The global process of militarization and its concomitant increasing levels of violence have reached such horrific heights that, by the end of the 20th century, 90 percent of all war deaths were civilian (Catherine Lutz, “Making War and Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist 104(3):723–735). The memories, experiences, and legacies of state-sponsored violence for one group of civilian survivors are the subject of Victoria Sanford’s new book. Those who subscribe to the notion that human rights are one of anthropology’s most pressing scholarly and political concerns will find much to admire and praise in Sanford’s work.

Sanford carefully, compassionately, and critically documents and analyzes one of the worst atrocities in the recent history of the Americas—the genocide against indigenous Maya populations that left 626 villages destroyed and over 200,000 dead in Guatemala. The author conducted participant-observation with the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation as it exhumed several clandestine graves, enabling her to perform what she calls an “excavation of memory” (p. 17) through the collection of survivor testimonies and their public recounting in the work of the Commission for Historical Clarification as well as in Buried Secrets. Sanford uses her multisided ethnography to argue cogently for a reconceptualiztion of genocide from discrete incidents of ethnic massacre to a continuum of experiences of violence (p. 63). This perspective is borne out of several interlocking chapters (3, 4, 5, 6, and 8) in which she elucidates a new understanding of genocide as process, rather than as event. The analytic key to this reformulation of state-sponsored violence is what Sanford calls “the phenomenology of terror,” defined, in the Maya case, by seven phases: (1) premasscre community organizing and experiences with violence; (2) the massacre; (3) postmassacre flight in the mountains; (4) army captures and community surrenders; (5) model villages; (6) ongoing militarization of community life; and (7) living memory of terror (p. 123). Sanford’s framework underscores the enduring terror experienced by Mayas as a result of the increasing militarization of quotidian life for rural people both before and after the massacre.

For those who desire a promising interpretation of Guatemala’s transition to democratic civil society based on the redress of past evils, Sanford delivers. She asserts that through public testimony and recognition of the genocidal atrocities, “the transformation of a private memory creates a public space, however small, where survivors learn to speak; it breaks down to externally imposed understandings and chips away at the power structures imposed through silent negotiation of life-shattering events” (p. 12). Despite the hope Sanford sees in her fieldwork and conveys in her analysis, one must consider the lingering unanswered question Sanford’s own informants raise—the question of impunity. Sanford recounts a horrific memory experienced by a doctor (presumably not Maya) whose patient was murdered as he lay on the operating table. The doctor was forced against the wall while three laughing men opened fire with their machine guns, shooting the patient to death. The doctor explained to Sanford, “The story is about impunity . . . It is the impunity of the act. Those men didn’t even wear masks to cover their faces. They are from here. One of them lives on the same street as I do. I tell you each time I see him on my street, each time he greats me, I relive those moments. . . . I see this man most every day and the impunity is so great, he doesn’t even hang his head” (p. 35). In a nation where forensic anthropologists still receive death threats, massacre survivors and peace activists like Dominga Sic Ruiz often travel with body guards, and increasing criminal violence dominates newspaper reports, the skeptic must ask, is speaking truth to power enough to transform the institutionalized structures of inequality that precipitated ethnic violence in the first place?

In addition to Sanford’s significant intervention into international human rights discourse by reconstituting genocide, true to her promise, she highlights the role of rural Maya survivors as agents of history and justice. By recounting Mayas’ living memories of violence and the struggles for reconciliation, Sanford directly challenges those who, like the Guatemalan army, elite interests, and U.S. academics like David Stoll, have attempted to discredit the testimony of massacre survivors: “The perception of the ‘manipulated’ Maya . . . is intended to erase both community and individual memory and agency. Like the official story upon which it is based, this perception shares the same racist ideational foundation that denies political consciousness and free will to the Maya” (p. 49). In sum, Sanford’s ethnography of genocide is a shining testimony to the will of its survivors as well as to the possibility of anthropologists aiding democratic social projects.