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ОглавлениеWes Collins reveals patterns of centeredness in various aspects of the Mam language, not only in the lexicon as expected, but in the use of spatial deixis and discourse structure as well. As a linguistic anthropologist, Collins’ goal is to describe centeredness in the language in a way that makes sense to the native speakers: “Without grounding centeredness in the daily lives and speech of the Mam, we run the risk of proving something to ourselves while not shedding any light whatsoever on local custom and categorization.”
Collins contributes greatly to the age-old discussion about the relationship between language and culture, claiming that centeredness is not only a great cultural value for the Mayan peoples of Guatemala but a grammatical theme in their languages as well. He establishes the connections between the use of linguistic centeredness–illustrated in the morphology, syntax, and discourse structure of Mam–and speakers’ living out of that centeredness in their architecture, dress, health system, religion, and self-awareness. This book is written in a clear, logical manner and brings forward new information that both anthropologists and linguists alike will appreciate.
Charlotte Schaengold, Ph.D., Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, Northern Kentucky University
Collins’ discussion of health and wellness in the Mam community is especially careful to integrate historical evidence of cultural contact, ethnographic details of community variation, and on-the-ground observation of specific individual examples of the on-going accommodation of multiple strands of knowledge and experience to form a coherent understanding of the world.
Laura Martin, Ph.D., Professor Emerita (Modern Languages and Anthropology), Cleveland State University; co-author of Culture in Clinical Care
I wish this book had been available to me a half-century ago when I first began trying to learn Agta, an unwritten language in the Philippines. I highly recommend it as a basic how-to guide to ethnography for university courses in linguistic anthropology. Author Collins is an SIL linguistic anthropologist who has spent the past 30-plus years working among the Maya-Mam. In this book he pulls together what he has learned. Collins also ties germane theories to his thesis, such as ethnography as a method, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, emics and etics, worldview, and Collins’s own notion of “centeredness” as an operating principle of the Maya-Mam people. He does not avoid controversial issues, such as the racist philosophy of Mam as a “lesser language,” Mam as an endangered language today, whether culture drives language, whether the introduction of Christianity is an attack on Mayan religion, etc. I highly recommend to linguistic anthropologists who plan to do research in indigenous communities today that they read this book first!
Linguisitcs in light of anthropology is how languages should be studied; anthropology in light of linguistics is how culture should be studied.
Thomas N. Headland, Ph.D., Fellow, American Anthropological Association; and Senior Anthropology Consultant, SIL International
This book is best viewed on a tablet or computer
The Heart of the Matter
Seeking the Center in Maya-Mam Language and Culture
Wesley M. Collins
Foreword by Brian D. Joseph
SIL International®
Dallas, Texas
SIL International®
Publications in Ethnography
44
The Publications in Ethnography series focuses on cultural studies of minority peoples of various parts of the world. While most volumes are authored by members of SIL International® who have done enthographic research in a minority language, suitable works by others will also occasionally form part of the series.
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ISBN: 978-1-55671-397-2
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Contents
Getting Started: The View from a Distance
1.1 The heart of the matter: Centeredness as a cultural and grammatical theme
1.2 How might we show that language and culture are cut from the same cloth?
1.4 Analysis of the data
1.5 Who cares?
Some Context for Better Understanding this Book
2.1 The occasion for research
2.2 Some comments on the Mam
2.3 Some comments on the Mam language
2.4 Mam as an endangered language and efforts at revitalization
2.5 What’s new in this book?
Centeredness as Cultural Theme
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Health as an instantiation of centeredness
3.3 From space to place: On the meaning of building
3.4 Religion as a search for centeredness
3.5 Conclusion
Centeredness as Cultural Practice
4.1 Why ethnography?
4.2 Introduction to thick description
4.3 Attaining b’a’n
4.4 Conclusion
Grammatical Aspects of Centeredness
5.1 Introduction
5.2 The centeredness of spatial deixis
5.3 Mam intransitive verbs of direction
5.4 Directional auxiliaries
5.5 Complex directionals
5.6 Extended use of -x and -tz
5.7 The discourse function of -tz and -x
5.8 Relational nouns as an instantiation of centeredness
5.9 Conclusion
Conclusion
6.1 What we’ve seen
6.2 Where do we go from here?
6.3 So why the commotion?
Appendix A: Text
Appendix B: List of Abbreviations
Appendix C: Notes on Orthography
References
Foreword
Being asked to write a foreword to a book can be a dangerous enterprise, as one is therefore forever associated with the work, whatever its merits or demerits may be. In this case, however, it is truly an honor to be able to be associated with this book, as author Dr. Wesley Collins has put together a meritorious volume that is both scholarly and interesting, as well as highly readable, a combination unfortunately all too infrequent in academia.
Dr. Collins examines certain aspects of the life and language of the Maya-Mam, speakers, numbering some 500,000 in all, of a Mayan language in the area in and around Comitancillo, Guatemala. Starting with the premise that the Maya-Mam have a focus in their lives on the “center” and on “centeredness,” Dr. Collins explores the ways this notion is manifest in both the culture the Maya-Mam live in and in the language which, as he says on p. 60, is available to the Maya-Mam for “the dual tasks of conceptualizing their world and enabling them to operate in it.” Centeredness is related to deixis, a basic, and crucial, notion that deals with how we orient ourselves in the world, relative to things and to people.
Author Collins sees centeredness as playing a key role in the Maya-Mam sense of well-being, city planning, the layout of their homes, and other aspects of Maya-Mam physical culture, as well as intangible cultural constructs such as religion, but also—and this is crucial to his argumentation and to his being take seriously as within linguistic anthropology (or anthropological linguistics, terms he sees as largely interchangeable (p. 3)—in the organizational structure of the grammar of their language. The existence of a link between culture and language informs his work from the very start, and pervades the discussion throughout the six chapters of the book. Collins says in Chapter 1 that his “frame or touch point will be this dual notion of grammatical and cultural theme…that there is some kind of relationship or influence between the language that people speak and the culture that they live out on a day-to-day basis,” and closes the book in Chapter 6 with the wish that he has “satisfied the hermeneutic approach to the problem” of whether “language and culture are interconstitutive in a measurable, empirical way” by showing that he has been able to interpret “data in a patterned way, consistent with how the Mam themselves view the world, how they see their place in it, their description of it, and their practice within it.”
Importantly, Collins is not simply giving impressions gained from thirty-some-odd years experience with the Mam; rather, he builds a solid case for his premise by examining details of Maya-Mam culture in Chapter 3, the structure of a sector of the lexicon in Chapter 4, and in Chapter 5 the formation and meaning of a closed class of intransitive verbs of motion and a set of preposition-like “relational nouns” that serve as deictic orientation markers. In each case, he demonstrates the relevance of “a reference location or deictic center” (p. 169), and thereby gives the anthropological linguist (or linguistic anthropologist) grist for his/her mill. Collins speaks with the authority of one who has “lived Mayan,” so to speak, and experienced Mam in a way that few outsiders ever do.
He is not afraid to take on controversy, e.g. regarding the interplay of centeredness and religion (both indigenous and Christian), and his reference throughout to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis concerning the relationship between thought and language, a notion which has been controversial from its first articulation in the first half of the 20th century. This willingness to address the provocative is good, for we are not given simply a whitewashed treatment of a feature here or a feature there, but rather we are treated to a deep delving into what makes Maya-Mam culture tick, so to speak.
Linguists may be disappointed that there is only one chapter that is fully language-oriented (centered on language, we might say), with a discussion of how centeredness manifests itself in the grammar. However there is sensitivity to language and structure throughout the book, and no chapter is devoid of linguistic material.
What consequences emerge from Dr. Collins’s work? What lessons can we learn? What conclusions can we draw? The answers lie in the direction of the study of the interaction between humans and their world, and thus there are consequences for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, for linguistic determinism, and for the examination of language in the world.
With all this said, I invite the reader to see for him/herself and to move to this most interesting book itself, which should, after all, be the true “center” of attention.
Brian D. Joseph
Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics, and
The Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Languages and Linguistics
The Ohio State University
10 June 2014
Preface: What to Expect
This book is about the Maya-Mam people of Guatemala. It’s also about linguistic anthropology, ethnography, cultural and linguistic research, the etic-emic distinction, history, architecture, pattern, health, religion, research methods, scholarship, and lots of people who have studied the Maya.
With a menu so varied, the metaphorical question might arise, “How does one go about eating an elephant?” The answer is, of course, “One bite at a time.” That’s how complex problems get solved.
That’s my plan here.
First off, there’s a lot about the Mam (pronounced “mom”) that I won’t talk about at all. We will narrow our field to the notion of “the center” and how this idea shows up and plays itself out in many divergent areas, both cultural and linguistic.
The format of the book goes along with what the old preacher said to his young disciple when queried about how to go about outlining his sermons. “First, you tell the congregation what it is that you intend to tell them. Then you tell them. Then you tell them what it was you just told them.”
Repetition is good pedagogical technique, one which I will make use of here, which is another take on what it takes to eat the proverbial elephant—perseverance over time.
