German coffee planters in nineteenth-century Alta Verapaz, Guatemala were also ethnographers, archaeologists, and geographers who published their works in Germany, the United States, and Guatemala. Their published works, as well as coffee plantation records, government correspondence, judicial records and other archival materials reveal how German coffee planters-cum-ethnographers drew upon ethnographic knowledge and representations to forge a reliable labor force. Like ethnographers in Britain's colonies, German settlers in Alta Verapaz understood the potential symmetry between ethnography and the governance of indigenous peoples. Their ethnographic knowledges also push us to reconsider distinctions drawn between German cosmopolitan ethnographic traditions and British functionalist ones and demonstrate how ethnographic knowledge and cultural difference could be deployed to forge new kinds of racial capitalism. In Guatemala, the intimate relationship between the rise of capitalism and ethnography shaped the anti-communism of mid-twentieth-century anthropology in the region.

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In the midst of Guatemala's nineteenth-century coffee boom, a frost struck the department of Alta Verapaz, destroying coffee harvests and catalyzing a debate over the “slavery” of mandamiento (forced wage labor). At the heart of these disputes was the problem of how to achieve Guatemalan political modernity, which focused discursive struggles over mandamientos around questions of national progress and related conceptions of history as the teleological march of nations and people forward in historical time toward modernity. While state officials justified mandamientos by arguing that Mayas were not yet civilized enough for equality and freedom, Q'eqchi’ Maya patriarchs and their ladino allies argued for abolishing mandamientos by drawing upon the metanarrative charting the end of slavery and feudalism and the rise of capitalism. While scholars have illustrated the importance of history to nationalism, this article argues for a broader understanding of historical discourse as a conceptual framework for ordering the world.

57 Such histories also demonstrate the limits of the so-called ontological turn, which first set out to avoid the overdetermined dualism of nature-culture, but in fact often "reif[ies] the most modern binary of all: the radical incommensurability of modern and nonmodern worlds." Bessire Lucas and Bond David, "Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique,"

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