Empowered speech: Social fields, testimonio, and the stoll‐menchú debate

This article employs Pierre Bourdieu's approach to the analysis of social fields in order to dispute David Stoll's critique of Rigoberta Menchú in his book, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Stoll argues that Menchú's testimonio was a politically charged document that inaccurately portrays Menchú's own history and incorrectly represents it as representative of the experience of most rural Guatemalan indigenous peasants. Binford counters that the stories told by testimonial subjects, ethnographic informants, and ethnographers (such as Stoll) are the products of strategic maneuvers within social fields of power and should not be evaluated in terms of abstract moral absolutes that cannot be enacted concretely. He also maintains that Menchú's testimonio is a better guide to rural social relations in northern Quiché department than Stoll's ethnographic work—if read as a representative, rather than a literal account. Finally, the article also briefly addresses literary critical analysis of testimonio and discusses the forms that future testimonial works might assume.

Key words:

• Testimonial Literature
• Rigoberta Menchú
• Guatemala
• Ethnography
• Literary Criticism