet to help raise aspirations of people as they strive to be like others and this is facilitated by imitating memes. The world keeps going on the collected wisdom, information that helps control the environment from one generation to the next, creating cultural and intellectual cooperation that we take for granted in our meme-driven world" (150). It seems to me that this meme-driven world is, in fact, merely symbolic in nature. It is an imitation and not the real; the rhetoric of democracy, a democracy of competition and measurement, is the verbal world of schools. Slater and Hayakawa call this a false map. The imitator, perhaps a teacher, believes the prejudices of maps that are presented are the actual territory, maps with misinformation and error, rhetorical maps. Because so many teachers believe the map, the meme, is scientifically based and because we believe the source has authority because he or she is in a position of power, then we believe the maps (or language).

Of course, this logic of meme does not put much faith in the minds of teachers to resist meme or to produce new a new meme that might cultivate a profession of critical thinkers. Language is symbolic, and while its interpretation has the power to shape action and inaction,any new meme will not necessarily be any more true than the last. Slater argues against "oververbalizations, smoke screens for action and ideas, guided by words alone rather than facts that should guide us," but the "should guide us" language here assumes the curriculum workers can "create and imitate memes that lead to more appropriate ends" (151). She asks "rather than letting the memes of imitation of programs and ideas control the endless duplication, let those on the front lines, who know the student population best, work toward the goals of equity instead of having the solutions come to them ready made and impenetrable"(152). She is referring to the timelines, penalties,  funding and the legislation to measure equity and accountability. 

I am not convinced that those on the "front line" can shake the years of mimesis that pervade their pedagogy, but I do think that Slater ends her chapter with an important point about democracy and what a rhetoric of thick democracy can do to counter the logic of meme. Democracy is not about imitation; it is the antithesis. Democracy is complex, messy, and alive. Slater says that an orientation to this type of democracy requires another form of thought and language that is open to debate and dialogue so that they truly reflect the underlying values of a society.  "We have to be careful what memes we aid and abet and which ones we as yet have the opportunity to create" (153). Indeed, we do, but the question really needs to be "What is the answer to the logic of meme?"

Carr's Educating for Democracy

Carr, P. (2008). Educating for Democracy: With or without Social Justice. Teacher Education Quarterly, 35(4), 117-136.

What kind of democracy are we talking about?

When we talk about competition, higher standards, and accountability, we are talking about capitalism and free market. When we talk about be responsive to needs of all students, serving as a force of disrupting status quo (inclusivity), and moving toward a participatory, critically engaged community of learners, we are getting at social democracy. what kind of democracy are we enacting and teaching to our students?

The first section of Carr's article has proven to be the most helpful for my understanding of what happens in the classroom, specifically what knowledges are at the center and the margin of the pedagogy (the vision and materials of the classroom). Epistemologically, what counts as knowledge in that space? Are students learning inclusivity, participation, and critical engagement? Or are they learning obedience and conformity?  This either/or is certainly a binary that we can trouble, but I tend to see the overt and hidden messages of schools to be more about obedience and conformity to the idea of America as a free market rather than a social democracy.  And for the majority of my students (and their families) who are living in the periphery of the free market, I think enacting a social democracy will help them to construct alternatives or at least begin the delinking that Mignolo talks about. Carr calls this binary thin and thick democracy: 

The thick interpretation involves a more holistic, inclusive, participatory, and critical engagement, one that avoids jingoistic patriotism (Westheimer, 2006) and a passive, prescriptive curriculum and learning experience (Apple, 1996). This version of thick democracy reflects a concern for political literacy (Guttman, 1999), emancipatory engagement (Giroux, 1988), and political action (McLaren, 2007) that critics of the traditional or thin conception of democratic education have articulated. The key concern for the thick perspective of democracy resides in power relations, identity and social change, whereas the thin paradigm is primarily concerned with electoral processes, political parties, and structures and processes related to formal democracy. (118)

 Another way of looking at this is as I have stated above which is seeing "thin" democracy as that privatized, market democracy. If we teach our student to compete by making test scores the purpose of education, and if we say that our goal is to make students employable, then we are participating in the neo-liberal agenda. I think Carr is not actually arguing against agendas, but arguing for a different agenda -- one of social justice. Social justice is required because we must actually engage and disrupt the neo-liberal agenda before and while we are constructing a more "thick" democratic agenda.  We must develop civic literacy if we are to shift schooling.

Carr's paper presents his research in the College of Education in a university in Ohio where he had students  (129) and faculty (15) complete separate questionnaires in the 2005-6 school year.  In these questionnaires, Carr sought to understand how students and faculty conceptualize democracy and social justice in education. Students did not tend to see social justice as a fundamental component of democracy and faculty members noted how the controlling mechanisms of education/schooling  (autocratic in nature) often get in the way of democratic values.  One participant commented on how because his upbringing was homogenous, it was easy to be a citizen -- citizenship was narrowly defined, which success connecting it with democracy more explicitly is an important consideration, according to Carr (124). Another finding with the student population was the the "impact and role of power in shaping democracy" -- or at least one particular kind of democracy. Carr quotes Parker(2006) to talk about preparing teachers and thus students for democratic project: 

Difficult though listening is for any of us—especially across social positions—the project is all the more worthy of effort, experimentation, and gumption. In this way, there is some chance that educators might contribute, in a small but significant way, to “re-forming” the democratic public. This public, this heterogeneous group connected by political friendship, fundamentally is one “in which speed takes the place of blood, and acts of decision take the place of acts of vengence” (Pocock, 1998, p. 32). Citizens who possess broad social and disciplinary knowledge plus the disposition to speak and open to one another, whether they like one another or not, are precisely what the  democratic project cannot do without. ("Public discourses in schools: Purposes, problems, possibilities." Educational Research, 35 (8), 16.