In the first chapter I will introduce our theme in quite a bit of detail, not just as an introductory teaser. In terms of our sermon metaphor, I tell you what it is that I intend to tell you throughout the rest of the book. The basic notion is this: the idea of seeking the center—sometimes physically, sometimes metaphysically—is both a goal and an operating principle of the Maya-Mam people. We will come to see it as a common theme in Mayan architecture, in health and the cause and diagnosis of illness, in religious thought, and in the myriad decisions and observations of the practice of daily life. The astute reader will notice that sometimes I talk about the Maya-Mam, or just the Mam, and sometimes, more generally, about the Maya. The Mam constitute a branch of the Maya, descendants of the great Central American civilization that was occupying their own land when the Spanish came to stake claim to it for the Crown some 500-plus years ago. Much of what I say will resonate beyond the Mam alone as a group to the larger Mayan civilization and its many descendant groups which today speak some thirty languages in Central America and southern Mexico. The term “Maya-Mam” is synonymous with Mam. It just helps people recognize who the Mam really are. They are Maya.
We will also look at Mam language data that seem to reflect in interesting fashion the same theme of centrality or centeredness. The crux of the grammar of centeredness is inherent in the notion of deixis, a grammatical concept that puts the speaker in the center of the entire universe, where everything that happens or might happen is figured from the location and moment of speech of the one who is speaking. All languages do this to some degree, but Mam does it in spades. Virtually every natively spoken utterance in Mam alludes to location and movement in some way, and these ideas are tied to a grammatical “center stake” that interprets speech in terms of just such a center. Indeed, it isn’t simply an occasional cultural and linguistic fact that seems to make sense in terms of a center. Rather, the pattern of such a notion seems to show up everywhere, throughout both the culture and the grammar.
We’ll attack this issue on a number of fronts. In chapter one we’ll lay out some definitions from the linguistic/anthropological literature and we’ll see that others have observed much of what I will be telling you. I will talk about a number of these scholars and their observations because of Newton’s famous quote about “standing on ye shoulders of giants.” Ethnographers never work in a vacuum, and anything we’ve been able to glean comes in part from the contribution of others. Even the granddaddy of modern ethnography, Bronislaw Malinowski, in his groundbreaking book Argonauts of the western Pacific… (1922), tipped his hat to a few scholars, missionaries, and sea-captains who had observed and studied (and published) before him. One of the great things about working among the Maya is that there has been a lot of fieldwork done across the area and through the years. And even though Maya-Mam is under-represented in the scholarly literature, these cultural principles that I suggest go “way back” and therefore have a presence in other Mayan groups and even beyond. So the giants should be acknowledged.
In chapter two we will look at some of the social context of the Mam, their work and schools, their lives vis-à-vis the dominant Spanish-speaking culture that surrounds them, and their economic and religious lives. We’ll hit these topics more fully later in the book, but in chapter two we’ll see some of the complexity of the social, linguistic, and religious milieu that these people face.
Mam is endangered, as are all Mayan languages. This doesn’t mean that the languages and cultures are on the verge of collapse, but that a perfect storm of factors—education, university studies, the internet, political power, national and international trade, travel, economic achievement, among other issues—all depend on success in Spanish. This puts a lot of pressure on Mam families to simply chuck their native language and “move forward” by means of Spanish. But much is lost when language and culture are abandoned. Questions of this nature used to be largely theoretical, but now virtually all Mam men and women face them to one degree or another.
In chapter three we will look specifically at three areas where centeredness seems fairly straightforward: in architecture and space, in the discussion of health and illness, and in religious notions, both Mayan and Christian. This last topic is controversial—on both sides of the aisle. First, to suggest that there may be cultural issues that would make Christianity an interesting option for rural Maya-Mam might be seen as an attack on Mayan religion. On the other hand, Christians don’t like to think of their faith in terms of merely cultural “fit” and sociological tendencies. I suppose I’ll hear it from both sides, but I think the discussion will be fascinating. We will look at religion—both traditional, as evidenced in the content of the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Mayan and in the writings of a number of scholars about present day traditional religion—and Protestant, as discussed in the words of Mam Protestants themselves.
We will consider how the traditional Maya look at health and illness in terms of a center space of health and wellbeing. Related to this, we will look briefly into the Hot-Cold Syndrome and see it as an instantiation of our theme of centeredness.
We will also discuss what is often called architectonics—how people create meaning in the spaces that they occupy, or, as Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga (2003:185) suggest, how people transform physical “space” into meaningful “place.” In this section, I discuss how both the Mam homestead and the layout of the central plaza in pre- and post-colonial Guatemala exist as a template and also as a reflection of the Maya-Mam world and worldview.
Chapter four is the heart of the book. It is written in a very different style from the other chapters. Chapter four is both a primer on ethnography and an ethnographic product as well. Ethnography has been criticized as being more about the researcher than the researched. You’ll be able to make your own decision when you read chapter four, but I think the style itself will make its point, that centeredness doesn’t show up only in the big spaces of Mayan culture, but in the smallest nooks and crannies as well. We will deal with centeredness as cultural practice. I discuss, in ethnographic style, why I chose ethnography as both a process and product for the discussion of centeredness in daily life, and I maintain a meta-dialogue with you, gentle reader, about both the content of the chapter as well as the value of ethnography as scholarly practice. This chapter discusses several events that I participated in, one by invitation, and one definitely not by invitation; I tie the events together in terms of a search for centeredness. In this chapter, I also discuss how the Mam themselves (both consciously and unconsciously) talk about centeredness as a structured and structuring enterprise.
I consider ethnography to be the most accessible of scholarly pursuits. Indeed, one of its primary tenets is to entertain. The trick is to keep the entertaining within the broader context of what the author is trying to get across. So if the names and arguments feel dry in the early pages of this book, bear with me long enough to dig into chapter four as a general and practical presentation of these same facts, but in ethnographic form.
Chapter five deals with centeredness as a grammatical theme. This will be the most esoteric part of the book, but linguistics is about language, and language is inherently fascinating, the greatest of human abilities. I will do my best to pass on to you some of that fascination. I discuss a small class of twelve Mam intransitive verbs of motion and a corresponding set of directional auxiliaries and how these depend on a deictic center whether it be a speaker, an “other,” or an arbitrary point in space, as part of their lexical (semantic or “dictionary”) meaning. We’ll talk a lot more on this notion of deixis in chapters one and five. We’ll then look at several directional suffixes and discuss how the meaning of both the directionals and the suffixes become less grounded in physical movement—and thereby become more abstract—while still maintaining a sense of center or norm. Next I discuss these same suffixes as grammaticalized discourse deictics that signal discourse material as being either old or new. In terms of discourse structure and centeredness, I also suggest in chapters four and five that the use of couplets in ritual rhetoric in Mam and other Mayan languages is iconic of our principle of centeredness and the sense of dualism that other writers, particularly Gary Gossen (1986:6), have mentioned. Finally, I cite Thomas Godfrey (1981) and Nora England (1983) in regard to Mam relational nouns (the head of the trail, the foot of the mountain), and I discuss these, too, in terms of Mam centeredness and the body in space. If some of these linguistic terms are unknown to you, be patient; I plan to unlock them as we go along.
In our sermon metaphor, chapters three through five are the content of what it is I want to tell you. Chapter six is a recapitulation of what it is I’ve told you if you read the book from beginning to end. In chapter six, I tie together the notion of an overlap of cultural and grammatical theme and use it as a heuristic or teaching strategy for commenting further on the relationship between language and culture, and I make a few suggestions about what seem to be good areas for further research.
Language and culture are among the most basic elements of our lives. Thinking about the relationship between the two is one of the privileges and joys our humanity affords us.
I am a college professor by trade; I love teaching. I want to tell you in this book what the Maya-Mam people are like, at least in part. But at the same time, I’d like you to learn about ethnography—what it is and why we use it and why it is the favored tool of linguistic anthropologists. Diving into practical anthropology, we will also learn about etic and emic layers of analysis. And we will consider some of the proponents of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and we’ll see why, after seventy-five years, anthropologists are still enchanted by the notion of linguistic relativity, the notion that one’s native language itself has an influence on how speakers of that language think about the world. We’ll also look at the nature of proof in the humanities and consider what kind of facts we should seek in order to affirm what we say about culture and values. Finally we will test the waters, if not the depths, of theoretical linguistics and see what, if any, overlap there might be among grammatical and cultural notions.
This book started out as a dissertation, “presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the graduate school of the Ohio State University,” as they say. During the process of transforming a dissertation into what I hope becomes a much-more-popular monograph, I changed the style of the book, and much of its content. I dropped a seventy-page chapter and assigned some of that content to other chapters, I did further research beyond the 2005 date of the dissertation’s publication, and I worked the discussion over into a more reader-friendly format and style, which I hope is interesting, thoughtful, and compelling. Perhaps that is a lot to hope for. You will be on the panel of judges. When I wrote the dissertation, I needed to sufficiently convince a committee of four that my thoughts were coherent to my premise, and that the premise was valid—that the search for the center explains a lot about the Maya-Mam. Now the book is “on the market” and it is subject to a whole new set of pressures and judgments.
If you prefer dissertations to more accessible formats, you can still download the original dissertation for free.
