Voices from the landscape Narrating and imagining local-global encounters in Guatemala's Western Highlands

This dissertation explores how social and natural landscapes in Guatemala's Western Highlands become meaningful by examining how different vectors of globalization inform and challenge how a diverse group of actors, such as residents and tourists, navigate environments in which processes of transformation play a central role. It unpacks how such processes of globalization are manifested through, for example, tourism (in all its guises), infrastructure development, and imaginaries of cosmopolitan or cosmopolitical conditions. These manifestations are subsequently mediated by interactions that take place within landscapes and are simultaneously shaped and reconstructed by these landscapes. Examining these processes of globalization on a local level shows how these should not be seen as separate developments per se, but rather as related and processual phenomena. Particularly, it unveils the importance of looking into local-global encounters within their specific contexts and highlights how transforming landscapes in Guatemala are negotiated and contested. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, I suggest new ways of understanding landscapes as global connectors that underline lived experiences and everyday encounters, rather than evaluating general processes of globalization as a central focus of study. As such, this dissertation proposes a point of departure for thinking about territorial narratives and imaginaries and, consequently, the construction of social and natural landscapes in a more nuanced way to reconsider how socio-environmental relations and worldly engagements play out in people’s everyday realities.