Origins of the Project

A different tree ought to have grown out of the seed of this study. When I went to the countryside of the western Maya area of Guatemala in July of 1969, I took with me the design for research into the consequences of population pressures on the social structure and culture of a community. I had chosen a number of municipalities in the western highlands of Guatemala, which I then visited to choose the one that displayed, through certain indicators, the greatest population pressure in terms of its resources. All of those under consideration were municipalities in the Quiché or nearby Cakchikel area. I had been studying the Quiché language for a couple of years; hence, I did not go looking for an appropriate research site in the Mam- or Kekchi-speaking areas. In order to work with a manageable population, I sought out only municipalities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. While traveling, moreover, I ruled out some small municipalities, such as those along Lake Atitlán that Stanford University was then planning to include in its genetics project and were then being "occupied" by students from both Berkeley and Stanford. The municipalities visited were Santa Cruz Balanyá, Santa Apolonia, San José Poaquil, and San Antonio Nejapa (administratively a village of Acatenango that resembled a municipality) in the department of Chimaltenango; Patzité, San Antonio Ilotenango, San Pedro Jocopilas, and San Bartolomé Jocotenango in the department of El Quiché; Santa Lucía la Reforma, San Andrés Xecul, and San Bartolo in the department of Totonicapán; Concepción in Sololá; and Zunil and San Francisco la Unión in Quetzaltenango.

After taking into account the number of people, the territorial extension, the quality of the land, the resources made possible by being near a major town with some economic activity, migrations to the coast, and other factors proper to each municipality, I chose San Antonio Ilotenango and San Andrés Xecul, intending to live in the former, whose lands were drier than those of Xecul, which had greater migration to the coast and was more isolated from sources of work in the capital city of the department, Santa Cruz. Two university students who wanted to help me would live in Xecul, which would provide me with a point of comparison. However, it turned out to be impossible to place the students in Xecul, so one moved to Patzité and the other to San Pedro Jocopilas. As a result of our contact with Patzité, the students and I published two articles on some of the processes that led to the religious conversion of two-thirds of the population, but I do not include those data in this book because they do not contrast sharply with those from San Antonio, the next municipality over (Baltodano, de la Cerda, and Falla 1970).

After I had begun to live in San Antonio, I became increasingly convinced of an idea that had occurred to me while I was doing the preparatory travel, namely, that although the communities visited had clearly reacted to population increase, it was not a topic that concerned them nor something people talked about, as they did about other recent phenomena. I was in danger of imposing my own issue. If research into population pressure was to be fruitful, the people in the area themselves would have to be aware of the problem. Such awareness existed, but it was not then, nor is it even now, so pressing that the people of the area were often dealing with the issue and discussing it.

Yet, two recent developments were far more striking, as determined by the frequency and interest with which people were talking about them: the adoption of chemical fertilizer and religious conversion. Almost everyone was by then using chemical fertilizer, after having held back for a few years. That change took place in the 1960s and was already a fait accompli (Falla 1972b). Conversion, on the other hand, which had begun in 1948, was still taking place in certain cantons in a process that divided groups on the municipal level and created divisions between neighbors and relatives, and sometimes between parents and children.

This rebellion in beliefs had been stirring the indigenous western highlands of Guatemala since the mid-1930s (Baltodano, de la Cerda, and Falla 1970), and after 1945 it had spread throughout the department of El Quiché. All the municipalities that I had visited on my rounds had been thrown into turmoil over it. According to calculations I made in 1970 with the help of men who were familiar with the various municipalities in El Quiché, in that department alone (which, according to the 1964 census, had 249,704 inhabitants) around 70,000 people had joined "Acción," or Catholic Action (CA), as the movement in opposition to the Tradition is known. This number does not include the various groups of evangelical Protestants, who have followed a course similar to that of Catholic Action members.

Thus, when I went to the western highlands and began to live in a town there, I myself was affected by this religious phenomenon and was personally involved in it. Indeed, the focus of my study gradually changed: because of its power to reshape society and the thinking of the people in the town, religious conversion became the new topic.