I do forewarn you, though, that this new book is a lot more fun than the previous one.
Pleasant reading!
1. Getting Started: The View from a Distance
1.1 The heart of the matter: Centeredness as a cultural and grammatical theme
My friend, Eugenio,1 came to my house one Saturday morning and told me that he and I shared a problem. I asked him what our problem was, and he said that our families were “off center.” He didn’t actually articulate this shared problem…he gestured it. He said that our families were like this, at which point he extended his arms to each side of his body and tilted his head to the left, lowering his left arm while raising his right, like a child imitating a zooming airplane. When I asked him what he was talking about, he said that neither he nor I had jun qxel, a replacement. I queried further, to which he replied that we each had a wife and daughters (my wife and I had two daughters at the time; he and his wife had three), but neither of us had any sons to “take our place” in the world after we were gone. He went on to describe how typical and full families have a father, a mother, the daughters, and the sons. A family without either sons or daughters, or a mother or a father is like a dog with only three legs, he explained. It just can’t function properly without all four elements.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but now I believe that Eugenio was offering me an unasked-for glimpse into the way he and his people conceive of the world—where life is a series of relationships that require constant care in order to achieve and maintain an elusive balance or centeredness: physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually—and also, where the cosmos is understood as the place where balance or, more specifically, centeredness, is the primary and normative good. In addition, each person’s place in the universe is an individualized “center” from which all other movement is described grammatically and culturally, physically and metaphysically. This notion of centeredness is a pervasive cultural value in Mam dealings with each other—an organizing principle of daily life—and it is basic to the way they conceive of the present world as well as the world to come.
In this book, I suggest that this sense of centeredness is what Laura Martin (1977) and Nora England (1978:226) call both a cultural and a grammatical theme. Culturally, the idea of seeking centeredness is pervasive in how the Mam conceive of relationships, how they define their presence in the world, how they construct their homes, their cornfields, and their towns, how they understand health and illness, how they discipline their children, how they bury their dead, how they deal with their spiritual lives and how they think of life beyond the grave. These perhaps sound like very divergent and disparate issues, but I show in this study that each of these is conceived in some sort of relationship to a real or metaphorical center space of ‘comfort, peace, goodness, and wellbeing’, or b’a’n. I suggest that this seeking of centeredness in all its varied applications is indeed a single pursuit, a cultural theme, an idea that extends beyond observation of atomistic facts to the underlying and integrating notion that gives these facts their spark of cultural life.
At the same time that centeredness operates on a cultural level, England (1978) defines grammatical themes as “the underlying organizational principles of a language linking structure with semantics.” Semantics is about meaning, which is culturally understood (for example, the difference of meaning between a purposeful wink and an involuntary twitch of the eye depends almost entirely on one’s culture: its shared gestures and the physical context). Structure is about grammar and how linguistic units relate to other units and how they combine to form still larger units. Languages tend to highlight, or “privilege,” certain issues or themes that are instantiated not only in the lexicon, the list of words in a language, but throughout the grammar of a language—in the morphology (the make-up of words), the syntax (the make-up of sentences), and the discourse structure as well.
In this study, my bottom-line goal is to tell you what the Mam people are like. Such a goal, of course, is a lofty and large one, so there needs to be some way to constrain or restrict it. I don’t by any measure claim to know everything about these fascinating people or their language, so how much can I really tell you? And is what I have to say valid?
I’ll keep those questions on the back burner as we plow through the data and observations that I present and as we consider a general interpretation of these data. I will try to privilege not what I have to say about Mam culture, but what the Mam themselves have to say about it, both by their actions and their contemplation. Bronislaw Malinowski, the father of ethnographic scholarship, said that the goal of such study is “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world (1922:25, emphasis and masculine pronouns in the original). He wrote this over one hundred years ago, but it’s still a good reference point for the meaning and purpose of any purported ethnographic account.
When one writes a book, she or he needs a track to run on, particularly if the work isn’t simply a chronological narrative where the passage of time can be the thread that holds the book together. Rather, there needs to be a foil or frame of some kind either against which or upon which to lay out an argument. Ethnography itself isn’t an argument at all, but a methodology, one which will be fully unleashed in chapter four, although I’ll talk about it quite a bit as anthropological practice later in this chapter. My frame or touch point will be this dual notion of grammatical and cultural theme. This idea, if not the exact vocabulary, crops up often in the linguistic-anthropological literature, the idea that there is some kind of relationship or influence between the language that people speak and the culture that they live out on a day-to-day basis. If you think about it for a moment, anthropology is about culture, and linguistics is about language; so it isn’t much of a stretch to consider that linguistic anthropology (or anthropological linguistics) would deal with just such a relationship, that is, that between language and culture. But it’s hard to nail down just what that relationship might be. Does language cause a certain kind of culture—or vice versa? Or are both views true? Or is the relationship one of influence or shading, rather than causation? Are our thoughts constrained in some way or limited by the language that we natively speak? Are so-called “primitive” cultures primitive because they are held back by a primitive language? Or is it the case that a primitive culture doesn’t make any intellectual or otherwise provocative demands on the native language, so everything and everyone just sort of passively sits as time goes by? Perhaps you can see the possibility of a racist philosophy here, that speakers of the world’s “great” languages are destined to rule over the speakers of the “lesser” languages. Indeed, by such an account, the supposed lesser languages don’t permit the thinking needed for world dominion. Suffice it to say, some have used such notions as a justification to stigmatize or to steamroll over others, but racists can use anything as a tool against anyone and we will not pursue such misguided philosophies; rather, we will delight in cultural diversity in the words of the eighteenth century German writer Johann Herder (cited in Schlesinger 1991:13), who celebrated linguistic and cultural diversity with these words:
Let the nations learn from one another, and let one continue where the other left off…every nation has its center of felicity in itself alone, as every sphere has its center of gravity…. Is not the good distributed through the whole world? It is divided into a thousand forms, transformed, an eternal Proteus!—in every region of the world and in every century.
1.1.1 Linguistic relativity and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
For the record, the person most associated historically with the idea of a causal link between language and culture is Benjamin Whorf and the articulation of said link (whatever it might be) is usually known as or affiliated with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH). The idea behind Sapir-Whorf, is that the language that one natively speaks predisposes that person to certain understandings about the world. Harry Hoijer, Sapir-Whorf’s chief apologist, describes the hypothesis like this: “language functions, not simply as a device for reporting experience, but also, and more significantly, as a way of defining experience for its speakers” (1954:93).
Although in this first chapter I will talk a good bit about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH), this book really is not about the hypothesis per se, but I mention it because it is well known even beyond anthropological circles, and it will be the frame upon which we rest the dual notion of cultural and grammatical theme. In other words, even if SWH ends up not being all that interesting, it won’t condemn the present study, since my goal is not to convince you of the validity of the hypothesis but to tell you what the Maya-Mam people are like. I hope to do that using a number of anthropological and linguistic touch points, one of which is the SWH. That said, I think my observations will rise or fall on their own, not on what you end up thinking about the ideas of Sapir and Whorf. On this issue, Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology (although born in Germany!), says in his famous introduction to the Handbook of American Indian languages:
…language seems to be one of the most instructive fields of inquiry in an investigation of the formation of the fundamental ethnic ideas. The great advantage that linguistics offers in this respect is the fact that, on the whole, the categories which are formed always remain unconscious, and that for this reason the processes which lead to their formation can be followed… (Boas 1911:70)
He means that the invisible qualities of culture can be externalized via language. Boas was Edward Sapir’s good friend and faithful mentor. Whorf studied under Sapir along with a group of other well-known early anthropologists, including Morris Swadesh, Margaret Meade, Mary Haas, and George Trager (among others).2
Much more recently, Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt, and Webb Phillips (2003) cite an interesting experiment that supports Sapir-Whorf. In the experiment, fluent bilinguals (German-English in one group and Spanish-English in the other, who were native speakers of German and Spanish, respectively) were asked to supply adjectives (in English) describing English words which were chosen for being of contrasting grammatical gender in the two native languages. The word “bridge,” for example, was described by native Spanish-speaking bilinguals with more masculine-like adjectives such as strong, big, foreboding, scary, etc. The word for ‘bridge’ puente in Spanish, is grammatically masculine. German speakers described the exact same bridge as pleasant, unifying and graceful. In German, the word for ‘bridge’ Brücke is feminine. Why would this contrast of modifiers exist? It does indeed appear that grammatical gender, which is randomly assigned by those languages that have it, significantly influences how one perceives the world.3
Just how strong or how influential the link is, is the subject of much discussion, and since the SWH is really more of an observation than a hypothesis, there is plenty of support for it, if not hard proof, although the Boroditsky experiment is pretty convincing. I will talk about this further below and throughout the book. The reason I’m pounding on the idea here is that it is the natural backdrop for our dual notions of cultural and grammatical theme, the interplay of language and culture. These are “old ideas,” but they aren’t really dated. Sapir-Whorf is still debated in lively fashion in universities around the country and beyond. Bestselling linguistics author Steven Pinker, no friend of Sapir-Whorf, thought enough of the notion to try to convince people of its naïveté in his book, The language instinct: How the mind creates language (1994:55–82). I was unconvinced.
