Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Anthropology

Major Professor

Tara F. Deubel, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Heide Castañeda, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Committee Member

Cecilia Menjívar, Ph.D., M.Sc.

Committee Member

Abraham Salinas-Miranda, M.D., Ph.D., M.A.CE., C.D.V.S.

Committee Member

Kevin Yelvington, Ph.D.

Keywords

applied anthropology, community-based resiliency, Guatemala, political determinants of health, qualitative research

Abstract

This dissertation examines Indigenous women’s access to and beliefs regarding gender-based violence (GBV) services and the Guatemalan legal system. It illuminates the legal, structural, and institutional challenges and power dynamics associated with seeking support and justice for women in Guatemala, as well as why and how women decide to seek formal assistance. This research also investigates changes in attitudes and beliefs regarding women’s rights, gender roles, and formal and informal forms of support for GBV survivors. Utilizing a mixed-methods, engaged anthropological approach during 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two primary locations in Guatemala, this dissertation explicates qualitative data collected from a total of 94 semi-structured interviews seven focus groups, and participant observation conducted in both organizational and local, community-based settings. Indigenous women’s lived experiences with GBV, and the challenges associated with seeking “formal” types of organizational support suggest that, while formal governmental and non-governmental services exist, the infrastructure in which they are offered, paired with lack of funding. I draw from a combination of theoretical frameworks, including transnational feminism, vernacularization of human rights (Merry & Levitt 2017: 213), law in action, transformative justice to holistically situate women’s rights discourse in organizational and localized settings. Further, this project utilizes a feminist ethnographic methodological approach by putting historically silenced and disenfranchised women’s voices at the center of this project. This dissertation contributes to scholarship on GBV survivorship, community and population-based resiliency, political determinants of health, transnational feminism, legal pluralism, transformative justice, and work with GBV-frontline workers and helps fill the research gap concerning women’s experiences seeking governmental and non-governmental services after surviving GBV. In the concluding chapter, the study offers a series of recommendations for researchers and GBV program funders, policy workers, practitioners and legal representatives based on key findings.

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