Carr's research provides several important considerations for teacher education programs that I see as equally important for k-12 and college education as well. Teacher educators and teachers should address the substance and purpose of classroom practice with emphasis on the quality of what is being taught and the learning produced (identifying central concepts and in-depth understanding). Teaching about democracy and social justice cannot be an "add on" but must be inherent in practice.  He also suggests that we consider the "starting-point" for students as we develop an conceptual framework for social justice education so that students can and will engage critically. He cites Patrick (2003) in Teaching Democracy for an better understanding of this integrated approach: 

Effective education for citizenship in a democracy dynamically connects the four components of civic knowledge, cognitive civic skills, participatory civic skills, and civic dispositions. Effective teaching and learning of civic knowledge, for example, require that it be connected to civic skills and dispositions in various kinds of activities. Evaluation of one component over the other—for example, civic knowledge over skills or vice-versa—is a pedagogical flaw that impedes civic  learning. This, teaching should combine core content and the processes by which students develop skills and dispositions. (p. 3)

Thus, when we work with new teachers or with K-12 students, we need to think about civic learning as both the how and what of education. There are some systemic obstacles to implementing social justice education -- namely, the capitalist democratic framework of schooling, but that is precisely why the effort must be explicit. As Giroux argues, teachers must be politicized; and as McLaren says: teaching is never neutral.

·         Perceptions and experience of the educators in relation to democracy in education and its impact on what students learn about democracy
·         Connection between democracy and social justice
·         Thin – electoral process, political parties, and structures/processes related to formal democracy
·         Thick – holistic, inclusive, participator, and critical engagement avoids jingoistic patriotism and a passive prescriptive curriculum and learning experience – a concern for political literacy, emancipator engagement, political action – the key is in power relations, identity and social change,
·         Shifting toward constrained curriculum, supposedly higher standers, greater focus on employability, accountability – decrease in explicitly teaching for and about political literacy
·         Desirable traits for people living in a community – recycle, clean up, teat old peoplewith respect – but the are not democratic citizenship
·         Galston (2003) and Hess (2004) Teachers must be prepared and willing to address controversial issues in the classroom, and also be able to make direct linkages with civic skills and attidudes  in an explicit way
·         Most education students have a weak understanding of global issues that directly impact lives of Americans, which necessitates further inquiry into the role of teacher-educators
·         Intersection between social justice and democracy
·         Marshall and Oliva (2006) – social justice – equity, cultural diversity, the need for tolerance and respect for human rights and identity, the achievement gap, democracy and a sense of community  and belongingness, inclusion of groups that do not immediately come to  mind – differently abled
·         Moral imperative of ethical and responsible leadership
·         3 key components
o    Progressive or critical theoretical perspective
o    A deconstruction of the practical realities and perpetuation of inequities and the marginalization of members of a learning community who are outside the dominant culture
o    View schools as sites that not only engage in academic pursuits but also as locations that help creat actives to bring about the democratic reconstruction of society (Dantly and Tillman, 2006, 18-9)
·         Social justice praxis – linking the principles of democracy and equity in provocative ways so that social justice agenda becomes a vibrant part of everyday work of school leaders
·         Critical engagement Westheimer and Kahne (2004)
·         Education – production and reproduction of particular identities and social positioning
·         Bales argues (2006) teacher ed programs need to be vigilant in relation to international trends, research, and developing a relationship between teachers and learners – not discrete and finite set of teacher skills – examine how we might alter the accountability trajectory in the policy  spectacle that surrounds us; how far can democratic ed be effectively purused within tightly regimented and highly prescriptive teacher ed programs weary of not meeting standards
·         Collaborative inquiry – messy and demanding but aligns with democratic and social justice oriented values

·         Productive pedagogy – Ladwig (2004)
1. The overemphasis on classroom environments and processes rather than on
substance and purposes.
2. The relationships between foundational studies, curriculum studies and field
experiences which are currently insufficiently connected.
3. The purpose and structure of field experiences which centre too often on practicing
teaching techniques with relatively little concern for what is being taught
and the quality of learning produced.
4. The focus on student management relative to student learning, which mistakenly
assumes that management should be addressed first and separately.
5. The emphasis on syllabus content and constraints of the formal curriculum
relative to identifying central concepts and producing depth of understanding.
·         I would argue teaching morally.
·         Teaching about controversial issues – democracy and social justice – must take into account the starting-point for students; effective resources that outline the impetus, conceptual framework and application needs to be highlighted
·        Refuse to take a neutral position
·         Moral imperative of providing ethical and inclusive leadership (Ryan (2006) – curriculum in a socially just way
·         Dangers of being too focused on standards Wilson cooper (2006)

Cintron's "Discourse of Measurement"

Angels' Town by Ralph Cintron

Publication Date: November 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 080704637X | ISBN-13: 978-0807046371

