Genocide and Cultural Change: Civilian Survival Strategies and the Reinvention of Political Culture During Guatemala's Mayan Genocide

This dissertation addresses the puzzle of political participation in the aftermath of genocide. The empirical record suggests that while exposure to violence ushers in high levels of participation in the aftermath of violence in some survivor communities, it leads to apathy and withdrawal in others. Why do individuals and communities that lived through horrific levels of violence during genocide become highly politicized by this experience in some cases but not in others? Relying on the case of indigenous communities that survived the Mayan genocide in the 1980s in Guatemala, this dissertation develops a theory of cultural change amidst genocide. I argue that the survival strategies that civilians adopt to navigate violence explain the transformation of their political cultures amidst violence. In the municipality of Ixcán, in northern Guatemala, indigenous civilians overwhelmingly made one of three survival choices: exit, voice or loyalty. I find that the strategies that civilians followed amidst genocide placed them in dramatically different cultural environments, which shaped the transformation of their political cultures during wars. Through continuing socialization in the post-conflict period, these war-inherited political cultures currently explain divergences in the levels of political participation in survivor communities. I relied on archive work, interviews, participant observation and a community survey embedded in eight months of fieldwork to generate this theory of cultural change in genocide.