Thus, I did not choose the site in terms of the research topic, but rather, choosing the site led me to the topic, which does not rule out the possibility that another site might have turned out to be even more revealing.

Constraints and Advantages

What I did among the people of San Antonio and my position in that society have to be explained in order to clarify both the limitations and the strengths of this study. I presented myself to the town as a Catholic priest; I said nothing about being an anthropologist. I could have said nothing about my identity as a priest and passed as someone who wanted to study the customs and problems of the town, as I did on another occasion in Venezuela with the Yaruros, who had no idea what it meant to be a priest or a Catholic. But that was impossible in Guatemala because my identity was public knowledge, and Guatemala is a small country.

The upshot of my position was that contacts, information, and, as I have already said, the focus of the study were automatically selected. I arrived in the town after being briefed by the priests in Santa Cruz del Quiché, the administrative capital of the department. There had been no resident priest in San Antonio for several centuries. I sought out the mayor, who was a convert and a past president of Catholic Action in his district, and the sacristan, who also held the position of fifth regidor (town councilman). Both were very pleased at my arrival, because even though they did not say so, it would bolster the prestige of their organization, Catholic Action, in its struggle against the Traditionalists (Costumbristas), those who stand by their tradition, and to a lesser extent against the evangelical Protestants. They were also pleased that I would serve them with my ministry. After a mass in one of the cantons where the bishop officially introduced me to three hundred persons, some participants in Catholic Action began to request that San Antonio become independent of Santa Cruz by becoming a parish, and that the times for weekly Saturday and Sunday masses be changed.

As a result of these requests, my functions were restricted. Since I would be there only one year, I would not have to take on any of the weekly activities of the priest who came in from Santa Cruz (classes, Sunday mass, baptisms, and marriages), nor would I have any jurisdictional function. All decisions proper to the pastor or his representative would remain with him. My services as a priest were reduced to celebrating private masses, ordinarily on weekdays; giving last rites to those who were dying, when they or their relatives requested it; and helping with confessions. All these services were requested by the parishioners themselves, either in general or in particular cases. I took practically no initiatives of my own along these lines and devoted most of my time to talking with the people.

The first time I was asked to help with confessions, a few days after my arrival, I was reluctant for a moment, but I gave in when I noticed the reaction on the face of a Catholic Action leader; I therefore decided to wait until later before making an overall decision. I did not want any reader of this book to think that the information had come from confessions, because a priest must hold such information in absolute secrecy. I heard many confessions, generally following a standard formula; those that were more detailed and personal, and which I did not understand well at first, I could filter out and forget, simply by not recording them in my journal. I have not used this specific information for this study. Nor did I ask other people in the town about things that I had heard from particular people in confession, and acted instead as though I knew nothing.

At mass it was assumed that I had to preach. Thus I could not fail to do so, and I had to deliver my message with conviction, which brings up a problem regarding the scientific method: was I changing the object under study, or could I know to what extent I distorted it? The answer—perhaps disappointing for a priest—is that my influence was practically nil. What I said was that they should not drink, not be unfaithful to their wives and vice versa, not fight among themselves, that they should try to rise up to improve their lives and that they should strive for mutual respect and to bring people together, even those who believed differently. This last message perhaps took some of the edge off the radicalism of conversion. They hoped rather that I would fan the flames so that they would convert more followers, but for personal reasons, I could not make my message favor proselytizing, even though at that time it would have been very welcome to them.