"As issues of power and social order loom large in Angelstown, Ralph Cintron shows how eruptions on the margins of the community are emblematic of a deeper disorder. In their language and images, the members of a Latino community in a midsized American city create self-respect under conditions of disrepect. Cintron's innovative ethnography offers a beautiful portrait of a struggling Mexican-American community and shows how people (including ethnographers) make sense of their lives through cultural forms."

discourse of measurement -- mapping and texting changed expansive land to something reigned, placed under control -- This reminds me of James Scott's Seeing Like a State with the idea of regimenting or making legible both land and people. But what is lost in this formal, structural, fictitious measuring of this ordering of that which is natural, and by being natural disordered? Prior to formal systems, indigenous people had a a concept of land that was cultural and community-based, not articulated through a discourse of exacting measurement (37). The "texting" that came to expansive nature -- the claim forms, contracts, bills of sale and even street names -- reduced overwhelming space (or perhaps the mystery of space which is not named or measured). Cintron talks about the discourse of measurement here in a way that strikes me similar to James Scott, but as Cintron's book is an ethnography, he also sees telling a story as a discourse of measurement. Such histories reduce time to visible space; the enormity to which the contents of this history point become fenced by the edges of paper. The history is contained in "an illusion of management. Question: how can we read with an eye on this illusion? To not walk away from the text thinking we "know" these people, that their story can be measured by the text, the pages? The author, the enthonographer, is acting upon texts, so the text itself is an example of an ordering of that which is messy or complex. Question: Ethics of authoring?


I am thinking about the movement in Guatemala with Maya revitalization: the Pan-Mayan Movement (http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/guatemala/pan-mayan-movement-mayans-doorway-new-millennium). What are the "fences" of this movement? What is the rhetoric? What will be the consequence of Maya lawyers, doctors, and poets in Guatemalan politics? What will happen to the milpas, chicleros, and weaving traditions? It seems that many Mayas in the highlands want subsistence living; they don't want to participate in the free market or politics, and educating their children for careers that place Mayas in the market economy, which is synonymous with government, will put the indigenous way of life in danger. Thus, have not the Maya been resisting the discourse of measurement all along? How has Rigoberta Menchu participating in the discourse of measurement (both the mapping and texting)? Cintron writes that the state cannot exist without a recorded relationship (maps and texts); they cannot manage individuals of the state without evoking the discourse of measurement. Thus, a major function of writing and other recording devices is this management of individuals and nature. However, it is merely a "representation of reality" in documents, documents that distance because of the lack of face-to-face contact (relationships). It is this distance(53) that makes genocidal atrocities possible, and it is this distance that also provides space for resistance and resilience. As Cintron talks to and about Valerio's wall, iconography, and literacy, I was thinking a lot about the indigenous Ka'quikel kids in Chimeltenago, Guatemala. Valerio's teachers wanted him to write "right"-- the structuralist approach that pervades all English classrooms -- they labeled him LD, and it took a lot of time and wounds to get him to believe he was, in fact, smart, and that he could, in fact, write his desires (rather than the formulaic paragraph). I am wondering what will happen when the children from the milpas get a pencil in their hands and begin to write their desires? If a page is blank but we (the measurers of the state) give them the page and the pen, are we writing on them ideas of modern desires? How long will these children stay in school? Perhaps long enough to read a little, write a little, and learn a little math - but perhaps not long enough. They will work with and for their family as soon as they are useful. And then, will they return to the milpa or the loom with ideas of "algo mas" (Fisher) and modernity? Will they turn away from the Maya ways because of school? Do Maya families desire education for their children or is that society's desire? I am now thinking about the poor public school system in Guatemala that provides an 8-12 day of schooling up to 6th grade (18% attend secondary school; 1% attend university). Is this measuring a mechanism for just enough participation in the free market economy but not enough to participate in the structures that control this economy? They are consumers in capitalism not participators in democracy --what Cintron calls a "warped citizenship" (126).

Cintron talks about Beth Roy's idea of "implicit ideology," and I think this is was I am pondering above.Bodies of ideas or ideologies can become so internalized that they disappear as ideas but reappear as emotions and truths -- a common sense understanding of the world so ingrained as to be beyond question and, at the same time, outside consciousness. Let's think about ideas about food and family, for example. The Maya who reside in the Highlands, have a family milpa that may be an hour or two walk from where they live. This milpa provides the corn they need to feed their family for the year and a little more for trading (for other food, medicine, soap). The family clears the milpa, plants the milpa, harvests the milpa. The milpa is an idea that became a truth of the Maya. As measuring changes -- zoning, taxes, sales, transportation -- the implicit ideology shifts. The Maya had to see land as "owned" by the state and were forced to accept the mapping and be marginalized by the "texts" that accompanied such mapping. I could go into this further as one way of thinking about the escalation of mapping and marginalization (and ultimate murder) of the Maya.

