In this concise and engaging study, Nicholas Higgins situates the events of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in the context of Mexican history since the Spanish Conquest, exploring theoretical debates within the field of international relations concerning modern state formation and local politics. He casts his book as an analysis of governmentality, a concept, he writes, “that combines the micropolitics of individuals with the macropolitics of states” (p. 21). For historians, this will sound a lot like debates about structure and agency, but the literature Higgins cites to frame his approach has more affinity with political science than with social history. This makes for a fresh and unpredictable discussion of theory in his introduction. Here he juxtaposes the antihistoricism of scholars like Karl Popper and George Kennan with the contemporary pragmatism of Richard Rorty; he credits the work of Ian Hacking and Michel Foucault with helping him to articulate an approach that is explicitly historicist and focuses on (after Foucault) the construction of “historical subjectivities” — in this case, the Invisible Indian.While the introduction is devoted to abstract theorizing, the chapters that follow are not. Instead, Higgins offers a fast-paced overview of Chiapas history in six parts, combining conventional political history and familiar accounts of local events like the 1712 revolt and the 1868 Caste War with brief discussions of state policies regarding Indians and shifting ideas about race and ethnicity. He begins with Bartolomé de Las Casas and Renaissance debates about souls; he then turns next to the Enlightenment and the New Science, and then on to positivism, liberalism, and eventually neoliberalism, ending with the events of January 1994. This is a well-worn narrative, but Higgins recounts it well. Though his work on the Zapatstas includes original interviews, most of the book is based on published secondary sources. He has read widely and wisely, however, and his synthetic treatment is well conceived, thoughtful, and remarkably broad, given its brevity. For someone with a newfound interest in Chiapas, whether a general reader or undergraduate, these chapters provide a useful introduction. Higgins’s book is not a substitute, however, for Neil Harvey’s The Chiapas Rebellion (Duke Univ. Press, 1999) or John Womack Jr.’s edited volume Rebellion in Chiapas (New Press, 1999), both of which provide longer, richer, and more comprehensive treatments. Nor is it a substitute for Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias, edited by Jan Rus, Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, and Shannan L. Mattice (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), which largely is devoted to events since 1994. Higgins does not discuss the most recent decade of Mexican political history at all, a puzzling choice that diminishes the potential readership for his book and deprives him of an opportunity to elaborate and clarify the theoretical position that provides the rationale for the entire study.In the end, the two dimensions of Higgins’s book — the sophisticated and challenging postmodernist critique of antihistoricism among international-relations scholars and the conventional, accessible narrative of historical events — are poorly articulated. This is, in part, a problem of rhetorical strategy, a decision by the author to make the argument more implicit than explicit, a point he addresses in his introduction. Though he promises to return to the theoretical premises he outlines at the start, his conclusion still leaves too much work for the reader. More importantly, despite the breadth of his interests, Higgins’s reconstruction of episodic histories focuses too narrowly on politics and political philosophy and neglects social history and the economy. For a book that on one level is all about globalization, there is little here about land and labor, little about the tangible material realities of poor rural peoples, little about families and the different experiences of women and men. Higgins does write knowledgeably about what he calls “the multiplicity of sociopolitical identities” in Mexico, including status hierarchies, class tensions, and religious disputes among Mayas, but he does not offer much context for understanding them. His study also would have profited from a deeper engagement with the literature on Maya activism in Guatemala, especially the debates about essentialism and self-representation that provide models for hard-nosed analysis that nonetheless can be sympathetic to native peoples. Higgins, in the last pages of his book, finally succumbs to a thoroughly romantic view of contemporary ethnic politics in Mexico, concluding, “I believe it is more convincing to view the sociocultural practices and experiences of Chiapan Indians themselves as producing another modernist vision, one that we might productively call a cultural humanism” (p. 186). That’s an appealing conclusion, but not a particularly insightful one, especially for readers looking to understand the complex and unpredictable events that have unfolded in Chiapas and Mexico over the last decade. It makes for a disappointing end to a book that opens with considerable promise.
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Mar 6, 2013
Rani T Alexander + 1
Open Access