Another problem was the customary mass stipend, Q 4.00 for low mass and Q 10.00 for high mass. (The Quetzal was on a par with the dollar.) The stipend for low mass was Q 3.00, but they added Q 1.00 for the gas of the priest who came from Santa Cruz. I was to charge 4.00, just as he did, so as not to stir up differences and protest. The going rate for a day's work was Q 0.60; thus a mass was equivalent to six days of a man's work plus a little more. Without consulting anyone, I decided not to charge for saying mass. I did not need this money because I had a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, granted to the University of Texas at Austin for a study on genetics and behavior. (My study would provide information on behavior.) But when I had said a few masses for free, the Catholic Action leaders came to tell me that I had to charge because otherwise the people were going to become used to it, and when I left a year later, they would not want to pay another priest. I gave in, and we set aside this money for buying medicine, but the people did not act as though they were aware of this "act of self-sacrifice" when the sacristan and I tried to explain it upon accepting the money. Some Traditionalists who, despite the conflict, continued to have masses said sought to bargain over prices.

Because I was accepted in the Catholic Action group, its members took me into their confidence almost absolutely, and they had the patience to provide me with very systematic information on almost everything they knew. Therefore, from the outset I was considered an enemy of the Traditionalists. By simply strolling along the paths or going out into the square I could tell who was in Catholic Action and who was not, because they either greeted me or averted their gaze. As someone who, in my anthropological training, had more or less internalized certain perhaps inherently questionable attitudes of neutrality, this was painful to me. I saw that I needed this (quite self-interested) neutrality for my study to be objective and in order to obtain information, but I felt myself being pulled in a particular direction in the community by my identity as a priest. Either I agreed to be in that position, or I would have no place in the community.

Yet I still tried to resist. When by my own choice I went to my first funeral wake for a Traditionalist, where relatives of the deceased from both Catholic Action and the Tradition were in attendance, I was almost attacked by a member of Catholic Action because I was listening to a Traditionalist who had been drinking tell a joke, and my laughter was misinterpreted. On other occasions, I went to celebrations of the cofradía (religious brotherhood), which is the Traditionalists' organization, and they were happy to see me accept a "little drink" from them. However, Catholic Action members found out and could not comprehend how I could be taking part in something that was off-limits for them. I felt like someone who has a wife and gets involved with another woman and would like to have both, but the wife finds out and kicks him out of the house. I gradually realized that it would be better for me to establish roots in my own group because, otherwise, should the Traditionalists want to kick me out of the town, no one would come to my support. A Traditionalist had asked me why I did not go back to Guatemala City, where there were seventy priests without work, rather than coming to take away the people's money. They saw me as being there to make money. A rumor was already circulating that they were drawing up a legal petition against me to take to the Ministry of Governance. It was the first time in their lives that these people were experiencing a priest living in the religious order's residence in the town; in 1955, a priest had tried to start working there but they threw him out, accompanied by shouting, insults, and threats.

Although I later managed to get along better with the Traditionalists, when they realized that I was not fiercely against them, I was never able to obtain systematic and patient informants among their leaders (principales). This is the most significant limitation of this work. It presents only one side, that of those who belonged to Catholic Action. However, I have tried to reconstruct the other side through the Catholic Action members who were at one time Traditionalists.

To this limitation must be added another, which is only partly rooted in the division of the people, and that is that the study is little concerned with women. Women normally do not talk with men outside their household, particularly when their husband is not present, and in San Antonio almost all speak only their own Mayan language, not Spanish. I did not become very fluent in Quiché because I did not practice it enough with monolingual women or male Traditionalists to hold long conversations.

Gathering Data

Within these limitations, information was gathered in various ways. The primary method was systematic conversation on topics that seemed meaningful to the people and to the question under investigation. Some men, ordinarily Catholic Action leaders from various districts, came to speak with me at the parish house for six, seven, and even eight hours a day. I let them speak almost without interrupting them, unless something came up that I did not understand. I realized that if I tried to say nothing at all so as to let them take the lead entirely, the conversation became listless. The more interest I showed in what they were saying, the more fruitful was the conversation for a deep understanding of their society and culture. I took down all their responses in writing. At first the speakers were disconcerted because they did not know whether I was listening to them while I wrote. I tried to register their expressions and manners, although not in shorthand. My own questions I wrote down only on special occasions, because it was hard to ask questions and write at the same time. Nor did I usually tape the conversations, because unless I had had time to transcribe them exactly, I would not have gained anything. Most of the few recordings were made in Quiché, and afterward they were translated for me with the aid of the speaker himself or of a "secretary." Otherwise, the conversations were held in Spanish.

Another method was that of systematically gathering information on people in the cantons. The informants were the same as those mentioned above: Catholic Action leaders familiar with their canton. In all cases, I tested the accuracy of the information with a second informant from the same district. This was how we drew up the list of the houses of all the inhabitants of the municipality. The informants determined the order of the list, sometimes very insistently, in keeping with the local geography, because the houses and the lands are lined up according to certain principles. Next we checked the approximate ages of the men in each household, if they were married, or of the woman head of the household if they were not; where their wives/husbands were from and to whom they were related; the number of wives/husbands they had had; the age of the house; the religious group to which they belonged; their work; their degree of literacy; their knowledge of Spanish; whether they had a radio; whether they worked on the coast or in the salt fields. We also gradually drew up the family relationships of people in the area with the same last name. We then situated each house over enlarged aerial photos, which all the informants except one were able to understand. Their faces lit up when they recognized the different places. Ordinarily I note that these men are very proud of their intelligence; they took reading the photograph as a kind of test to resolve a doubt over whether they were going to be able to "handle it." They showed a great deal of pride in their district, they were happy to be able to correct someone else, and they were sometimes disappointed when they were unable to provide responses to specific questions, such as Who is that woman a daughter of? and the like.

Another method was the preparation of a census solely of Catholic Action members, since we knew in advance that the Traditionalists would not agree to answer and that if we tried to include them, the only result would be a futile protest. To begin the census we met with a group of seven men, generally the secretaries of the Catholic Action centers. We went over the written questionnaire in Spanish, as they were not trained to read Quiché, we ran tests to see how they filled it out, and then they went out to their districts to carry it out. I monitored them closely, visiting them and settling their doubts when they did not know how to record situations that were not envisioned in the questionnaire or that we had not explained. With the exception of one center, which closed down entirely, the census proceeded with no problems. We particularly looked for demographic data that we could not obtain from other people, such as the number of children, living and dead. The reason for compiling this information was set forth in the original focus of the study. But we also included questions on conversion, which was presented as an effect of demographic growth. For all systematic work that required a significant amount of time and in cases where my assistants missed a full work day or half a day, I paid them Q 1 for eight hours.

Finally, information was also gathered through direct observation and participation in celebrations such as weddings, meals, burials, and so forth. In view of the vast array of activities carried out in a community, observation was limited, and that was even more true of participation, since one cannot do everything at once and a year is a short time. Moreover, the functions I performed as a priest prevented me from participating in certain celebrations or rites of the opposition group.

Data gathering was conditioned by the origins of the study, and that in turn affected the content. As I began to pursue the social and cultural consequences of population pressure, I devoted myself to gathering population data. In addition to the census, archival work in the municipal registry was utilized for this purpose. The lists of people in the municipality provided overall information and also served to show the layout of houses on the map. But as the research focus gradually changed, I found myself left with no theoretical framework and no methodical plan for gathering data. Hence, the procedure became one of first obtaining as much information as possible to shed light on the two extremes of the process of change, and, second, focusing on some processes within this change that seemed to be significant for explaining conversion. The first approach entailed preparing two monographs on the site, one dealing with the present and the other dealing with information from people's memory or from documents of the recent past before the change, which in this case meant conversion.

The second approach (seeking explanatory factors for conversion) meant gradually engaging in the research with no theoretical framework. In the censuses and lists made prior to refocusing the study, some questions had been included on conversion and on the characteristics that might be related to it, such as age, work, and number of spouses. However, conversion was there being viewed as a possible effect of population growth. When the study was redirected, I completed the lists for some other cantons, but now my pursuit was moving in another direction. Through accounts of converts about their own conversion and that of others, or about resistance of others to being converted, I began to note some characteristics that seemed to be constants in the process, such as whether the convert lived with his parents at the time of conversion; whether another relative had been converted before him; whether the occasion of conversion had been an illness, a "temptation" (suffering), or his own decision; whether the conversion had had an effect on drunkenness, on attendance at a weekly class, or on going to the zahorín (shaman, or indigenous religious leader). I gathered the same information on nonconverts, in order to discover the reasons why they had not converted.

As I had done before the project's intent changed, I continued to gather information on resources, because there seemed to be a connection between conversion and certain ways of earning a living, such as being engaged in trade. Adopting the use of chemical fertilizer resembled a conversion in the realm of technology that had been affected by the other conversion. Moreover, the increase in the number of well-off people in the municipality seemed to be quite connected to the strength of proselytizing and the change of belief, so we looked into these matters.

Conversion was more and more proving to be a process with ties outside the community, to the church, to the government, and to political parties. One way of disentangling these connections was to narrate all the conflicts at the municipal level from the time when the division had begun. In this account, made from inside the community, the outside agents are necessarily seen from outside.

Hence, it is obvious that the theoretical framework for the study was not laid out prior to the gathering of data, but that it was subsequently applied when the data were analyzed. Some information turned out to be superfluous, while other material fit because theory was applied to the intuition with which it was gathered, and still other information was missing or in short supply.

Earlier Studies

Religious conversion as such had not been a research topic in the literature on indigenous people in Guatemala prior to 1974, but political and religious division, which in many instances was the product of such conversion, had been studied. Community division had been studied by a number of authors for twenty years. Elsewhere (Falla 1972a) I published an article on political and religious developments among indigenous farmers in Guatemala during the previous twenty-five years, using data from monographs and articles on the issue in eight communities: San Luis Jilotepeque, in the department of Jalapa (Gillin 1957, 1958); Chinautla, in the department of Guatemala (Reina 1960, 1966); Alotenango (Moore 1966) and Magdalena Milpas Altas (Adams 1957) in Sacatepéquez; Panajachel (Tax 1964; Hinshaw 1968; Tax and Hinshaw 1970), San Pedro la Laguna (Paul 1968), and Santiago Atitlán (Mendelson 1965; Douglas 1968) in Sololá; and Cantel, in the department of Quet-zaltenango (Nash 1957, 1958).

Here I simply report the general conclusions of that study on how religious groups form alliances, to serve as a background against which I can outline what is new in this study within anthropological literature about Guatemala, up to 1974 when I finished writing this book. The conclusions were organized into three main sections: one on the Traditionalists, that is, the cofrades and principales, who had been carrying on the traditional religious organization that I found operating in San Antonio Ilotenango at that time; Protestants, including a variety of churches and groups, all of which were then a recent development in indigenous municipalities; and, finally, new Catholics, including all those who had broken away from the traditional organizations, especially the cofradías, to form new associations linked to the Catholic Church. The present work will focus specifically on this latter category, although I am also interested in comparing the process of the Protestant movements in other communities to determine which elements of their process have been repeated in San Antonio Ilotenango among new Catholics, inasmuch as Protestants were a small and weak group in San Antonio at the time.

In order to understand certain references to the nation's political development in these conclusions, the time may be divided into three periods: (a) pre-1945; (b) 1945 to 1954; and (c) 1954 to 1969. According to the principles of the October 1944 Revolution, which were ratified in the Constitution of 1945, municipal mayors had to be elected by popular vote and political parties began to operate with explicit recognition in the law. With this legislation, the windows of the community were opened to the winds of politics, and religious groups took advantage of this impulse. The second period (starting in 1945), which over time moved toward the left (agrarian reform was passed in 1952), ended abruptly in 1954 when Colonel Castillo Armas staged a coup with the support of the United States and encouragement from the Catholic Church. All kinds of organizations of the lower sectors, such as labor unions, peasant leagues, and agrarian committees, were suppressed. To this day, no government has provided political support to the less well off, and repression has become systematic, with periods of greater or lesser violence and bloodshed.

As I began my research, my survey of the literature on religious groups in Guatemala could be summarized along the following lines.

Traditionalists

The traditional type of organization had not remained utterly static, because to protect itself from the innovating groups, the principales or cofrades often had to set up a legally recognized committee, either to rebuild churches destroyed by earthquakes in the most central area of Guatemala or simply to organize the cofradías with legal department-level recognition.

The principales generally still held their positions for life, although in one or another municipality closer to Guatemala City, such as Alotenango, a new modality whereby principales served three-year terms was becoming visible. However, even in this modality, the principales, regardless of whether they were organized into committees, were part of the "old folks" who, even if not organized formally, were lifelong principales by definition and kept a certain generational identity that made itself felt in important community decisions.

The principales or their equivalents generally still appointed all the cofrades, although in some cases this was because the new Catholics, or Catholic Action members, had taken over the cofradías or had been absorbed into them. Such a relationship never occurs with Protestants, who are, as it were, in another world, since they meet elsewhere than the Catholic church building and have broken away from devotion to the saints. The Traditionalists and the reform Catholics have always shared this common space—namely, the Catholic church building, which has been a bond of union but also a point of contention.

The main reason for the reaction of the innovators, Catholic or Protestant, against the cofradías always had to do with the imposition of the cargos (responsibilities for patron-saint celebrations) and the large financial contributions these entailed. During the twenty-five years covered by the studies listed above, Traditionalists were still being pressured to serve in the cofradías, but the principales no longer enjoyed the same power to impose their will as they had before, inasmuch as the towns were no longer unified around one form of organization; in addition to cofradías, there were Protestants, hermandades (voluntary religious brotherhoods), Catholic Action groups, Third Orders (branches of a religious order whose members are laypeople), and so forth.

Another factor in the loss of the Traditionalists' power was that the strict connection between serving the saints through the cofradía and the municipality had been lost. A de facto relationship had always been maintained between the mayor and the religious group, Traditionalist or otherwise, to which the mayor belonged, but this did not enable him to support the appointment of even a fellow religious believer, let alone of someone who was not. After 1945, the birth of hermandades in those towns with greater non-Indian influence and greater proximity to the large cities was even then shaping this new idea of free service, to which the cofradía was gradually adjusting.

Where the principales or their equivalents, through their control over the cofradías, still exercised control over the municipal system, they profited from the 1945 elections, because they could choose the candidate for mayor. In some municipalities, the cofrades at this time began to envision how the cofradías might be revitalized and how the civic and ritual wings might be merged, but they were soon disappointed. As political parties moved in, Traditionalists lost control over events and they had to become the opposition to the innovators, who were more skilled than they in dealing with the new political machinery. In some municipalities where the principales formed the bulk of small landholders, the 1952 agrarian reform accentuated the clash. Because they were smallholders, they had not fled from the town and so they could support cofrade ritual activity.

Protestants

Protestants were generally the pioneers of change in the communities in the pre-1954 period. In some communities, they split away from traditional observance ten years before 1945 or even earlier, as in some towns on Lake Atitlán (Panajachel, San Pedro, and Santiago). The reason is plain: Protestants were social outcasts. Sometimes this marginal status was due to the "foreign" status of Protestant indigenous persons who had come into the community from elsewhere looking for work, such as in the tourism trade in Panajachel. In other instances, such marginalization was due to the poverty of the indigenous people in the community who were no longer leaving it in search of work and were connected to the outside world through Protestant groups, as in Chinautla. Hence the Protestants made religious or political-party alliances with ladinos within the community, especially with those hungry for land.

In some places during the 1945–1954 period, the alliance, whether explicit or not, between the left-leaning Protestant Maya and the radicalized ladinos prompted a mirror-image alliance between better-off ladinos and Traditionalist Indians. This alliance need not be understood as long-lasting but rather as a temporary agreement in opposition to the radicals. It did not necessarily entail belonging to the same party. On the other hand, among radicals, a greater merging of the two ethnic groups into a single party or within a single Protestant religious group did occur. As a result, the degree of Indian-ladino tension, which was quite sharp before 1945, generally tended to decline with the incipient class struggle brought about by the changes unleashed by the October 1944 Revolution.

After the fall of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, "communist" Protestants were persecuted. As a result, they became frightened and disillusioned, tended to become depoliticized, and felt there was no longer any point to interethnic alliances. As it became impossible to engage directly in politics, bureaucratic methods for gaining power became widespread (e.g., drawing up legal accusations designed to unseat mayors and prove electoral fraud), and Protestants became more otherworldly, that is, they became more oriented to holding worship, preaching that politics is dirty and that God's Kingdom alone is to be sought.

New Catholics

No single religious organization represented the Catholics. On one side stood the hermandades, which had been less divisive with regard to traditional belief. On the other side were more aggressive organizations such as the Third Order and Catholic Action, which had better connections to the Catholic clergy. The Third Order received orders directly from Franciscans in the cities, beyond the reach of the parishes in the communities; Catholic Action, with which this book is concerned, had support from bishops. Catholic Action was especially active in the western departments of the country, which were in the diocese of Quetzaltenango. As we will see below, this movement, which began in Totonicapán in the 1930s, was systematically encouraged by the auxiliary bishop of the diocese and was known to be aggressive.

After 1954, with the triumph of the anticommunist movement known as the Movement for National Liberation, and with the arrival of young, foreign clergy with energy, resources, and money, Catholic Action grew stronger, especially in the more remote rural areas.

Catholic priests began to experience the more or less covert opposition of the zahorines, as they were then called, those who understood and followed the 260-day Maya calendar. The zahorines tended to become concentrated in some municipalities, while elsewhere they declined until they almost disappeared. Catholic priests as a rule attacked them as agents of the devil, especially if the zahorines were soothsayers and prayer reciters who healed with prayer and charged money for their ceremonies.

***

I focus my study against this background literature survey in order to highlight what is new about it. All the works cited in one way or another touched on the political and religious changes summarized in the three categories of Traditionalists, Protestants, and new Catholics noted above. But in only two of these works do the changes in religious beliefs constitute the core of the work: in Mendelson's book (1965) and in the article by Tax and Hinshaw (1970). Mendelson studies a conflict between already established groups and their worldviews. By contrast, in this book I look at the very process of the formation of these groups: religious conversion, that is, the change of beliefs and its causes and consequences, one of which is conflict.

Tax and Hinshaw study the change from the worldview of the inhabitants of Panajachel in 1930, contrasting it to that of today's more forward-looking Indians. They compare the two extremes of the process but do not carefully study the process itself, which the authors call the "erosion" of beliefs. This is not the same thing as a conversion, because here a belief, rather than being painfully replaced by an opposing one, is simply gradually lost during the socialization process, through the informal contact of the indigenous child with ladinos in the later years of school. There arises a new generation now deprived of certain nonladino ideas, or perhaps ready to drop them, but having nothing with which to replace them. Emphasis is placed on comparing the two distinct generations.

By contrast, although I also assume that the socialization of the converts did not sow the beliefs so deeply into them as in the nonconverts, I focus on the more dramatic cases where the change has meant the uprooting of one idea, not a mere erosion after which the previous belief does not disappear but is simply reversed. In these cases, the innovating group, though it attracts an outer circle of uncommitted opportunists, is sustained by a core of people who have given their complete assent to a belief that runs counter to their former belief. Such people, I assume, would be willing to surrender their lives (hence the totality) to sustain that assent, which in turn is life-giving for them. In the course of the book, I will come to dramatic cases. By contrast with the other two studies, which have not focused on the process of people in their immediate sociological context, the household, I will move down to that level in this work.

Thus the original feature of this study within anthropological literature on Guatemala is that it studied the religious conversion process itself within a sociological framework that, starting at the household level, connects individuals to the political and religious forces of the community and the nation.