Cinton's work ultimately asks how one creates respect under conditions of little or no respect, and while he is exploring how the cheros, Cecilia's continuum of modernity in the neighborhood (222), and how they create respect in the discourse of measurement, I think his study has generalizable features. He writes, "We might imagine a variety of societies, then, urging their citizenry toward the modern in a variety of ways -- and, therefore, simultaneously defining the backward in a variety of ways. Of course, those defined as backward may also, in turn, resist the modern in a variety of ways. And so it goes, the plethora of ways that modernity can take" (227). I saw, for example, widows who are using their traditional dyes and weaving methods as a way of supporting their families: they started a co-operative with other widows to pull together their textiles, rent space in a market, and save money towards the purchase of a building. They have business cards and a website. While most speak the native Quiche, some of the women are bilingual and have enough education to read, write and do the necessary math for their cooperative. They are maintaining their tradition and participating in the market. Chicleros have also reclaimed their craft and have begun a cooperative that no only sells the raw chicle to companies in America (like Glee Gum who advertises this heavily), but one cooperative actually manufacture a fully biodegradable gum marketing it as that which will save towns the clean up costs of the biodegradable, synthetic chewing gums.

Here we see Cintron's second point about the discourse of measurement. He writes, "The discourses of measurement tend to belittle other knowing systems -- implicitly, if not explicitly -- or at least to make a prior discourse of measurement obsolete. ...These displaced ways of knowing and talking represent a precision that may now be taken as one more sign of backwardness when compared to the discourses of modernity" (213). Indeed the discourse of measurement that regimented the expansive Maya land, and the state or plantation land that Maya families cannot afford to buy back (to expand their milpas to provide for their growing families) has pushed Maya ways of knowing to extinction for some families, specifically ones that have to travel to work in factories or move to live in factory towns (abandoning all traditional methods of life and living). This leads into Cintron's third point: "The security that a discourse of measurement offers may increase dependence and a certain anxious expectation concerning the power of its control" (214). Indeed, the government might like for all Mayas to abandon their milpas and come to the cities where they can be made legible (be measured). The land and life they abandon in the highlands will leave a great deal of fertile land for the major corporations,and the people will be thorough absorbed into the economic sphere (Cintron's fourth point about the discourse of measurement) -- the sphere subsistence farmers have avoided for a century.

However, the Maya have worked hard not to make their prior discourse of measurement obsolete. Some Maya (specifically Tecpan) allocate a portion of their milpas for export crops (a risky shift that requires knowledge of cultivating new crops, understanding fertilzation, the distribution business, and new taxes) which allows them a semblance of their traditional subsistance farming; or, as mentioned above, using their skills previously used for subsistence living to participate in niche markets (textiles, gum).

As I am writing here, I an keenly aware of Cintron's argument about ethnography. Writing about a people is one discourse of measurement among many that attempts to shape or made order out of that which is overwhelmingly expansive and complex.

Testimonio

Zimmerman, Marc.  Literature and Resistance in Guatemala: Textual Modes and Cultural Politics from El Senor Presidente to Rigoberta Menchu. Volume Two. Ohio: Monographs, 1995.

testimonio

• reveals the hidden secrets of popular traditions in relation to questions of resistances
• provide access to situations and forms of thought unknown  or poorly understood by officially sanctioned culture
• bridges dimensions of the state, social class, and  military institutions (sociology) with , popular traditions and every day life (anthropology) 
• literary testimonio -- as an aesthetically  rich and generally linear first person narration of socially and collectively significant experiences, in which the narrative voice is that of a typical or extraordinary witness or protagonist  who metonymically represents  other individual or groups that have lived through other, similar situations or the circumstances which induce them
• collective representativeness -- intertextual dialogue of voices, reproducing but also creatively reordering historical events in a way which impresses as representative and true and which projects a vision of life and society in need of transformation (12)
• a genre marked by it status as a subaltern discourse, which came to speak from the perspective of middle or lower sectors frustrated, repressed, marginalized, or exploited under capitalism
• democratic humanism (Duchesne) -- the recuperation of those marginalized by the processes of capitalist modernization throughout the third world; the oppresses, repressed, and humiliated takes a stances against the dominant cultural forms and elaborates  its own discursive space; this process takes place with the mediation of an intelligentsia that by definition is lettered (a person who can read and write must mediate the story of the subaltern who is not lettered)
• so...is it mediated or unmediated? Can true testimonio be unmediated? Achugar says that it is inevitably mediated with the intervention of and for the benefit of the lettered; whereas, the left says it is an unmediated voice of a revolutionary-tending social subject constructed as the people.
• Zimmerman and Beverly say that it is a form that takes its place in the struggle for the middle sectors, which are so often crucial in supporting and opposing revolutionary struggles
• Beverly -- a novella-length first person narrative recounted  by the protagonist or witness to the events recounted; testifying or bearing witness and the overall narrative unit is a life or a significant life experience; defined by its conflictive relation with established literary-aesthetic norms and with the institution of literature itself
• often at the margins of literature -- representing women, the insane, the criminal, the proletarian -- excluded from authorized representation
• defined as a nonfictional , popular-democratic form of epic narrative, since the narrative "I"  has a metonymic function as part of its narrative convention and since the form implies that any life so narratwd can have a kind of representivity
• each given testimony  evokes an implicit polyphony of other possible voices, lives, and experiences, and testimonio then involves an erasure of authorial presences and intentionality which makes possible a "comradely complicity between narrator and interlocutor and/or reader" (14)
• interlocutor's function -- what if the narrator requires (which it likely does) an interlocutor with a different ethnic or class background to elicit, edit, publish, and distribute the text? The function can lead to a one-sided questioning  or editing that results in a reactionary articulation of the testimonio as a kind of costumbrismo of the subaltern or the smothering of a genuine popular voice by a well-intentioned but repressive notion of correctness; 
• the narrator-compiler relationship can stand as a figure for the possible union of a radical intelligentsia and the masses -- a combination which has been decisive in the development of third world movements for social change
• gives voices to the previously voiceless, anonymous, collective pueblo
• suggests not charity but solidarity between the intelligentsia and the masses
• audience -- the readinb public which is still class-limited in advanced capitalist  societies; the complicity the form establishes with readers involves their identification with what they may well have seen as an alien or at least distant popular cause; by breaking down distance, testimonio has been important in maintaining and developing the practice of third world solidarity movements (15)
• illusory -- the effect has been produced by a narrator and a compiler;  the direct narrator uses oral story-telling tradition and the compiler makes a text out of the material; a metonymic trace of the real
• novel -- private form; both the story and subject end with the end of the text
• testimonio - -the narrator is a real person who continues living and acting in a real social history that also continue; it cannot be analyzed as a text within itselfness
• calls into question the very institution of literature as an ideological apparatus of alienation and domination; "for the form to have become more and more popular in recent years, means that there are experiences in the world today which cannot be adequately expressed  in forms like the novel, the short story, the lyric poem, or the autobiography == in other words, which would be betrayed by literature as we know it -- Why
• extraliterary or even antiliterary discourse which is its aesthetic effect
• interlocutor -- interviewer as mediator, interviewer as creative and therefore distorting interlocutor, as censor, editor, conveyor of testimony to those whose literary, ideological, and political norms are shaped by the written word
• Zimmerman argues that given the complex play of international, regional, and national forces, testimonio cannot necessarily signify any decisive or definitive transformation.