Other scholars have discussed the same notion under different terminology. In Sapir-Whorf nomenclature it is called linguistic relativity. Mayanist Gary Gossen (1986) discusses the cultural part of our theme as a symbol cluster, that a variety of cultural observations can be generalized as variants of the same symbol or cultural value. Anna Wierzbicka (1997) speaks of key words as being a link between language and culture, that culture is articulated in words or, even more subtly, in grammar, while at the same time, it is language that is a most powerful means of cultural assimilation (for both insiders and outsiders). Language and culture are two sides of the same coin. Ken Hale4 (1986) presents our notion in what he calls “World View-1” and “World View-2” (which I will elaborate on directly), and Nick Enfield has a recent edited volume titled Ethnosyntax (2002), which is a transparent marking of some sort of integration between culture (ethno) and grammar (syntax). So there is still a lot of interest in our theme, Pinker notwithstanding. We’ll see quite a few more authors who display more than a passing interest in it. Whorf was somewhat eccentric, even back in the day, but he was much appreciated and highly regarded by his colleagues some seventy-five years ago, and he continues to be oft-cited today—even by his detractors.
Both Martin and England use these related ideas of cultural and grammatical theme as a discovery procedure for discussing the broader relationship of language to culture. Indeed, Dell Hymes, an early pillar of linguistic anthropology, says, “Cultural values and beliefs are in part constitutive of linguistic reality” (1966:116). In other words, a language will encode cultural factors that are salient to its speakers. So, the discovery of such factors suggests areas where we can successfully look to elicit culturally meaningful linguistic data. At the same time, as we discover relationships among the formal structures of a language—say, how the grammar marks honorifics, ambiguity, and indirection in Japanese—we can assume that these may reflect important cultural thematic material, as they certainly do in Japanese.5
To pursue these twin notions of cultural and grammatical theme, in addition to Whorf we will consider Hale’s claim (1986) that all cultures have two worldviews, what he labels World View-1 (what I’m calling, following Martin and England, cultural theme) and, not surprisingly, World View-2 (grammatical theme). According to Hale, World View-1 is more philosophical than grammatical. Indeed, he says that it is learned apart from language and that it is independent of a language’s grammar. It is acquired by participating in a group’s cultural ways—even if one does not necessarily speak the native language. For example, Charlotte Schaengold reports for Navajo: “Some Navajo families seem to maintain Navajo cultural norms without fluent use of the Navajo language. The proper respect for the elderly and clan relationships with other Navajos can apparently be maintained without the Navajo language itself” (2004:18). Even without the critical cultural formation that language provides and guides, cultural norms nonetheless flow out of, or emerge from, the behavior, observations, and choices of members of a society even when members no longer speak the language.
To achieve World View-1, then, one need not be a fully fluent native speaker of the language in question. Hale additionally claims that some details of such a worldview are not even necessarily shared by all who are native speakers of the language, because of different levels of sophistication and access to the events and esoteric knowledge that point to what the world is like. Certain areas of cultural knowledge are inaccessible to men, for example, or to women or to youth or to the otherwise uninitiated. This is an important caveat. It is worth stating that worldview is not a monolithic concept that all cultural insiders are essentially tied to and from which they are unable to escape. Rather, worldview as per Hale’s World View-1 is a propensity and tendency to see and understand the world in particular ways, promoting and privileging certain understandings of how the world works.
Nevertheless, World View-1, though largely independent of language by Hale’s reckoning, is not distinct from language. Its relation to language is not based on the grammar but on meaning. World View-1 is elaborated in the lexicon, for example, in the now-mythic, yea cultic, status of the supposed dozens (or scores or even hundreds!) of “Inuit words for snow” (see Martin 1986 for a far more realistic and investigative view of this arctic notion), where a culture’s ways and concerns are coded in the words used to speak of issues significant to the members of a specific culture. The meanings are “out there” in the eyes and minds of beholders, even when the language itself starts to slip away and gets replaced by a majority “monster” language like English or Spanish. We might consider this phenomenon similarly to that of a deaf child growing up in a hearing society. Although she doesn’t have the benefit of the assimilative power of spoken language, this does not mean that she is not an active and comprehending member of the society as she assimilates the culture in ways beyond spoken language itself. So language lays down a template of meaning in the world, and World View-1 picks up and understands much of the template, even without fluency in the language. Navajo youth honor their grandparents in cultural ritual and respect even without Navajo fluency. Of course, if form follows function, even these cultural rituals may be lost as young people shift their language usage toward English where the new language doesn’t support time-honored traditions.
Still, language is complex because the world is complex. A language must have the resources (grammatical, phonological, and semantic) to express all that is culturally significant to its speakers. But even when speakers begin to shift their language use to a second language (L2), the real-life complexity of their first-language (L1) world is still out there for them to participate in and to describe (Hale’s World View-1), albeit now less convincingly, and probably less ably, in an L2. I say “less ably” on the assumption that the language that best describes a series of integrated cultural phenomena (like the respect shown to Navajo elders as mentioned above) would necessarily be the native language of the people to whom these phenomena are personal, meaningful, and pervasive—like snow and related categories to the Inuit.
On the other hand, Hale’s World View-2 is necessarily and automatically shared by all native speakers as a by-product of learning to speak natively one’s heart language. This is very different from World View-1, which is only loosely tied to language, and it means that World View-2 is shared communally because the group’s native language is shared communally. World View-2 has an intimate relationship to the grammar far beyond the mere accumulation of entries into a cultural dictionary. Hale’s notion of World View-2 is as that part of culture that we absorb in the learning of the grammatical distinctions and requirements made in our native languages, like Boroditsky’s German and Spanish friends as they learned about bridges as either grammatically masculine or feminine. A bridge is a bridge, but culture always rubs off.
World View-2 deals not with the simple naming of cultural phenomena (not that this is necessarily all that simple), nor with the content of history or ritual, but rather in the way the grammar privileges certain recurrent themes that are instantiated in various grammatical structures or on different grammatical levels, say the morphology and syntax.6 Hale claims that World View-2 is necessarily shared by all L1 C1 (native language and native culture) members of the society since these broad themes are acquired in the very process of learning one’s first language. It is clearly not autonomous of the grammar but rather is co-referential with it in that the internalizing of these grammatical categories is how World View-2 is acquired.
Anna Wierzbicka shows to some degree how this works out in English. She concedes that clearly, words carry cultural meaning, but, she says, “certain meanings are so important to communities of speakers that they become not just lexicalized (linked with individual words, WMC) but grammaticalized, that is, embodied in the language’s deep structural patterns” (2002:162).
She talks about the legacy of English in the world and the parallel practice of democracy in many English-speaking countries, particularly in the United States. She says that as industry developed in the US, the need to get people to do things and follow orders became increasingly important. In the meantime, the growth of democracy taught citizens that just as their individual votes were worth as much as the individual votes of the wealthy, so their dignity and equality are commensurate with that of others. So at the same time that grammatical imperatives would seem the way to communicate orders, Wierzbicka suggests that other strategies needed to be adapted that reflect the day-to-day ideology of democracy. “The cultural emphasis on personal autonomy, characteristic of the modern Anglo society…is no doubt closely related to the expansion of causative constructions in modern English” (2002:166).
She says that, compared to other languages, English is loaded with watered-down imperative constructions. Instead of just telling someone to do something, which, on occasion, we do in fact do, Wierzbicka says that “the growing avoidance of the straight imperative, is an unparalleled phenomenon in modern American English” (2002:167). She cites constructions like would you do something, could you do something, that someone should do something, to have someone do something, to persuade them do it, to get someone to do it, along with a number of “let” constructions: “Let’s think of a better solution,” “Let’s not do that,” etc. Additionally, there are all kinds of indirect strategies such as asking a question (“Can you pass the guacamole?”) rather than simply and blatantly demanding that the guacamole be passed—or the use of just the bare noun in “Guacamole, please,” where the presence of “please” shows us that the use of the noun is really and truly an imperative, although it doesn’t carry the same social heaviness of a straight-up, demanding imperative. This, latter “bare noun” strategy parallels the situation where a friend comes to the door and buzzes you. You answer, “Yes?” “It’s John,” he says. Here the imperative is simply a name, and you interpret the pragmatics of the situation to let John in. “It’s John” operates as a veiled imperative. The so-called whimperatives (a term derived from wh-imperative—not from “wimpy” imperatives)—are imperatives that masquerade as questions (questions are often called wh-structures in linguistics since so many question words (in English) begin with wh-: when why, who, where, etc.). These whimperatives are also called stealth imperatives by Steven Pinker (2007), which are structures with imperative force that don’t “look like” imperatives. Some examples of whimperative are: “Why don’t we do it like this?” “If you would be so kind,” “So, when do you plan to finish your homework?”
To these constructions I add a few additional ones. Recently I had a plumber and an HVAC technician (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) come to our home to give us some advice. The plumber said, “A fellow could cut this off here and ‘tee’ into the main line over there.” The other said, “You might could consider not doing anything until fall.” These are clearly muted imperatives, on par with one could… and one might…, which are perhaps used more extensively. In any event, there are a lot of options in English for telling people what to do, without really telling them. It’s the linguistic analog of the iron fist in the velvet glove.
