Diane M. Nelson was surrounded by her family when she died in her home in Carrboro, North Carolina, USA. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the end of January and died on April 27, 2022. Yet she remains presente among us, held close by an astounding range of comrades, friends, kin, teachers, students, and colleagues who admire her. Her life was celebrated in public ceremonies at the Carrboro Town Commons on June 12, 2022, and in Guatemala City at the Fondo de Cultura Económica's Librería Luis Cardoza y Aragón on August 5, 2022.Diane was a graduate of Wellesley College and received her master's and PhD from Stanford University. She taught at Lewis and Clark College for six years, then at Duke for twenty-one years in the Department of Cultural Anthropology. But before that—in chronology and consequence—Diane began fieldwork in Guatemala with Paula Worby in 1985 as a recently graduated student of Beatriz Manz. She published in Spanish and English and wrote several important books and a prodigious number of articles, book chapters, reviews, talks, and letters of recommendation. Diane published three single-author books—A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (1999), published in Spanish in 2006 as Un dedo en la llaga: Cuerpos políticos y políticas del cuerpo en Guatemala del Quinto Centenario; Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala (2009), published in Spanish in 2022 as Saldando cuentas; and Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide (2015). She also coedited War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-genocide Guatemala (2013) with Carlota McAllister and Guatemala, the Question of Genocide (2018) with Elizabeth Oglesby (forthcoming in Spanish as El juicio histórico: Genocidio en Guatemala). She published numerous articles in Current Anthropology, Journal of Genocide Research, American Ethnologist, and WSQ, among other journals. She recently published “Low Intensities” in Current Anthropology and the book chapter “Water Power Promise: Revisiting Revolutionary DIY.” This work reflected some of the expansive thinking that was set to rock the world in a new book project, “Riparian Worlding: Mayan Life and Anti-extractivism,” which she was writing at the time of her death. Diane was active in many communities, including the Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences in Guatemala (AVANCSO), Universidad Ixil, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, the Oxidate Working Group, and Occupy.Diane challenged historians and history to be more rigorous and more playful. She assembled archives of jokes, rumors, horror and science fiction films, clothing, light bulbs, grave sites, math, scale, mosquitoes, statistics, pyramid schemes, Star Trek, well-known theory heads, fake news, and even her own marginalia. Her intellectual dexterity is unmatched. Her books are essential reading for historians because of how she approaches the postwar state. Each text takes up a distinct angle or, really, problem. A Finger in the Wound challenges colonial frameworks of solidarity and complicity through her concept of fluidarity. Reckoning considers the contradictions at the heart of the postgenocide state through the framework of engaño. Who Counts? interrogates the unpredictable afterlives of numbers and counting amid the Guatemalan state's brutal peacetime regimes. Diane teaches historians how to see the state.Her commitments to scholarship alongside social justice, mentoring, generosity, fluidarity, and kindness spun a vast web across the globe. The best way to encapsulate Diane's lifework is to hear from some of her many compas.Many who remember Diane point out the depth of her commitment to Guatemala. María Aguilar writes, She knew how to nurture networks of friendships created through trips, fieldwork, and long stays in the country. Diane never assumed Guatemala as a source of study to advance her career and then forget about it. On the contrary, the country and its people were a source of love that nourished her analysis of the rotten wounds that the nation carries. . . . Diane taught me that the academic world should not take away our humanity or individuality, and that within a system that can often become toxic, the most important thing is to defend joy and not lose our essence.“Diana Nelson era un sol,” writes Arturo Taracena. “Brillaba donde se encontraba. Brillaba por su inteligencia y la perspicacia de sus comentarios. . . . No era fácil para un lego como yo seguir sus escritos sobre la realidad guatemalteca, la subalternidad, las mujeres, el papel de la biopolítica, pero, cuando se la escuchaba, uno terminaba por comprender lo básico, ayudado por la alegre gesticulación de sus manos y brazos, en medio de sus contagiosas carcajadas. . . . Siempre vivirá en nosotros.”“Diane possessed an inimitable talent and intellectual flair as an anthropologist,” write Carlota McAllister and Elizabeth Oglesby in the LASA Forum. “But she also made conscientious decisions throughout her career about the kind of anthropologist she wanted to be, leaving us a legacy of impassioned engagement to carry on. She maintained a decades-long commitment to collaborating with Guatemalan scholars and activists and to nurturing those transnational networks. And she did it with unforgettable sparkle and joy.” They add, “With her commitment to reflexivity, her command of Marxist, poststructuralist, and feminist theory, her talent for fieldwork, and her friendships and collaborations with Guatemalan colleagues, Diane became an active participant in the reconstruction of critical intellectual life in Guatemala.”1AVANCSO director Clara Arenas adds, Hubo años en los que Diane pasó más tiempo en Guatemala y, entonces, su relación con AVANCSO fue más regular y, diríamos, orgánica. Tal fue el caso en los años 90, cuando para desarrollar nuestra planificación quinquenal, nos dividimos en grupos que a lo largo de varias semanas discutirían diversos temas. Pues Diane se