Farnham: "Ethical Ambiguity" and Teaching about Atrocities

Farnham, J.F. (1983). Ethical ambiguity and the teaching of the Holocaust. English

Journal, 72(3) , 519-542.

Farnham argues for an educational system that tries to sensitize students to ethical matters and to cultivate both complexity and ambiguity in ethics.  His experiences teaching about the Holocaust through literature suggest that the impact of witnessing prisoners and victims abandon their moral codes and follow ethical values geared to survival can rupture a student's binary of good and evil.  Our socially constructed notions of what and who is good or evil come with us as we bear witness/listen to stories of atrocity. We expect an S.S. man to be a "moral monster" just as we expect the "victim to be good and innocent," so when students read about what the victim does to survive (see my notes on Never Fall Down), their preconceived notions/stereotypes interrupt "authentic, analytic responses." Farnham writes: "We honor victims more easilyif they are recognizably more innocent like...Martin Luther King, whereas we tend to say that victims whose qualities violate our own sense of morality deserve what they got" (63).  If we can select or lead students to inquiry about the "ordinary" victims -- ones who do not fit the hero or martyr stock character --  and if we can create a framework of ideas for students to critically engage -- we can trouble this binary. Farnham asks, "Do victims have to be innocent to make their death significant to us?" 

This might be a good place to refer back to Walter Mignolo's work in The Darker Side of Western Modernity (see my notes on that, too).  He talks about the rhetoric of Western modernity based on the logic of coloniality. Where this is relevant is that we -- students and teachers linked with Western rhetoric and coloniality -- come to bear witness as readers/listeners with the values of our Western culture.  Farnham, however, says that because the Nazi's, when speaking about Holocaust literature, "disavowed the Western tradition of the dignity of the individual person" that what was left was a "moral vacuum, a world without traditional ethical values, and it was within this world that the victims tried to survive, some successfully by abandoning their former ethical values in a world without culture, a world in which traditional ethical values, through no fault of the victims, were absent" (64). While I certainly agree that the camps were a moral vacuum, I am not convinced that Hitler was, in fact, not enacting Western ideology and working within the logic of coloniality. There is little in Western culture that values an individual or sees every human being worthy of dignity. Western ideology values the "1%" or what Mignolo identified as all but the 80% of the population living "without."

The "lamb-like" victims that Farnham argues students want to see when they read about atrocities is evidence of Western rhetoric, which has indoctrinated students with notions of America as good, with victims as innocent, with soldiers and guerrillas as bad; thus, when students encounter a victim surviving at the cost of stealing food from a fellow victim or digging a mass grave for another victim or even invoking a punishment upon fellow man for the sake of survival, students/readers/listeners face a crisis because for this victim to fit into the binary, the student must decide the victim was at fault somehow. And how can we say the victim can be held to the same moral standard when imprisoned in this moral vacuum? So the framework of pedagogy needs to provide support for making sense of why students experience this crisis, why they want to turn way or blame rather than reconstruct notions of good and evil  (the Gorgon effect from Clendinen). Farnham writes, " We are in no position to judge the actions of people forced to live without the support of their culture and its values" (64). Here, he is talking about the Judeo-Christian culture whereby to judge a deed morally is to interpret it without context -- and to an extent that is what our students lean toward. How does the logic of death -- certain and irrefutable -- fit with the cultural logic of ethical behavior? 