Wierzbicka goes to all this trouble in order to show some kind of relationship between culture and grammar, not necessarily causation, which is very hard to prove (although, like Boroditsky, she makes a strong case). But she does show at the very least a clear pattern both in the grammatical data and the cultural, observations. Not only are there lots of grammatical options for indirect imperatives in English, but the number of constructions seems to be growing, as I reported regarding my own observations from my very own basement in Ohio. Wierzbicka claims that not only are there many more constructions of this sort in English when compared to other languages across the board (not just European languages), but that their usage in English is very high as well. She points out that such grammatical options (and their actual use in day-to-day discourse) tell us something about the culture of people that use these grammatical strategies, in this case, the importance of respecting others’ esteem by not being obviously and blatantly demanding.
Saying that the egalitarianism of US culture is behind the use of these constructions may seem like common sense, but such a pronouncement is fraught with peril. Perhaps it is the other way around, that language precedes culture, and we have grown egalitarian because of the abundance of expressions we have to express such a notion. The use of she/he, for example, is an attempt to provide some gender equality in academic writing, along with a sentence like “A person should consider their own best interests,” where we sacrifice grammaticality for the hope of greater inclusion. Here we’re trying to affect culture with language. Causation is hard to prove, and it’s most likely that it goes both ways, at least in practice, so I won’t be dogmatic. But we will certainly shoot for patterns among the data presented here.
We can see the possibility of using such cultural features as discovery procedures to search for corresponding grammatical features that encode these culturally key concepts. At the same time, if we observe lots of grammatical material related to a common theme, this certainly gives us cause to search for corresponding cultural aspects of such grammatical themes.
Some concepts are coded subconsciously and automatically (grammatically) in a given language, while others must be articulated more analytically, in more piecemeal fashion, laying out for hearers just how a situation is to be understood. This reflects what the well-known linguist Charles Hockett said: “Languages differ not so much as to what can be said in them, but rather as to what it is relatively easy to say (because of its grammatical coding)” (1954:122, emphasis in original, parenthetical comment, WMC).
In terms of causation—that culture “causes” language to be a certain way—Hale says, “It seems to me to be a matter of luck, a chance happening when a neat correspondence between World View-1 and a principle of grammar…is met with” (1986:237). Nevertheless, he says that part of our work as language and culture specialists is to search for just such correlations between World View-1 and World View-2. What is particularly difficult about finding or purporting any “neat correspondence” between language and culture is that it is extremely challenging to figure out any way to prove that there is causation involved, that language would cause a certain kind of cultural behavior, or a certain type of culture would cause the grammatical codification of a certain grammatical theme. There are so many variables. Humans are complex.
Understanding causation has always been a goal in the human sciences, but being empirical about plumbing the depths of causation has been an ongoing challenge. Wierzbicka (1997) cuts through some of the haze here. She suggests that languages that have a word for ‘orange marmalade’ certainly have a cultural product by that name. It is not the case that language creates the product. Rather, culture members create or discover something that becomes meaningful to them and they need a way to talk about it. Culture comes first, then language. Language serves culture. Nevertheless, language then becomes the major tool that a culture uses to replicate itself, from its deepest values to its sweetest fruit concoctions. As Wierzbicka (1997:1) claims, “there is a very close link between the life of a society and the lexicon of the language spoken by it.” She agrees with Sapir and quotes him: “Vocabulary is a very sensitive index of the culture of a people” (cited in Mandelbaum 1949:27). Again, she quotes Sapir, “Language is a symbolic guide to culture” (ibid.:162). In other words, there is a connection, perhaps causal, but certainly considerable, between language and culture.
As mentioned previously, this notion of a relationship or influence between the language that people speak and the daily life that they live is a notion usually attributed to Benjamin Whorf and his mentor, Edward Sapir, and is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
Whorf claimed:
…each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade…. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. (1940, reprinted in Carroll 1956: 212–213)
The “categories and types” that he mentions here are cultural constructs that depend on the interaction of language and culture for their meaning. To affirm this idea, we need only consider Geertz’s discussion of the difference between a wink and a twitch, a difference I mentioned a few pages ago. Geertz says that the wink construct is the “speck of behavior” (the action itself) together with the meaning behind it, what he calls “a fleck of culture” (1973:6). Meaning is culture based. There is nothing about the physical act of the wink/twitch in and of itself that makes it meaningful. Indeed, one might easily assume that there are cultures where what we consider to be a volitional wink is utterly meaningless and therefore ignored as cultural detritus. It is rather the history of experiences with such behavior and the cultural contract or underlying agreement of those who have so interpreted it in the past that gives it meaning. The etics of behavior—what the camera sees (the physical twitch)—are important to us as outsiders trying to understand what is going on, but it is the emics—the meaning, the interpretation by locals (the wink, and all that it might mean)—that speaks to the relationship between language and culture. Whatever else we might say about the relationship, it is my position that the link between language and culture—or in the present case, between grammatical and cultural theme—is meaning based. I think Whorf would have agreed.7 He got this partly from his own study and observation and certainly in part from his mentor and teacher, Edward Sapir. In perhaps Sapir’s most oft-cited quote, he says:
Though language is not ordinarily thought of as of essential interest to the students of social science, it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social processes and problems. Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. (cited in Mandelbaum 1949:162)
Harry Hoijer is the scholar perhaps most responsible for the post-World War II revived interest in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis after the two men’s early deaths, Sapir at 55 in 1939 and Whorf at only 44 years of age in 1941. In fact, it is most likely Hoijer who first coined the term the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Hoijer’s definition of the SWH is the observation that “language functions, not simply as a device for reporting experience, but also, and more significantly, as a way of defining experience for its speakers” (1954). Two readings of Whorf are possible. The first is that language determines the way we think about things, or, more subtly, that it determines the thoughts that are available to us. The second reading is that our language merely influences how we think. These two positions have come to be known as the strong version and the weak version of the SWH, respectively.8 And although both Sapir and Whorf are on record with statements that could be construed as deterministic, they often mitigated these strong statements in print and most certainly held the milder view, that of influence and not determinism. The SWH is often thought of in terms of how language potentially constrains thought, but from the outset, Hoijer saw it in more general terms—how language and culture interact.
Hoijer and Mayanist Robert Redfield organized a conference in 1953 at the University of Chicago that brought together some of the leading linguists and anthropologists in the country with the idea of laying out just what was meant by the SWH, and how it can be sustained through linguistic analysis and cultural observation. Hoijer’s subsequent publication of the proceedings of that conference (1954:93) includes not only the papers presented, but the gist of the ensuing discussions as well. It is an outstanding resource for understanding the SWH in terms of how Sapir and Whorf’s friends and contemporaries understood it, and in these articles, we can see that they were trying to feed linguistic and cultural data “up” to a more general level in order to develop a larger encompassing theory of the interaction of language and culture. Nonetheless, even Whorf’s friends and colleagues found it difficult to pinpoint exactly what Whorf meant by linguistic relativity. Still, in the papers and discussions, several points were recurrent. First, that whatever one could say about the relationship between language structure and cultural experience in the world, it needs to be backed up by nonlinguistic, that is, cultural material. Formulating hypotheses about such a relationship on the basis of linguistic data and then using further linguistic data to prove these hypotheses is circular and trivial. Hoijer suggests that any connection between language and culture will come “from a totality of categories cutting across lexical, morphological, and syntactical materials plus the impresses of these upon other behavior which is nonlinguistic” (1954:129). The categories he mentions are what we’re calling grammatical themes, while the nonlinguistic behavior reflects our cultural themes.
In his discussion, Hoijer lays out a research agenda for establishing the value of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis for cross-cultural understanding and to “develop the hypothesis” (1954:102). It’s interesting that he didn’t see the hypothesis as something to be proved or disproved, but rather, as a discovery procedure to be developed. As in all scientific endeavor, his basic research question is in essence, “What is going on here?” His call for research has no clinical, laboratory component (although many such experiments have been carried out such as those by John Lucy (1992) and Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt, and Webb Phillips (2003), which I think are very convincing). Rather, Hoijer’s call is mostly related to the gathering of nonlinguistic, cultural information that would enable cross-cultural comparison of similar and dissimilar languages with similar and dissimilar cultures, in order to understand not only “what is going on” in specific cultures, but to provide empirical data for the cross-cultural comparison of how language and culture interrelate at a higher level. This book is in part a belated response to Hoijer’s plea.
In this book, I suggest that we look at the relationship between language and culture in terms of local interpretation. This removes—albeit only partially—the investigator from the analytical process by asking how the people themselves view such a relationship between how their grammar works and what are some of the salient values of the culture that they live out on a daily basis. How is such a grammatical theme instantiated in the culture and vice versa, how is such a central cultural theme instantiated in the grammar, and how does an outsider mount evidence to endorse such an integral interpretation? To do this, I suggest that we adopt an interpretive model of analysis based not on empirical (physically measureable) findings, but on interpretive reflection.
