¹ Economists will have to speak for themselves on this. The ample of evidence of misleading economic prognistications suggest that the synchronic approach is still popular. However, a significant number of economists are turning to evolutionary and complex systems models.

² It is not exactly synonymous with “mestizo” because it is used more in a cultural sense. Its colonial origins and recent evolution is a study in itself.

³ Quintana, Epaminondas, La generacion de 1920 (Guatemala: Tipografia Nacional, 1971)Google Scholar; Pitti, Joseph Apolonio, Jorge Ubico and Guatemalan Politics in the 1920s (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1975)Google Scholar; Adams, Richard N., “La Población Indigena en El Estado Liberal: 1900–1944,” in press, in Muñoz, Jorge Luján, ed., Historial General de Guatemala.Google Scholar The notion derived from the contemporary evolutionary view of the world where, for example, in Lewis Henry Morgan’s scheme, hunting and gathering peoples were generally designated as “savages,” agricultural peoples as “barbarians,” and only literate, citified peoples were designated as civilized.

⁴ Asturas, Miguel Angel, Sociologia Guatemalteca: el problems social del indio (Universidad nacional de Guatemala, 1923).Google Scholar

⁵ The work of Redfield, Gillin and Tumin were important exceptions.

⁶ Cultural Surveys of Panama-Nicaragua-Guatemala-El Salvador-Honduras (Washington: Pan American Sanitary Bureau, Scientific Publications, 1957), no. 33. The section on Guatemala appeared in Spanish: Encuesta sobre la cultura de los Ladinos en Guatemala. Seminario de Integración Social Guatemalteca, publicación no. 2, (Ministerio de Educación Publica, 1956).

⁷ I came to Guatemala in the late 1950s in response to a request by Guatemala’s ambassador to the United States, and its first professional anthropologist, Antonio Goubaud Carrera, to the Smithsonian Institution’s Institute of Social Anthropology. I worked with Goubaud’s Instituto Indigenista Nacional, and with the then newly founded Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama, and then with the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau. My job there was to contribute to the effectiveness of public health programs through the use of applied anthropology in all of Central America. I recommended to the PASB that I undertake a survey of the cultures of Central America in order to be able to lay a better foundation for the development of applied work. This eventuated in the Cultural Surveys of the various Central American states. (Costa Rica was omitted from these surveys because the then Director General de Sanidad, Dr. Oscar Vargas Méndez, was unconvinced that an anthropological study of his country was necessary since the Costa Rican population was composed of [in his words] “Aryans.”)

⁸ Traditional Indian: Men and women used clothing distinctive of their Indian community and speak an Indian language. Most women and some men did not speak Spanish. Modified Indian: While women used components of distinctive clothing, men wore Ladino clothing (e.g., usually commercially available) and while the Indian language was used, most people spoke at least some Spanish. Ladinized Indian: Neither sex used clothing distinctive of the community, and the Indian language was little used or had disappeared. However, the population still identified itself as Indian, and is usually so called by their neighbors. Their principle objective basis of differentiation was in being members of different social organizations. New Ladino: Outward characteristics were the same as Ladinized Indian and of other Ladinos, but the people are no longer regarded as Indian either by themselves or by their non-Indian neighbors; They did not identify themselves as Indian.

⁹ Carlos Guzman Bocker and Humberto Flores Alvarado both studied in Paris. Bockler was accompanied by a French student friend, Jean-Lupe Herbert. The principal texts can be found in Bockler, Carlos Guzman y Herbert, Jean-Loup, Guatemala: una interpretación histórica-social (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Ed., S.A. 1970)Google Scholar; Alvarado, Humberto Flores, La estructura social guatemalteca (Guatemala: Editorial Rumbos Nuevos, 1969)Google Scholar; El adamscismo y la sociedad guatemalteca (Guatemala: Editorial Piedra Santa, 1973).

¹⁰ Much of this is chronicled in Falla’s, Ricardo “El movimiento indígena,” Estudios Centroamericanos, Año 33, Nos. 356–357 (San Salvador, El Salvador: Universidad Centroamerican José Simeón Cañas, 1978), pp. 437–461 Google Scholar; and Arias’, Arturo “Changing Indian identity: Guatemala’s Violent Transition to Modernity” in Smith, Carol A., ed., Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540–1988 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 258–286.Google Scholar

¹¹ Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1966), 3rd definition.

¹² Max Weber: “We shall call ‘ethnic groups’ those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration … Ethnic membership differs from the kinship group precisely by being a presumed identity, not a group with concrete social action …” in Economy and Society, vol. 1 (University of California Press, 1978), p. 389.

