David Stoll

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Stoll (born 28 February 1952) is an American anthropologist who specializes in socio-cultural anthropology and the study of violence. He received his Bachelor's Degree in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and completed his Master's and Ph.D. at Stanford University. He spent much of the eighties and nineties in Latin American countries such as Colombia and Guatemala, where his research is concentrated. He achieved brief notoriety, making the front page of The New York Times, for his controversial work concerning the Guatemalan activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú and currently teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Former peasant Rigoberta Menchu described in her memoir I, Rigoberta Menchu a life of poverty in the highlands of Guatemala, exacerbated by the oppression of light-skinned wealthy landowners. She describes how many of her family died at the hands of government soldiers during the Guatemalan civil war and depicts the communist guerrillas of that war as defenders of the Indigenous peasantry.

In his book, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999), Stoll uses evidence collected in the field to show that the story set forth by Menchu is not entirely accurate. He points out that various events described in the book could not have happened as told by the narrator and that scenes depicted by Menchú were not recalled from memory, and in fact often did not happen at all.

Menchú had maintained that her family was actively involved in fighting against their subjugation by wealthy Guatemalans of European descent and the Guatemalan government. She had also claimed that her father, Vicente Menchú, had organized a peasant movement named the Committee for Peasant Unity and had been killed by the government for his activities. This event was said to be the catalyzing event in her political activism. Stoll determined that neither of these events took place.

Vicente Menchú had in fact been quite prosperous, by local Mayan standards, and decidedly apolitical. He had owned a relatively large amount of land and was involved in a 22 year dispute with the Tum family, led by a relative of Vicente Menchú. It was during one of the many arguments with his in-laws that he lost his life, not at the hands of government forces. Vicente Menchú organized no peasant movement.

Her accounts of her early life also appear to be inconsistent with Stoll's research. Menchú claimed that her father would not send her to school, claiming that it would turn her into a Ladino, or light skinned ruling class, and that it would make her forget her Mayan roots. Although Menchú says she never received any formal education, Stoll discovered that Vicente Menchú paid for her to be educated at a Catholic boarding school, where she was educated to the level of eighth grade. She also claimed that she was forced to work eight months a year on a plantation, but Menchú was in fact away at boarding school during the growing season.

Menchú had also claimed that her younger brother Petrocinio was killed by elements of Guatemala's right-wing military and had been burned alive before her eyes in the town’s plaza. After interviewing local townspeople as well as friends of her brother, Stoll discovered that the army had never burned prisoners alive in the plaza and that her brother had in fact been arrested for petty crimes and executed by a firing squad. Two of her other brothers supposedly died of malnutrition while laboring in the brutal conditions of a local plantation, but Stoll could not corroborate this with any of Menchú's family in Guatemala.

Although his findings appear to undermine Menchú's account of what happened to her and her family, Stoll has made it clear that the violence that was described did occur to others. He has stated that by publishing her book, Menchú helped bring the Guatemalan conflict into the international arena and that should be regarded as an achievement whatever the means by which it occurred.

Stoll notes that the political left and the human rights movement accepted without question certain points of view without looking at conflicts as a whole. Stoll commented that "Books like I, Rigoberta Menchú will be exalted because they tell many academics what they want to hear. Such works depict rebels in far-off places, into whom careerists can project their fantasies of rebellion."[1]

One of Stoll's central contentions about the Guatemalan civil war, set forth in his book Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala, is that instead of representing a struggle between oppressed indigenous peasantry, represented by communist guerrillas, and the wealthy, land-owning (European) elite, represented by the Guatemalan Army, the civil war was the result of the efforts of a small number of radicals, many of them white or Ladino, to organize Indigenous peasants in the cause of Communism, and the government's attempts to quash them. Stoll argues that instead of backing the guerrillas, the majority of peasants quickly became apathetic, wanting only to be left in peace.

Stoll's other books include Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? (1983), about the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and Is Latin America Turning Protestant? (1990). He lives in Middlebury, Vermont and has two children.