Paper short abstract:

This paper will look at the way cultural and emotional categories emerge in context of ongoing violence and how this impacts on affective states in recently established post war Mayan communities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the way violence perpetrated by the military during the civil war in Guatemala altered both people's frameworks of meaning and the way they experienced and related to the world around them. This paper draws on field work carried just after the signing of the peace agreement in 1998 and 1999 and explores the way people formerly displaced from the town of Primavera drew on and redefined traditional Mayan cultural symbols, concepts and meanings and rearticulated them in the immediate post war context. It examines the emergence of a new symbolic landscape that enabled people to give meaning to experience and mediate levels of latent fear and social anxiety in the aftermath of conflict violence. It explores how people were drawing on existing cultural repertoires to redefine their socio-cultural and emotional life in order to both give meaning to their experiences of violence and to account for the emergence of a new symbolic landscape in post-war Guatemala.