Based on a thirty-year span of fieldwork in the Lake Atitlan region of Guatemala, Scandals in the House of Birds is a multivoiced epic of a sacred crime, and its tangled mythic, religious, and political ramifications. The Maximon, a wooden statue venerated since pre-Columbian times, is stolen from the local villagers, sent to a European museum, and finally returned decades later, largely thanks to the authors' intervention.