In the "ethical behavior" section, Farnham talks about the importance of education to sensitize its students to ethical matters of our culture. The ethics that I see in the schools are those of capitalism and free market -- those who work hard get ahead; those who prepare for and participate in the market deserve to be successful; those who are not rich are not rich because they didn't work hard; competition breeds greatness not fairness; and equality is based on opportunity not on the conditions of that opportunity. What Farnham argues in this section is that for a deed to be moral, it need not conform to external principles of authority ( I think he means Judeo-Christian) but that because it "contributes to another person's freedom can make that deed moral in itself (but isn't that a principle?_). I guess the idea here is to bring in notions of obedience and conformity as not necessarily being moral but that we are free to choose or to "determine the moral nature of our deeds" (65), which requires a critical consciousness (thinking of Freire here). 

Now we can think about how ethics reflect culture. I want to make a comparison here that might not work. In literature of atrocity, we can see the logic of ethics in a moral vacuum -- one of survival that is outside of the culture in which the victim lived or was raised.  Behavior may change when people lose the support of their habitual culture. Farnham writes, "...the Holocaust was a rupture in Western culture and thus in Western values." I know what he means here, in the sense that Western culture valued human dignity. However, and here is my comparison, can we begin to think how Western culture and Western values do not value human dignity? Can we talk about how what we see in literature of atrocity and testimony of victims is a consequence of Western rhetoric and the logic of coloniality taken to its logical outcome?  The "normal" environment from which the victims are taken might actually be a facade of sorts, that hegemonic forces constructed and allowed until....? So the argument from Farnham that people can still act freely and ethically without the support of authority holds -- yes, we can and should provide this framework for critical engagement. Mignolo would call this delinking, I think. But, I suggest that teaching about atrocities provides a framework for students to see the rhetoric that has constructed their culture. (I am now imagining if readers in third world countries would experience the same crisis reading literature of atrocity as Western readers. Would they be appalled or think the victims are behaving amorally as they struggle to survive? In McCormick's rendering of Arn Chorn-Pond's experience suriving the "killing fields," did she  impose her rhetorically shaped Western values in the theme about survival's guilt?)

As Farnham suggests that what is latent in the Western tradition in literature and thus student expectations is "the assumption that heroes in books should be models of good behavior," and what "good behavior" means is also part of that tradition, a tradition that schools cultivate, a tradition that, as I have been arguing, is about conforming to Western rhetoric and the logic of coloniality -- capitalism rather than social democracy.

• ·         An education system which does not try to sensistize its students to ethical matters fails
• ·         What materials do you use to sensitize students to ethical matters?
• ·         Ethical values are one of the voices with which culture speaks to use
• ·         Examples of individuals and groups whose moral behavior disintegrated when they were deprived of the support of culture
• ·         What happens when we lose touch with the morals our culture teachers and conditions us to observe
• ·         Not every deed to be moral must be performed in obedience to some external principle of authority; performing a deed because it contributres to another person’s freedom can make that deed moral in itself
• ·         Existential approach to ethics – a deed is good because it contributes to another person’s freedom to be, not because it conforms to some external principle of authority, our freedom being that which defines us as human
• ·         Simone de Beauvoir in the Ethics of Ambiguity – choice and the responsibility which dervies from free choice;
• ·         Michael Siegel, We want to encourage the growth of citizens who can say no to authority when they judge the response necessary
• ·         Ethical behavior is not necessarily obedient behavior, not merely conformity to an external set of values – when we practice our freedom, we make ourselves more available to error than if we were to obey a fixed set of values which brook no ambiguity
• ·         While culture may support us in acting ethically, we are free at all times under all conditions to determine the moral nature of our deeds, as long as we are not deprived  of consciousness and self-awareness
• ·         Surveys the literary texts where ethically ambiguous occurrences reveal ethical choices without cultural support –

Menchu, the story of ALL Guatemalans?

I, Rigoberta Menchu, and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans by David Stoll (1992) refutes elements of the taped testimony and autobiography of Rigoberta Menchu (I, Rigoberta Menchu)  by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (1982). Stoll's central argument is that the Burgos account of Menchu's story served to support the guerrillas because she focused all the blame for the violence (genocide) on the government. Furthermore, Menchu put a human face on a clandestine movement (URNG), but as a Maya, she also validated the guerrilla's claim that their revolutionary movement represented the interests of the indigenous peoples who comprised nearly half of Guatemala's ten million people. So while Menchu went on to earn the Nobel Peace prize and brought international attention to the violence and political unrest in Guatemala, Stoll seems to argue that Burgos' book, in fact,  misrepresented the guerrilla's actual work and the role of the indigenous peoples in the revolution.

It seems that the first place where Menchu is clearly uniting guerrillas and peasants is when the meaning of companeros shifts from villager to guerrilla in the mountains saying "once the Indian opens his heart to them, all those in the mountains will be his brothers. We didn't feel deceived as we did with the army"(204). However, for an Indian to join the guerrillas he has to perform a death ceremony with his family for the purpose of passing on traditions or 'secrets' of the culture. This clearly aligns some Indians with guerrillas, but the question is whether or not the guerrillas were, in fact,part of the unionizing efforts and land rights organizations. Was this, perhaps, just Menchu's experience of intersecting ideologies or was she exploited by the guerrillas or did she exploit indigenous peoples for the guerrillas anti- government campaign?

