Review by Choice Review
This collection is an extraordinary and timely contribution to the sociology of religion. Hawkins (emer., Brigham Young Univ.) has studied indigenous communities in Guatemala for half a century. During that time, the country and the indigenous people he studied transitioned from being predominantly Catholic to overwhelmingly Pentecostal in a remarkable shift mirrored elsewhere in Latin America and the world. The book's first section explores various aspects of Pentecostal practice in two K'iche' Maya communities as well as other alternative religious orientations still found there. Chapters in the following two sections carefully and persuasively advance Hawkins's thesis that the great religious transformation of Guatemala since the 1950s reflects a desperate, rational, and substantially successful response to the collapse of traditional Maya lifeways (based on corn agriculture), brutalization by decades of war and natural disaster, and continuing exclusion from viable alternative livelihoods in the new neoliberal world economic order. The Maya, about whom Hawkins so knowledgably and compassionately writes, represent a significant component of the wave of southern migrants to the US, and insights into their religious transformation in Guatemala are relevant to understanding their impact on changing religious practices and preferences in the US. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels. --Paul R. Sullivan, independent scholar
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