The Finnish linguist Esa Itkonen (1978) claims that proof in the human sciences is different in a number of ways from proof in the natural sciences. He says that proof (and data) for the more “human” sciences is hermeneutic, interpretive rather than positivistic, where the term “positivistic” implies logical or mathematical preciseness and measureable proof. This is not meant to be an apology for anthropology, but an admission that what we’re looking for is not spread out over the measurable spaces between and among cultural players. Rather, we’re looking for what things mean to locals.
A hermeneutic approach is basic to Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology, an understanding of culture that privileges local action as well as local understanding and explanation. Nevertheless, for Geertz, although the local view is privileged, it isn’t presented in isolation, nor does it trump all outsider observation. Just because we may be outsiders, it doesn’t follow that we can make no valid observations about another culture. Rather, Geertz models an ethnographic technique where he observes culture as a participant, one involved (even embroiled) in the very cultural and linguistic notions he is attempting to understand and explain. At the same time, he relates this participation and these formal linguistic notions to similar situations in our own culture and language. In this way, he tries to make the strange familiar by showing how an event as gruesome to Western eyes and minds as a cockfight (1973:412–453) is basically an instantiation of the issues of prestige, leadership, dominance, and respect—things that we understand very well within our own cultural trappings. At the same time, by focusing on the common occurrences of daily life in almost microscopic detail, Geertz also succeeds in making the familiar seem strange by showing us that we are largely unaware of many of the intricate details of things that we think and do each day. Anthropologists call this idea of making the strange familiar (or vice versa) strangemaking. I detail this ethnographic technique in chapter four and discuss how an emic (insider) analysis of cultural values overlays an etic (outsider) account of “what the camera sees.” We will try to see beyond the reach of the camera’s lens.
This etic-emic distinction in anthropology is attributed to Ken Pike, who first applied the difference between phonetics and phonemics from the field of linguistics, to culture. For a thorough discussion of these terms, especially as used by anthropologists, see Headland, Pike, and Harris (1990).
Geertz explains that the difference can be encapsulated in the difference between a wink and a twitch, a comparison we’ve mentioned several times already, but which gives us a good touch point for discussion. Although the mechanics of the two movements are identical, one is full of cultural meaning (the wink), whereas the other is simply a response to a bug in your eye. In ethnography, it is local meaning—the wink—that is of greatest interest, not the twitch. The reason we’re concerned about the etic perspective at all is that, as outsiders, we can’t know ahead of time what will end up mattering and what won’t. For example, there is a common rural Guatemalan gesture where you bend your index finger and swipe it lightly across your nose. It seems to be merely the classic response to an itchy nose, but it isn’t. It actually means “nothing happened.” So I could say something like, “I went to Carlos’s house to get what he owes me, but [gesture],” which would mean Carlos didn’t cough up the ten bucks he has owed me for two years. If I had made no observation of the etic swipe of the nose—what the video camera itself would have duly recorded—I would have almost certainly missed this, interpreting it to mean the same thing in the new culture as it does in my own culture, merely a response to an itch, and I would never have learned that there is something behind the swipe: real, cultural, meaning. So being attuned to the etic perspective keeps us open to what might shake out as meaningful and emic upon further cogitation.
For Geertz, the goal of ethnography is not a recapitulation of everything etic, as the empirical behaviorist would want it—think B.F. Skinner—but rather an understanding in the hermeneutic sense of interpreting behavior as it is locally meaningful. Dealing with culture and the human sciences is less about logic in the strict sense of the physical scientist and more readily about meaning, interpretation, or validation—showing pattern, if not necessarily cause.
Of course, since culture is so often expressed linguistically, and since language can only be fully understood in extended cultural context, the teasing apart of the linguistic and cultural aspects of these themes—especially when they coincide—may not be at all straightforward, but, repeating England, “Where these themes overlap [culturally and linguistically, WMC] will be found powerful elements of the world view of a people” (1978:226). This makes sense, since we would expect a language to code most adequately and extensively those factors most important to the speakers of that language, or, as John DuBois so quotably puts it: “grammars code best what speakers do most” (1985:363). This coincides with Dell Hymes’s observation that not only does our native language affect how we conceive of the world (linguistic relativity as per Benjamin Whorf), but also culture—how we look at the world and participate in it—has a profound effect on our native language, by effectively coding or “packaging” those elements and themes that are most salient to us as cultural insiders (1966).
I propose that the Maya-Mam theme of centeredness is just such a powerful cultural and grammatical element, one which reflects, affirms and, indeed, constructs this Maya-Mam worldview. As one speaks Mam, the worldview that is represented and reflected by the language is confirmed and established. Indeed, it emerges in the very act of speaking. Action in the world, of which speaking is a prime example, is both the outflow or product of the worldview which engenders it, as well as the prime building block used to establish that very worldview. This is at the root of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the habitus, the idea that as language actively structures cultural reality, at the same time, it is itself structured by that reality (1990:52). In the same way, I consider centeredness among the Mam as both a template of how the world works (that which is seen as a structured whole) as well as a goal to achieve personal peace and communal accord (that which helps structure our behavior). Mayanist Evon Vogt of Harvard (d. 2004) says that this idea of the Mayan sense of centeredness “symbolizes the essence of social order, civilized behavior” (1976:33)—whether out in the hamlets with their clusters of house compounds or in the ceremonial center with the “houses for the saints” with the “navel of the earth” at its center. This is in opposition to the “undomesticated domain populated by wild plants, wild animals and demons” (ibid.), where civilizing centeredness is unknown.
It is this sense of order, equilibrium, fairness, and harmony that typifies the world as it should be: centered—not extreme, nor unbalanced nor skewed. At the same time, the world is rarely so nicely organized, so centeredness becomes a goal to work toward and a cultural value that comprises that which is ultimately b’a’n, good and meaningful. I will continue to spell this out as we look at data from a variety of contexts.
So the distinction between what Hale calls World View-1 and World View-2 is not as neat as the finite numbers may have intimated: first one, then the other. Rather, the two are “interconstitutive, through overlap and interplay between people’s cultural practices and preoccupations and the grammatical structures they habitually employ” (Enfield: 2002).
To understand another culture, it isn’t enough to simply note their practices, even less so the physical coordinates and measurements of the bodies that “do” those practices. Rather, such understanding is built up in community and over time. It includes the perspective and practice of history, both the acquisition and augmentation of cultural knowledge, as well as how that knowledge has been appropriately expressed throughout reported history. This sense of “that’s how things are and how they have always been” lays down extremely powerful cultural norms for regulating and interpreting behavior. Language gives us a powerful tool for understanding and interpreting these norms.
Of course, we can only hope to approximate, rather than attain, a truly local or emic analysis of culture—particularly a culture other than our own—but to strive to do so leads us into an analysis of the practices and cultural knowledge of a people, both of which can be expressed in language. This is what Geertz means when he says that culture is public—it is “out there” where it can be seen, discovered, learned, taught, acted out, and interpreted. It isn’t magic. It’s real—if not fully material. In this study, I am assuming that both grammatical and cultural themes are indeed public, “out there” and discoverable in the world as it is understood by the Maya-Mam.
My goal in this study is to establish the Maya-Mam integrating value of centeredness as a cultural and grammatical theme, and to posit the relevance of such a theme to our understanding of the relationship between language and culture. I show that the particular overlap of the cultural and grammatical theme of centeredness is specific to Maya-Mam and basic to the Mam conception of the world. As such, this notion supports the concept of linguistic relativity, according to which language affects culture (language is a force for structuring the world). But it also shows that culture affects language (language is a construct built up by the articulation of our understanding of the world and how it works).
1.2 How might we show that language and culture are cut from the same cloth?
What kinds of evidence would we consider adequate to such an enterprise? First, England and Martin agree that grammatical and cultural themes need to be verified independently. In other words, grammatical themes should emerge from the formal analysis of naturally occurring texts in addition to the meanings and distribution of individual lexical items (words and affixes). And they should operate both across and within levels of the linguistic hierarchy—lexical, morphological (the make-up of words), and syntactic (the make-up of sentences), as well as in discourse.9 I suggest that deictic centeredness as a formal grammatical theme operates on just these levels of Mam grammar. We will talk more about deixis a little later and also in chapter five, but for now we will let a few examples stand for the whole.
The difference between the verbs bring and take is a deictic distinction; the topic of discussion is called deixis. When someone brings something, it comes toward or to the speaker. When someone takes something, it goes away from the speaker or from where the speaker was when he or she articulated the phrase. The speaker occupies a “center space” from which the orientation of this kind of motion (toward or away from the speaker) is determined. The words here and there and this and that also define a deictic center space from which location is measured. Here and this are near me as the speaker (this book that I have here in my hand). There and that code things that are not near to the speaker, at least when compared to here and this (that cat over there). This can get complicated as we will see later.
We will find the notion of the deictic center or origo to be extremely productive in Mam grammar.
In addition, the meanings of lexical items should be construed within an overarching semantic domain which is meaningful to locals. This is possible by comparing and contrasting both use and meaning of words and affixes as they occur in daily practice, grounding centeredness in the daily lives and speech of the Mam. Centeredness is indeed ”a big-ticket item” among the Mam.
