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The question that comes most immediately to mind is this: If a meaningful response to Weber's disenchantment is the reenchantment supplied by the religious impulse, how should we understand "reenchanting the world" in Guatemala, a country that has been saturated with religions for centuries on all levels of society? As the abstract for one of the panels at the anthropologists' Phoenix conference pointed out, "It should come as no surprise that religious reenchantment is on the rise. In many parts of the world it never went away." On an even more basic level, in this realm of discourse what is reenchantment anyway? Samson does not evade these questions. But they are not simple ones, and it takes the entire book to examine the layers of complexity and bring everything into focus.
 A working definition doesn't sort out all the subtleties, but it's a necessary start. Disenchantment, as Samson treats it, "connotes the sense of a loss of mystery as human life becomes more rationalized through the application of a scientific worldview and technological innovation." Reenchantment, then, refers to the recovery of that sense of mystery in one's relationship to the world. As will become apparent, in the Guatemalan indigenous context it will involve revindication (revindicacion) of the Maya worldview.
It is necessary as well to give readers a modicum of information about Guatemala's culture and history. Samson meets that demand with several introductory chapters in which he lays out an admirably clear and concise background not only for the focused subject of the book but for a better understanding of the violent warp and woof of Guatemalan life.
 The burden of national history is at the root of the problem: a European invasion that forcefully imposed Christianity on the native population and declared the practice of their traditional religion illegal; centuries in which that Maya religion survived either through clandestine ceremonies deep inside mountain caves or in a syncretistic melding with Christian ritual winked at by the Church; the official welcoming of Protestant missionaries late in the 19th century as a counterbalance to Catholic power; the inevitable overlap of Christianity, civilization, and commercialization; systematic oppression of the Maya population whose cheap labor was essential but whose numerical majority created a perpetual fear of revolt; vacillation of dominant Catholicism between support for the oligarchy and protest on behalf of the poor in the name of liberation theology; a 36-year civil war in which one's religious allegiance was often a life or death matter; and a postwar decade in which the hope for a "multiethnic, pluricultural, and multilingual" country is still only a distant dream.
Add to that the fragmentation of both Protestantism and Catholicism. Samson sees four kinds of Catholicism in Guatemala—indigenous, orthodox, charismatic, and activist—with the possible addition of a "folk Catholic category for those places where the indigenous component is not as strong." On the Protestant side, it is said that there are more than 300 evangelical groups in the country, leading Presbyterian mission co-worker Dennis Smith to postulate an "Amoeba School of Church Growth." Smith adds that "where there is one Evangelical congregation, within six months there will probably be three." [5] Protestant groups, Samson says, can be loosely categorized as "evangelical (Bible-believing non-Pentecostal), Pentecostal (focused on experiences of the Holy Spirit in the person's life, including through divine healing), and neo-Pentecostal (usually based in the elite sectors of society and proclaiming some version of dominion or health-and-wealth theology that justifies their place in the upper crust of society)." The huge Mega Frater church, whose opening was covered in the Miami Herald, would be in this last category. And when you include in the mix the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other groups usually identified as sects, plus a revitalized traditional Maya spirituality with its own special appeal, one is tempted to say that no place on earth is more deserving of the ubiquitous postmodern label, "religious marketplace."
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