When Menchu talks about the development of CUC, she says, "when those student, peasant and worker's leaders died together in the embassy, we knew we had an alliance and we looked at how we would confront the policies of the government together"(231). In 1981, this became the 31st January Popular Front to honor those killed in the Spanish embassy on that day; so while she says the CUC incorporates all peasants, she goes on to say "we" used real bombs but also propaganda bombs (233). However, later she decides her role is not with the CUC but another faction of the popular front, one with a Christian foundation saying she would not take up arms: "the people, the masses, are the only ones capable of transforming society"(246). She says she will teach her people to build a people's church not the Catholic church.

Misrepresentation might be the problem of "non-fiction" and testimony -- if only one testimony is given voice, then such an experience is in danger of essentializing a people. Thus, Stoll's efforts in his book to take multiple testimonies and to refute aspects of Burgos' rendering of Menchu's testimony, THE testimony of Indios, seem to be a worthy historical project: the doing of history. In showing the rhetorical function of Menchu's story, Stoll makes visible the rhetoric of modernity. I argue, and Stoll may argue this too as I am not finished with his book, civilians had to be rhetorically aligned with the guerrillas and Rigoberta had to be the face of the revolution (not an armed, male, dressed in fatigues -- a symbol of communism/socialism that prompted the US military support in the 60s/70s) for the Western/colonial forces to take notice and to facilitate peace talks. As it was, the West was not interested in peasant land rights because the allocation of land suited the free market well (e.g., the United Fruit Company).

Tree Girl a young adult novel written by Ben Mikaelsen (2004) complicates Menchu's account as well and seems to support Stoll's argument in that the protagonist, Gabriela Flores, and her Quiche canton do not have any affiliation with the guerrillas or the government. The plot shows how the villagers are careful not to take sides in the conflict despite the guerrillas efforts to say they were helping the canto get land rights and the government checking to see if the Quiche learned Spanish (a sign that the different ethnic Indios were now collaborating) and later outlawing machetes. The protagonist notes how she can tell the difference between the guerrillas and the soldiers (sometimes pretending to be guerrillas to get information) because of the modern weapons (American) they carried. So this story, like Stoll, want to complicate the context of the political unrest and show that the Indios were not necessarily aligned with the guerrilla movement anymore than they were content with the government land policies.I think Grandin's book, The Last Colonial Massacre, does a nice job of presenting the complexity of the Guatemala's political history including all the different revolutionary groups, their leaders, their objectives, and successes with failures -- using several testimonies but a great deal of primary sources.

Stoll clearly indicates that Menchu and Burgos' work brought international pressure for Guatemala to participation in UN sponsored peace talks. Guatemala's civilian government, army, and guerrilla movement signed a peace agreement in 1996.  The international community negotiated with human rights certification and trade packages, but it was Menchu who turned a local situation into a dramatic international symbol (would Mignolo call this rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality?).

Oral testimonies like I, Rigoberta Menchu have become controversial (see my post about Zimmerman's description of testimonio). Indigenous and other marginalized groups are insisting on equality so they are less willing to have their words mediated by outsiders including anthropologists accustomed to speaking and writing on behalf their behalf. (thinking of Linda Tuhiwai Smith who advocates for Maori to write about Maori). Stoll shares his experience coming face to face with Menchu at a conference where he presented Menchu with the "real" account of the death of her brother: "Whites have been writing our history for five hundred years, and no white anthropologist is going to tell me what I experienced in my own flesh" (227). One of facts that Stoll refutes is that Menchu was, in fact, educated and did, in fact, speak Spanish. If this is the case, why, then did Menchu  need Elisabeth Burgos as "the intermediary" who shaped Menchu's story for publication.  Stoll argues that Menchu was sufficiently literate throughout the book and questions why Menchu neglected to tell this part of her story. The question remains of this testimonio (and for the genre more generally) as to who authored the book. If Stoll is arguing that it was Menchu, and that Menchu was indeed literature,  then the question he needs to be asking why Menchu used Burgos as an intermediary -- especially if the taped testimony was not intended to become a book? And if there is a question as to Burgos' faithful rendering of the taped tesimony, that answer can be easily determined by listening to the tapes. Stoll says he listed to 2 hours of it. It seems to me that such an investigation should have been Stoll's first step. Ultimately, Stoll concludes that "contrary to the laureate's occasional statements to the contrary, there is every reason to believe that I, Rigoberta Menchu is her own account of her life" (183).  Burgos who has edited more than one oral testimony says,

The person feels carried away by her voice, her memory, and above all her capacity to improvise. She imagines, but in a true manner, on the basis of events that have happened, such that what is imagined has a real dimension...I have become aware that they relate, as their own experiences, what they could not have witnessed directly, what instead happened in proximity to their own histories. It is not that they act in bad faith, nor that they lie.  Instead, they are moved by a feeling of belonging. This feeling of belonging, of identifying with peoples, occurs when they feel empowered to elaborate their own version of history...It is not the same as reflecting on the basis of writing. The act of telling a story orally requires recreating  what happened through images , it requires setting a stage, like a theater director would, and requires what theater does -- to demonstrate. (199)

Therefore, I think that Stoll's anthropological approach to refuting Menchu's "own story" is ultimately insufficient if we are to understand history. Narratives are already incomplete with gaps and fissures -- whether it is testimonio, autobiography or even an anthropological text. A critical reader knows this and accepts this.