Likewise, to posit centeredness as a cultural theme requires independent, nonlinguistic, or paralinguistic verification across a number of cultural areas—religion, daily life, construction, the use of space, health and illness etiology, etc. This is just what Hoijer, Hymes, Hale, Martin, England, and Enfield are asking for—establishing cultural and grammatical themes independently of each other and then comparing them for similarities and overlap. Still, any generalizations that we reach must be cross-checked with cultural insiders to prevent the “eye of the beholder” effect, where things seem perfectly clear to an outside researcher but remain opaque to locals. Of course, pattern unrecognized is still pattern, but my claim is that grammatical and cultural themes converge in local meaning, so pattern, though crucial, isn’t enough. We seek local interpretation in order to show meaningful linkage between linguistic and cultural material.
Enfield, like Hale, cautions against the overzealous positing of causal, non-arbitrary links between linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena, yet he claims that “exploratory attempts at explanation can be extremely valuable” (2002:24) in that they give us an idea where to look for strong arguments supporting these links. He suggests that these arguments may well be psychological in nature, wrapped up in the meaning assigned by native speakers to linguistic and cultural phenomena. To that end, “it is well worth exploring the idea that a language’s morphosyntactic resources are related to the cultural knowledge, attitudes, and practices of its speakers” (idem). So, although we’re skating on thin ice when we posit that language causes certain cultural responses or that culture is behind certain grammatical structures, this is just the vocation that Enfield and Hale call us to.
As mentioned above, Itkonen claims that proof in anthropology, sociology, history, and other human sciences is different in a number of ways from proof in the natural sciences. First, for the natural sciences, “Since each centimeter or second is identical with each other centimeter or second, the differences and similarities between (physical) things and events can be ascertained in a precise and perfectly general way” (1978:25, parenthetical comment his). In the human sciences, on the other hand, such measurement is either impossible or trivial. Cultural phenomena such as values, contentment, faith, and honor, are not readily reducible to numbers and precise calculation. Of course, there are physical, spatio-temporal coordinates to cultural phenomena, but to reduce the phenomena themselves to the location where they take place and to the measured movements of bodies in space, though not unimportant, is to a large degree orthogonal—or at best minimally relevant—to what it is that cultural anthropologists are trying to find out. Second, whereas positivistic proof requires the precise measurement of calculable phenomena—observable “objects” in space and time—the human sciences strive not to measure but to understand or interpret observations not reducible to such calculable phenomena: things like attitudes, cultural values, and worldview. Third, a positivist scientist attempts to stand outside of the universe of measurement and the things to be measured, and in this way, to be truly “objective,” whereas social scientists “investigate something which they themselves, qua scientists, are part of” (ibid.:30).
Itkonen says that proof (and data) for the more “human” sciences is hermeneutic, rather than positivistic. He defines this by suggesting that “it might be said that hermeneutics acquires its data through understanding meanings, intentions, values, norms, or rules, and the hermeneutic analysis consists in reflection upon what has been understood” (ibid.:20). This gives rise to a fourth and final Itkonen observation: whereas the methodology of positivistic science is well established, hermeneutic methodology has no standard discovery procedure. It is eclectic, participatory, and interpretive.
With this in mind, how do we go about “proving” that centeredness is a cultural and grammatical theme in Mam?
1. First, we don’t do away with careful observation. Rather, we contextualize it. Itkonen reminds us that meaning exists only in social context. So, instead of trying to extract ourselves from social context, linguistic anthropologists embrace it. This is quintessential participant observation, the hallmark of ethnographic description (see section 4.1 below). The ethnographer is part of the context—not a fly on the wall—and, as such, needs to be described and discussed just as any other fact of the context. Some feel that this kind of reorienting of context around the researcher is useless and tangential navel gazing. Like anything else, it can get out of hand, but by committing to a focus on those being researched, the researcher is normally only manifested as a grounds against which more central figures play out their roles. The focus of good ethnography, while not denying the researcher’s presence, is not about the researcher.
2. We look for historical continuities. Frenchman Émile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, says, “The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it” (1988:244). Since I claim that centeredness is a “social fact,” in the tradition of Durkheim, that is, a pervasive, culture-wide phenomenon, it should be manifested through time, as well as across social sub-groups within the culture. These facts don’t just pop up fully grown like Aphrodite from the sea foam. They take time to spread—more broadly and more deeply. And despite differences of gender, social class, education, home region, religion, and economic standing, there are nevertheless issues that supersede these differences in uniting members of a culture group. These include language, values, and worldview, continuities which can be uniting principles even in the face of extensive social variation.
3. We seek patterns in the data that we observe, both linguistic and cultural; the more disparate and atomistic the data, the more helpful an encompassing theory “within which the observations find a natural place” (Chafe 1994:21). And, as we’ve discussed already, the patterns should be independently verified (chapter three); yet, at the same time, we should be able to unite them under the common notion of centeredness. Hymes says that a basic practice of anthropological study is “the showing of a pattern, fashion of speaking, or style among a number of traits” (1966:117). This is the goal of my study—to explain how such diverse observations as religious choice, the constructed world, the perception of health and illness, daily language use, and aspects of the formal grammar of Mam are all instantiations of a single theme.
This kind of analysis is based on triangulation, a term used by ethnographers to indicate that conclusions are drawn from a variety of sources based on disparate observations across different aspects of the culture, in order to draw inferences that are integrated across the observations and commensurate with native opinion. Something that we observe just once really doesn’t tell us anything. If we see it a second time, perhaps it is a coincidence. But if it happens three times or even more, there may well be a pattern emerging.
4. Itkonen says that the people themselves must be able to understand and accept the description arrived at in our research (1978). This is what Amy Zaharlick, in a personal communication, calls the “Aha! factor.” When locals appropriately understand the data and the explanation, they should agree that the analysis is realistic and that it reflects how they view the world. The fact that locals would say, “You know, this is really the way we think about things,” is itself data and therefore subject to analysis.
5. When someone acts outside cultural norms we can expect some kind of critical reaction from the group. Culture includes learned and shared patterns of behavior. These cultural norms aren’t deterministic—people can decide to comply or not to. Nevertheless, these norms exert tremendous pressure on individuals in the culture to conform. As Durkheim (1988:240) says, because society “surpasses the individual in time as well as in space, it is in a position to impose upon him ways of acting and thinking which it has consecrated with its prestige.” As we have said, culture is built up over time and its influence is spread over entire areas of habitation. It is practiced by family, friends, and pretty much everyone—and has been for a long time. A cultural value becomes salient via its absence, and ignoring these norms exacts a price. I discuss this in chapter three in terms of Timo’s patio. When centeredness was considered compromised (ignored or flouted), something had to be done.
6. Finally, assuming that our theme of centeredness is as pervasive and explanatory as I’ve suggested, we would expect it to be manifested in many ways in the daily life of the Mam.
In chapters three, four, and five I attempt to “prove” or affirm my premise via this six-fold rubric. The careful reader will see that the first three points of the rubric are methodological in nature—the priority of participant observation, the search for continuity from the past, and the identification of patterns of behavior. The second three points are predictive, something we should expect from any theory worth its salt. Our rubric predicts that the Mam will generally agree to the notion of the center as an organizing and influential principle of life, that either the flouting or ignoring of this principle leads to strong response and that the instantiation of centeredness will be pervasive and varied in Mam behavior. These six points will provide us with a track to run on.
I consider chapter four the heart of the book. In it I show how centeredness is a part of daily life among the Mam. I look at a marriage proposal and an agreement protocol where I was personally (and innocently, I might add) involved in offending a man’s wife, and I discuss how centeredness comes into play in each event and, also, how the two events coalesce around the notion of a commitment to reciprocal action, which I claim is an analogue of a search for metaphorical center space among disputants. I also discuss the language of centeredness, how the Mam themselves talk about daily life in terms of our theme and what vocabulary they use to do so. Most of this is based on lexical items taken from discussions in which I played a participatory role, although the longer discussion of -k’u’j ‘stomach’ terms stems from Scotchmer’s (1978) unpublished componential analysis of such terms and my resultant ethnographic interview session with a number of Mam men based on Scotchmer’s findings, and confirmed in local conversations.
1.2.1 A future for linguistic anthropology
As sociolinguistics has become a well-respected branch of linguistics by showing the relevance of social context to language choice and structure, so I believe that anthropological linguistics merits the same respect from the broader linguistic field, as we see how relevant cultural context is to language. My hope is that this study will be a step in that direction, presenting linguistic and anthropological data together in order to show the critical importance of both in our quest to understand another culture and the language that culture members speak.
As sociolinguistics looks at variety within language, based on differing social contexts (when language varies or correlates with gender, age, socio-economic class, geographic region, education, vocation, etc.), so linguistic anthropology seeks to understand the commonalities that all culture members share despite social and linguistic variation. In this sense, I consider culture to provide a “context for contexts.” In other words, despite language variation based on the variables mentioned above—along with other potential factors10—people within the larger culture still largely agree on linguistic code and worldview, powerful factors that allow for successful communication and basic agreement about how the world works despite observable differences within the larger group. I suggest that it is these cultural themes that hold across social and even linguistic contexts, as well as across time, that help solidify and account for social practice, “the behavior of whole cultural groups” (Martin 1977:366), despite the distinctions of class, gender, education, and geographic region.
