Two unprecedented, striking developments form part of the reality of many Latin Americans. Recent decades have seen the dramatic rise of a new religious pluralism, namely the spread of Pentecostal Christianity - Catholic and Protestant alike - and the growth of indigenous revitalization movements. This study analyzes these major transitions, asking what roles ethnicity and ethnic identities play in the contemporary process of religious pluralism, such as the growth of the Protestant Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal movements, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and the indigenous Maya movement in Guatemala. This book aims to provide an understanding of the agenda of religious movements, their motivations, and their impact on society. Such a pursuit is urgently needed in Guatemala, a postwar country experiencing acrimonious religious competition and a highly contentious debate on religious pluralism. This volume is relevant to scholars and students of Latin American Studies, Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, Practical Theology, and Political Sciences.

This series offers a comparative perspective on a critical issue - the often combustible interaction of resurgent religion and the developing world's unstable politics. This volume considers the case of Latin America, where evengelical Protestantism is increasingly challenging the historical Catholic hegemony.

Mayas, and indeed all Guatemalans, are currently experiencing the collapse of their way of life. This collapse is disrupting ideologies, symbols, life practices, and social structures that have undergirded their society for almost five hundred years, and it is causing rapid and massive religious transformation among the K’iche’ Maya living in highland western Guatemala. Many Maya are converting to Christian Pentecostal faiths in which adherents and leaders become bodily agitated during worship. Drawing on over fifty years of research and data collected by field-school students, Hawkins argues that two factors—cultural collapse and systematic social and economic exclusion—explain the recent religious transformation of Maya Guatemala and the style and emotional intensity through which that transformation is expressed. Guatemala serves as a window on religious change around the world, and Hawkins examines the rapid pentecostalization of Christianity not only within Guatemala but also throughout the global South. The “pentecostal wail,” as he describes it, is ultimately an acknowledgment of the angst and insecurity of contemporary Maya.

Based on empirical analysis, this ethnographic fieldwork and collection of original articles on contemporary Protestant religions in Mexico and Central America examines regions ranging from the Pacific coast in the north to Guatemala in the south. These new studies reveal that Protestantism was in the rise in the last decades of the twentieth century because it was opposing political structures that were largely unworkable in a new age of economic expansion and population growth. The studies cover regional and local variations in the growth of Protestantism, examine numerous reasons for the variations, and compare rural villages with modern communities. While the Catholic Church remains only a marginal player in the conflicts taking place in local communities, the book concludes that the modern religious conflicts bear only a general resemblance to the anti-Catholic issues that impelled the original Protestant Reformation in Europe. Relying on traditional scientific principles of data recording and theory development, the contributors look into the lives of contemporary rural people, Indian and mestizo, and provide data that enhance the general study of modern religious movements. The chapters examine, among other topics, the relationship between religion and demography, the role of leadership in church growth, the theories of Max Weber relating capitalism and Protestantism, religious conversion, and the modernization of Indian communities. Scholars and students who are interested in cultural anthropology, religious change, and religion in Latin America will find in these pages a unique and enlightening examination of Protestantism's rise and spread in Latin America.

How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change? Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld, edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges. People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change. Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.

Enlivened with 102 photographs and 50 figures and maps, Shamans, Witches, and Maya Priests explores the "old ways" that still prevail in the Q'anjob'al, Akatek, and Chuj communities of the remote northwestern Cuchumatán Mountains. Krystyna Deuss provides vivid descriptions and images of the traditional rites and rituals she witnessed during fifteen years of fieldwork. These sacred moments include blood sacrifices for the good of the community and private shamanic rituals--as well as black magic. Deuss also includes a selection of the prayers she recorded.