Community Justice and Ritual Spectacle: A Case of Mayan Law in Guatemala

Abstract

This essay, which accompanies the documentary “Suk’ B’anik,” is based on a case of theft settled by the so-called “ancestral Mayan law” in the municipality of Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala, where more than 80% of the populace self-identify as Maya-K’iche’. The material seeks to deepen understanding of the collective reasoning and emotions that took place in the community trial of the case. In the face of the systemic weakness of the state’s justice system, in this region popular courts coordinated by local community mayors and supracommunal structures of ancestral authorities have become common to collectively try criminals or alleged criminals and to subject them to some form of corrective punishment. These judicial proceedings are developed within their own cultural understandings, which frequently offer highly ritualized spectacular choreographies for local as well as wider consumption. That visuality, often accompanied by community video practices, gives the participants’ performance an intrinsic status in the interior of these judicial processes while reaffirming the structures of local power. In these collective scenarios, the individual bodies of those accused are exhibited and prosecuted by the local authorities in front of audiences that demand sanctions to drum out the wrongdoing perceived as being damaging to the community. This, in turn, acts as a metaphor of moral cleansing and reequilibrium of a social body processing its own conflicts. Just as in rites of passage or in the theater, the popular trials in these Maya-K’iche’ communities often invoke other times and spaces, including supernatural ones, that have a bearing on the effectiveness of the reorganizational message that at the same time reinforces their own constructions of identity.