What Stoll could have done with this book was to take more thorough testimonies to examine the narrative process along with exploring the experience being the intermediary. Would he see the imagining that Burgos notices in her storytellers? Stoll admits that this would have been one way to do it-- the comparison of narrative (but I guess that is left for the reader). He wanted to evaluate oral testimony using documents that could set parameters (e.g., land contracts and human rights reports).  But such documents are also partial narratives and such documents are not the work of testimonio nor does testimonio claim to be.Stoll talked to Beverley and George Yudice, literary scholars. Beverley defined testimonio as a story "by a narrator who is also a real protagonist or witness of the event he or she recounts" while Yudice feints it as "an authentic narrative, told by a witness who...portrays his or her own experience as an agent (rather than a representative) of a collective memory and identity" (242). Stoll argues that Menchu's book was not testimonio because it fails the eye witness test, but he seems most upset by our "unfortunate tendency to idolize native voices that serve our own political and moral needs, as opposed to others that do not" (242). I think he is really referring to his refutation as something that does not serve our needs.


 Indeed, readers should step back from any text and weigh reliability, but what is Stoll exactly trying to prove? I think he is trying to expose how I, Rigoberta Menchu was a work of Western rhetoric. Menchu appealed to the Western expectation of native peoples; he argues that Menchu was charming her audience to get a hearing with mythic inflation (232) -- monolingualism, illiteracy, rejection of Western technology. There is a danger of essentializing a people and distorting debates about indigenous issues. I think, based on what I have read and my own conversations with the Maya, that Stoll's secondary argument that Menchu is not necessarily speaking for ALL Guatemalans is more convincing and can at least be argued with claims and evidence.  Is it fair to say that all peasants were ideologically committed to revolution? He writes, "Although some peasants acknowledge being attracted to the revolutionary vision, their moment of decision usually follows the onset of army retaliation. They face a grim choice between surrendering to army killers, escaping to coastal plantations, or casting their lot with the insurgency, if only by staying in a village over which the guerrillas are asserting control" (191-2).

What I, Rigoberta Menchu  does  -- and I think this is Stoll's contribution -- is that it is functions as a "symbol that resolves painful contradictions by transcending them with a healing image," and what that painful contradiction is depends on the beholder. The beholder is the white middle class and the symbol functions to bring the gap between privilege or Western values and its opposite. The symbol identifies a common enemy -- here the Guatemalan army. The privileged and the unprivileged, according to Stoll, can stand on the same side. The symbol is a unifying image.  Imagine, however,  if Menchu would have identified the US government who trained the Guatemalan army in her testimony. (Menchu narrated When Mountains Tremble, when this information was clearly presented; she seemed to know the US role in the genocide, yet she did not talk about the US or use the word genocide in her testimony.)  Menchu was making an argument for peace in her country; she needed to get her story out there, and she seemed to know what story was going to achieve that goal. Her story is both a narrative and an argument, but Stoll wants to say that we are caught up in that argument , privileging a story, and essentializing a people which takes us further from understanding life of Guatemalans.

"Only by establishing chronologies, vantage points, and probabilities can we have any hope of evaluating the reciprocal stories of victimization that are used to justify violence, or how these claims become rationales for larger political interests, or how human beings can be induced into committing mayhem" (274).The concern I hear is how cultural studies and postmodernism can be and have been used to silence inquiry by doing what Stoll says is " reducing intellectual discourse to relations of power and dismissing opposed points of view as reactionary. Scholars have to be able to critique a text to consider the different imaginings of the "other" and to consider what's behind privileging one version of a history over another. Stoll argues that the consequence of publishing this rendering of Menchu's story with the guerrilla movement depicted as a movement for and with the peasants was a Novel peace prize that prolonged a war because it was tailored to the propaganda needs of a guerrilla movement that had lost hope and leverage; the war continued for another fourteen years even thought it did use the international human rights movement to keep pressure on the Guatemalan army and finally obtain the December 1996 peace agreement (which may have been resolved earlier had the book told a different story).

While I, Rigoberta Menchu presents a tale of the necessary guerrilla movement to resist government oppression, Stoll concludes his book by asking What gave rise to such ferocious regimes  in the first place? And Greg Grandin offers an answer to this in his book The Last Colonial Massacre.  Similar to Grandin's argument, Stoll explains that the US bears much of the responsibility for this progressively violent militarization of the Guatemalan government. And the guerrilla movement has to accept responsibility for positioning the peasants as military targets, specifically indigenous groups who do not share the revolutionary vision. The imagery of native insurrection spread through the rhetoric of I, Rigoberta Menchu (notice that I am careful not to say that it was Menchu, specifically) was critical to romanticizing the guerrilla movement and its legitmacy. Stoll has argued that the Menchu family was not representative of the poorest peasants and that the idea of a guerrilla insurgency actually originated  in the plans of nonindigenous revolutionaries (Ladinos and ex-government agents as depicted in Tree Girl, When Mountains Tremble,  and Granito).  The middle class  radicals seeking solidarity with the countryside is an "urban romance" that is "more likely to kill off the left than build it" (282). 

• Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004. Print.
• Menchú, Rigoberta, and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso, 1984. Print.
• Menchú, Rigoberta, and Ann Wright. Crossing Borders. London: Verso, 1998. Print.
• Mikaelsen, Ben. Tree Girl: A Novel. New York: HarperTempest, 2004. Print.
•  Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999. Print.