Missionaries, Basketball and Stranger-Kings. Modernization and Power in Todos Santos, Guatemala, from 1950 to 1980

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores ethnographically the impact of foreign missionaries in a Maya Mam community of Guatemala between 1954 and the end of the 1970s. As previously evidenced, the development-oriented activities of the missionaries were well received by local youths as they enabled their empowerment before the Ladino population and endorsed rebellion against the civil-religious status quo of communal power. This article proposes that, despite causing a rupture that sometimes escalated into violence, the communal order reshaped by rebellious youths maintained elements of continuity with the past. By analysing the persistent entanglement of power and religion and an emerging relevance of basketball through the lens of Graeber and Sahlins’ reflections on the divine origins of power, we can see how, under the surface of the explicit rupture, there was a hidden attempt to appropriate modernity by placing it within the Indigenous logics of rituality and power.