¹³ A recent paper by Bogin, Barry (“Biocultural studies of ethnic groups,” in Research Strategies in Human Biology, Lasker, G.W. and Mascie-Taylor, C.G.N., eds. [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 33.)Google Scholar has argued that the non-biological usage has also been advocated by biologists. In 1936 Huxley and Haddon wrote, “The essential … reality is not the hypothetical sub-species or races, but the mixed ethnic groups, which can never be genetically purified into their original components …” We Europeans: A Survey of Racial Problems (New York: Harper and Bros., 1936), p. 108. More recently Crews and Bindon stated that, "Ethnicity is a sociocultural construct that is often, if not always, coextensive with discernible features of a group of individuals. These features include, but need not be limited to, language, style of dress and adornment, religion, patterns of social interaction and food habits”, Crews, D.E. and Bindon, J.R., “Ethnicity as a taxonòmic tool in biomedical research” Ethnicity & Disease. 1, 42.Google Scholar

¹⁴ In 1988 and 1989 FLACSO/Guatemala sponsored three seminars in which Maya Indians and Ladinos addressed various aspects of ethnicity in Guatemala. Mimeographed transcripts of these were made available shortly thereafter and the quotations herein are taken from those transcripts. Subsequently these materials were edited into a book by Solares, Jorge (Estado y nación: las demandas do los grupos étnicos en guatemala. Guatemala: FLACSO & Fundación Friedrich Ebert, 1993).Google Scholar All but three of the quotations in the following were reprinted by Solares: for convenience the citations to these passages will be made to the published volume. Citations for the other three (statements by Tujab, Curruchichi, and one by Caceres Estrada) are made to where they appear in the original mimeographed transcripts. All translations are by the present writer.

¹⁵ Marcial Maxiá in Solares, 1993, p. 30.

¹⁶ Gloria Tujab in Fundación Friedrich Ebert-FLACSO, Proyecto Guatemala. Seminario sobre relaciones intrétnicas en Guatemala. Guatemala, 8-9 Dec. 1988. Transcript, p. 9.

¹⁷ Pedro Gonzalez Curruchichi in Fundación Friedrich Ebert-FLACSO, Proyecto Guatemala. Seminario sobre relaciones intrétnicas en Guatemala. Guatemala, 8–9 Dec. 1988. Transcript, pp. 8–9.

¹⁸ Gerardo Ellington in Solares, 1993. pp. 26, 42, 43, and 46.

¹⁹ However, probably also because of more complex processes having to do with the politics of nation building and national definition. See Segal, Daniel A., “‘The European,’ Allegories of racial purity,” Anthropology Today, Vol. 7, No. 5, pp. 7–9, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁰ Smith, Carol A., “Class position and class consciousness in an Indian community: Totonicapán in the 1970s.” In Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540–1988. Edited by Smith, Carol A.. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. pp. 205–229.Google Scholar

²¹ See Earle, Duncan, “Mayas Aiding Mayas: Guatemalan Refugees in Chiapas, Mexico,” in Robert Carmack, Harvest of Violence, University of Oklahoma Press, 1988, pp. 256–273.Google Scholar

²² See Solares, 1993. pp. 121, 134.

²³ See Solares, 1993. pp. 116–117.

²⁴ Thus far we have discussed identity, culture and ancestry in Guatemala principally terms of the Maya. Does the same analysis work equally well for other étnias? It seems to apply to the Garifuna, if we accept Gerardo Ellington’s description: “For us, the Garifuna, it would be easy to respond: I am Garifuna because I have my own religion, the cult of the ancestors–we consider that Dios is first, then come the ancestors, then us–because I have my own dances, an infinity of our dances, because we have our own social organization–based on clubs and hermandades” (p. 26). “I am Garifuna because I have my own language … But it should be mentioned also that in Fuatemala there are blacks–the Garifuna are black, but among ourselves we can identify who is and who is not Garifuna because … [the] Negros ingleses … have different surnames … We also have the characteristic that we never stay in a fixed place, where there is no good life, we move on.”

²⁵ Solares, 1993. pp. 34-40, 77-81.

²⁶ Blanca Estela Salój in Solares, 1993. pp. 52–53.

²⁷ Roberto Cabrera in Solares, 1993. p. 39.

²⁸ Roberto Caceres Estrada in Fundación Friedrich Ebert-Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLASCO) Guatemala, Proyecto, Seminario sobre relationes interétnicas en Guatemala (Guatemala: FLACSO, 1988) p. 64.Google Scholar

²⁹ Roberto Caceres Estrada in Solares, 1993. pp. 37–38.

³⁰ Adams, Richard N., Cultural Surveys of Panama-Nicaragua-Guatemala-El Salvador-Honduras, no. 33 (Washington: Pan American Sanitary Bureau, Scientific Publications, 1957), p. 594.Google Scholar

³¹ Fry, Michael Forest, Agrarian Society in the Guatemalan Montaña, 1700–1840 (Dissertation submitted to … Tulane University, December, 1988).Google Scholar

³² Renato Rosaldo, paper delivered at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, Mexico, DF, 30 March 1993.

³³ The approximate distribution of Indian population in Central America changed between 1492 and 1980 as follows: