L’ouragan Stan : quand des glissements de terrain dévoilent des transformations environnementales et culturelles : ethnographie d’une municipalité de l’altiplano mam du Guatemala
(2011)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Servais, Olivier
- Abstract
- (en) In the month of March 2006, I began an ethnographic work which had as its research goal the expansion of evangelical movements in the Altiplano of Guatemala. By an unhappy coincidence, six months before this first investigation in the field, tropical storm Stan had devastated Guatemala, and in particular the municipality of San Martín Sacatepéquez, the object of my study. A certain ignorance on my part, but also the media concentration on the damage around Lake Atitlán (department of Sololá), had led me to think that the consequences of the disaster of October 2005 had been dealt with in the locality of the Western Altiplano. As on my arrival however, I could see that that was not at all the case. In full candour, both landscapes and faces revealed the recently passed disaster. The municipality had been invaded by diluvian rain, sand and mudslides. The landslides from the mountains overhanging the urban centre had gashed their slopes. Spontaneously and in an almost obsessional way, the inhabitants, mainly indigenous Mams, related to me their souvenirs of the passage of Stan in their community: 4 days and nights of anguish, torrential rains, wind, floods, electricity cuts, hunger, thirst, landslides, searching for dry shelter, evacuating the municipality… In my ethnographic capacity, I listened to their fears of new storms that the dry season had alleviated. It was a moment of catharsis: the onset of the new rainy season in April awakened memories traumatized by the recent events. New questionings arose, induced by the local actors’ worries. A new line of research took on form… This ethnography takes the reader to a fieldwork that is both geographically located within an ethnic and linguistic area and anchored in a religious landscape and a specific climatic zone. Based on a long-term empirical approach, the presence of Stan in this doctoral research results in our discussing interconnected problematics, responding to one another throughout this doctoral research, ones nonetheless usually presented as separate: environmental and land problems, transformations in religiosities, beliefs and modes of transmission. Among other things, this study presents a model of intelligibility of the spontaneous etiologies of natural events and their damage in a Maya Mam community in a context of symbolic systems in mutation; certainly a prospective question in view of ongoing climatological evolutions and the current pentecostalist expansion. Treatment of the disaster, as it is takes place in this thesis, reveals the local representations in response to it as much as its material manifestations. Behind the reality of the event Stan, we discover both the symbolism of conservation and the transformation of a sociocultural world.
- Affiliations
Citations
Hermesse, J. (2011). L’ouragan Stan : quand des glissements de terrain dévoilent des transformations environnementales et culturelles : ethnographie d’une municipalité de l’altiplano mam du Guatemala. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/152777