Silvia Posocco, Secrecy and Insurgency: Socialities and Knowledge Practices in Guatemala, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014. ISBN: 978-0-8173-1359-3 (cloth); ISBN: 978- 0-8173-8698-6 (ebook) Secrecy and Insurgency is a study of guerrilla ex-combatants of the FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes / Rebel Armed Forces) living in the northern Guatemalan department (state) of Petén. Anchored in everyday life after the civil war (1960-1996), this ethnographic text focuses on the testimony of insurgents about their experiences during the war, and specifically about practices of “guerrilla secrecy”. This is not a book about concealment, however. Rather, the text explores how the practices of secrecy are productive–generating identities, subject positions, socialities, material arrangements, and particular ways of life and death during a time of conflict. Secrecy and Insurgency is unusual for the loving engagement with extended testimony of ex-combatants, for the rigorous and rewarding meditations on the performativity of guerrilla secrecy, and for the moments of tenderness and ferocity that characterise the analysis. These various attributes come together in the political project of the text. Dedicated to “the memory of the compañeras and compañeros who died during the Guatemalan conflict and to those who sustain the struggle by different means in civilian life”, the book aims to centre, supplement and intensify the insurgent project of the FAR as a condition of the present. In this work, relations of secrecy become a fertile space for engaging with insurgency and rebellion. Secrecy and Insurgency at first appears to be a contradictory project. Guerrilla secrecy was a mode of survival during the war and continues to be important today when ex-combatants are regularly assassinated in Guatemala (Arias 2014). How then could revealing practices of guerrilla secrecy benefit insurgency rather than undermine it? Posocco’s work transcends this seeming contradiction in two interconnected ways. First, the text focuses fastidiously on how 1