Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on a theorization of the relations between secrecy and ignorance for an ethnographically informed analysis of sociality and knowledge practices in post-conflict Guatemala.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on a theorization of the relations between secrecy and ignorance for an ethnographically informed analysis of sociality and knowledge practices in post-conflict Guatemala. Drawing on ethnographic research with ex-combatants of the guerrilla group Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes which began in 1999 and has continued, intermittently, to the present, the paper aims to put into conversation anthropological approaches to the study of secrecy (e.g. Crook 2007, Barth 1975, De Jong et al. 2008, Ferme 2001, Herdt 2003, Lattas 1998, Taussig 1999) and recent work on the anthropology of ignorance (Dilley 2010, High 2012 et al). Whilst both secrecy and ignorance may be said to foreground issues of epistemology, the paper combines a re-alignment of epistemological reflection with the proposition that secrecy and ignorance be understood as a set of relations and connections, in the context of an ethnography of an insurgent movement at the point of dissolution. The paper reflects on how secrecy and ignorance may emerge through 'ethnographic refusal' (Ortner 1999) but also reference a range of guerrilla modes of knowledge, sociality and action that in turn raise fundamental questions regarding the possibilities and limits of anthropology's interpretative and representational practices.