integró plenamente al grupo que discutía el ajuste estructural, ese asunto que podía ser árido, pero que para ella fue motivo de gran interés, quizá no tanto por los aspectos técnicos, sino por la posibilidad que le daba de captar con su singular mirada las maneras en que se discutían los diferentes temas implicados. Puede decirse que hacía etnografía al mismo tiempo que ponía su granito de arena en la discusión. Más tarde la oiríamos decir en otros contextos y momentos, cosas del estilo de “como dice mi grupo de ajuste estructural.” También organizamos en ocasiones charlas con nuestro equipo de investigación en las que Diane nos puso al tanto de alguno de los temas que estaba explorando. Pero quizá más interesantes todavía . . . fueron las innumerables conversaciones o discusiones en los pasillos o entre los cubículos donde se encuentra el Área de Estudios sobre Imaginarios Sociales en nuestra oficina. No siempre salió todo el mundo convencido de los puntos de vista de Diane, pero lo que es seguro decir es que nadie fue indiferente a la discusión y que ella abrió puertas y ventanas a nuevas posibilidades para pensar.Others note her kindness and generosity. Avery Dickins de Girón, national coordinator for the Guatemala Scholars Network (GSN), writes, “As all who knew her would agree, Diane was a force of energy, full of enthusiasm and warmth, and an amazing sense of humor. . . . Diane made critical contributions to scholarship and praxis, mentoring and supporting many younger scholars through the GSN and beyond.” “For all her brilliance and wit,” writes Jeffrey L. Gould, “she was incredibly unpretentious. She was also very supportive of the work of other scholars. Her own work challenged established paradigms in ways very few other scholars did. I only wish I could have spent more time with her.”Many compas and students write of her fabulous teaching. “Diane allowed me to push my pedagogy forward in unexpected ways that always seemed to transgress the bounds of what was acceptable,” writes Elliott Young. “She would do a closing ritual in her Myth, Ritual, Symbol class that one year had a student in diapers peeing himself. . . . Diane and I went up to Seattle for the WTO protests in 1999 along with more than 100 students. Being with her on the streets of Seattle with tear gas filling the air and riot cops pointing big guns in our direction was something I will not forget.”Emily Taylor writes, I wish I had a picture now, but when she taught Marx to our graduate seminar (fall 2019), she dressed up as a “fat cat” boss, with a suit and cat ears with a drawn-on mustache and sideburns. She led an activity simulating primitive accumulation, class oppression, and worker power—we, the workers, had to seize the means of production from the capitalist class (her!) through collective action! I'll never forget that she cried during the debrief of the activity, openly mourning all that capitalism has taken from us and the lost possibilities of a more just world.Others remember her commitment to living. “Diane was a spark, a burst of song, a bad pun, a warrior princess ready to enter the struggle wherever she found herself (and many places she didn't find herself),” remembers Jocelyn Olcott. “She was the angel on my shoulder reminding me of all the things more important than the deadline in front of me. And reminding us all to breathe in and to breathe out.” J. T. Way remembers, I've never traveled around Guatemala with anyone else but Diane who shares my childlike awe at the place; we'd both be glued to the windows commenting on everything we saw while en route between stops. Really, like two little kids seeing everything for the first time. In Huehue we tramped together for hours through the barrios marginales in the ravines on the edge of town, stopping to chat with everyone we met. She had an amazing gift for getting people to open up. In the parque central I sat down on a bench while she was shopping at the vendors' stalls (she could do that endlessly!), and two shoeshiners were looking at us and making what I will generously call “ribald” comments in K'iche’, as even I could tell from my elementary knowledge of Kaqchikel malas palabras. No sooner had Diane strolled over than we were all in a deep conversation about their hometown of Toto and Padre Ricardo Falla and migrant labor and their wives and kids and hopes and aspirations . . . really, it was incredible.Paula Worby remembers, Diane always put other people first—friends, family, students. She loved her people very fiercely and yet always made room for one more. She was programmed like few others to listen deeply, learn and evolve, and work to unlearn societal practices deemed harmful or hurtful. She fought for water, loved fire, listened to trees. She walked the talk and looked to call out historical wrongs while being a motivating force to change the future. I shared her very first trip to Guatemala in 1985 and inadvertently, because it never should have been her last trip, shared her final days in Guatemala too. During all those years she maintained both her intrepidness and deep inquiry, toward Guatemala and so much else. Like the bees she revered, Diane played her part in spreading goodness, creating sweetness, and sparking wonder.Diane generously shared her experiences of becoming and being sick with clarity and humor through an online journal site. She reflected on privilege in the hospital, therapeutic toxicity, garden flowers, Netflix binges, snacks, yoga, body-minds, and new scars, and in so doing created still more new communities in the comments section. These words sometimes read like field notes on cancer, except she shared that she had “no ethnographic desire towards this.” She called them a “memory bridge,” instead. She shared because, in her words, “I wanted you all to know because you are such a dear and important part of my life, intellectually and communitarily.” Characteristically, she signed off her last journal entry with: “pues, hasta la vista!”