An academic book should put its claims in a larger context. A study of great beaches shouldn’t limit itself to observations about the chemical composition of the sand. So I will keep coming back to the bigger picture. We’ve already talked quite a bit about linguistic anthropology, specifically the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and the corresponding notions of cultural and grammatical theme. We’ve heard the voices of a number of heavy hitters, all of whom have at one time or another considered linguistic relativity with kind eyes. Boas, Malinowski, Sapir, Whorf, Hoijer, Hockett, Pike, Hymes, Bourdieu, Geertz, Gossen, Hale, Zaharlick, England, Martin, Wierzbicka, Boroditsky, Enfield, and others have become colleagues and mentors in our quest for understanding the heartbeat of Maya-Mam culture.
These people are modern linguists, which means that we all are interested in the commonalities of languages around the world. It is truly astounding that, despite the obvious differences among the world’s languages in terms of their sounds and meanings and structures, nonetheless there is a tremendous amount of similarity and even “universality” among them. This look at the forest rather than the trees is Chomsky’s major contribution to modern linguistics, indeed, it virtually defines modern linguistics. But in our quest for the universal, we must not overlook the beauty and reality of linguistic and cultural diversity. Although languages seem to be cut from the same cognitive cloth, the variety of that cloth is also astounding and worthy of study. This is the purview of linguistic anthropology, trying to keep both the universal and the particular in focus.
In addition to these “heavy hitters” we’ve also heard from my friend Eugenio about the power of the center for orienting behavior and for providing a template for understanding how the world is supposed to work. We will hear from many others, since ethnography is a multi-voiced and many-layered discipline. My hope is that the mix of scholarship with the earthiness of data and observations drawn from the real lives of real people will enrich us, both intellectually and humanly. And you, gentle reader, will decide for yourself if I have cleared the high bar of good ethnography which requires hearty entertainment, solid teaching, accurate reporting, and integrated analysis.
This is what good ethnography is about. We’ll be working this out together through the rest of the book.
1.3 Methodology employed
This study combines various methodologies drawn from linguistics and linguistic anthropology, ethnography, and discourse analysis. It is a mix of the scholarship of others and my own research. My contribution is largely in the arrangement and interpretation of the data, although much of the linguistic data is a result of my own investigation. I have corroborated among Central Mam speakers all the data that I have included from others and I have, to my thinking, made the data from other sources “my own,” in the sense that I’ve attempted to find analogues in the speech and culture of Comitecos (people from Comitancillo, where Central Mam is spoken) concomitant with the data of others that I have cited in the cultural fields of architectonics, health and illness, religion and conversion, and in daily life and speech.
1.3.1 Ethnographic methods
My life among the Mam has been largely as a participant observer, although not exactly as an ethnographer. When my wife and I moved to Comitancillo in 1980 I had had a single graduate cultural anthropology course, although I had fairly extensive SIL training in second language acquisition (which had a strong cultural component).11 I also had my recent Spanish acquisition experience to aid me in approaching a third language. Our language-learning program was socially, not academically, based. It was basically learning by wandering around and getting involved in activities and conversations wherever and whenever possible. This has ended up being the main strength within my ethnographic contribution via this book, since good ethnography is based on native-language participation.
In 1980 not a lot had been published about Mam beyond a few dissertations. These were especially helpful for providing some advance notice of what to look for. Yet today, although much more is available about the language, including a great deal written by the Mam themselves, England still maintains, in a personal communication, that Mam is extremely underrepresented in the scholarly literature.
My Mam language-learning experience centered around a “route” that I walked several times a week, meeting people in store fronts and visiting in homes or in the plaza, or in the lines of people waiting to get into the municipal buildings to pay a fee or see the mayor. In these different contexts, I recited a short, memorized monologue with the dozens of people willing to listen to a gringo stumble over their language.
Later that day, after evaluating my performance and dealing with any questions that arose, I would learn another short monologue and repeat the process. At the end of each week, I would review my progress, write up any interesting cultural or linguistic observations, and plan for the following week.
This route-based system of language learning was founded on the work of Tom and Betty Sue Brewster, a married team of language-acquisition gurus who taught that learning a language is as natural as having a baby. Rather than turning the experience over to the language schools and “experts,” they proclaimed that we should embrace the naturalness of the language acquisition situation and learn a language socially rather than formally.12 This made sense to us since there were no schools in Comitancillo for learning Mam, nor were there any Mam-101 instructors, nor texts of any kind.
While we were still in Guatemala City, before moving to Comitancillo, both my wife, Nancy, and I walked Spanish language-learning “routes” each day. I found that, after moving to Comitancillo, memorizing Mam monologues was much more challenging than learning Spanish routines. I was unable to learn enough overnight to warrant another foray into the community the following day. I usually made these visits of several hours in length two or three times a week.
An acquaintance (and eventually an employee), Gilberto, worked several hours with me each afternoon, helping me construct grammatically correct monologues that would answer questions people had about my wife and me and our newborn daughter. Where were we from? Were our parents living? Why did we have just one child? Why had we come to Comitancillo? What was life like in the United States? Did I have a real job? Did we eat tortillas?
When Gilberto and I had prepared a short monologue (usually just three or four sentences), he would record it three times in its entirety on a cassette recorder. I would listen to this recording over and over, often putting it on an everlasting tape loop, and I would try to match Gilberto’s rate of speech and his intonation by speaking the monologue together with the advancing tape. Then he would record it again, going through the text a phrase at a time, leaving a short dead space after each phrase so I could repeat it after him. Then he would tape another exercise, building the phrases up to full sentences for repetition, eventually to the point where I could say the entire text verbatim and at normal speed. I would often listen to these tapes and recite my text hundreds of times before trying it out on people in town. Gilberto would also note sounds that were difficult for me to produce and we would create taped exercises to focus on those sounds. We would also develop exercises to help me learn verb tense and aspect, person marking and new vocabulary. So although I claim that I learned language socially rather than academically (there being no schools to attend or adequate programmed materials to work through), there was still a strong formal component to my methodology,13 much of which Gilberto and I developed as we went along. The difference in the Brewsters’ system and a more typically formal one is based on the Brewsters’ insistence on self direction, a very strong social component, and learning things as needed rather than according to a predetermined scope and sequence. After some six months dedicated to learning Spanish in the streets of Guatemala City, I spent almost two years concentrating pretty much full time on learning to speak Mam. Although I’ve never been mistaken for a native speaker, I was usually/often able to understand what was going on around me, and word spread about my language ability, which was usually overstated in the telling. In a way, this is a sad situation. Since there have been so few outsiders who have made even a stab at learning to speak this wonderful language, any that do become hot news. People often ask me how long it took me to “learn Mam.” I usually tell them quite truthfully, “I’m still learning,” which is certainly true. It did indeed take all of two years before I felt comfortable speaking Mam even in limited contexts.
The social and formal components of my language-learning experience were bolstered by the technical work of translation. This is where I learned much about Mam language and culture as I worked with native speakers to try to understand together with them Biblical content and the best way to get this content across in Mam. Using Mam as the medium of communication and participation has been crucial to any insight I’ve been able to put forth in this study.
Good ethnography is based on just such participant observation. Participation implies a degree of language ability such that the researcher can share in the practice of daily life without constantly referring to the mechanics of speech. Speaking ability comes to be assumed and is used as an avenue through which deeper understandings are achieved.
Ethnography is both a methodology and a product. It offers explanations in terms of multiple voices, and it highlights views not often publicized. Basically, it tries to answer the question, What is it like to be a member of this culture and a speaker of this language?
Ethnography is a broad, interdisciplinary methodology. Yet, despite its all-comers eclecticism, there are some basic elements that hold true of all ethnographic inquiry, as suggested by Martyn Hammersly and Paul Atkinson (1986). It is based on participant observation. It denies even the possibility of being the so-called fly on the wall that is privy to everything that happens and which enables one to make “valid” judgments about its meaning. Ethnographers admit that the observer’s paradox is real (Labov 1972, especially chapter eight). This paradox, also known as the thermometer effect, constantly badgers the analyst. If you want to know the temperature of a glass of water, you stick a thermometer in the water and wait for a reading. But the thermometer being in the water affects the temperature, and the reading is therefore suspect. So the presence of an anthropologist affects the context such that what she or he has to say about it is itself suspect. We basically want to observe what the people are like when they are not being observed. If that sounds like an impossibility, you get the picture.
The solution to this conundrum is not to try to extract oneself from the situation, to “rise above it,” or to hide a tape recorder or video camera under one’s sombrero (which, by the way, is unacceptable to any reputable university social science department). Rather, effective analysts participate (in varying degrees) in the very events that they describe. The goal is to understand the emic categories of the people being studied. With this in mind, ethnography is long-term. One can’t simply ask people, “So, what are your emic categories?” These are uncovered over many months and years of inquiry—both formal and informal—and observation. Ethnography assumes that research is done in the native language as much as possible, and that it is based on firsthand observation. In addition, the search for emic categories makes those studied the experts, since they know what things mean, and we don’t. So an ethnographer’s role is one of a learner, and she learns naturalistically, that is, in social context via relationships with native speakers—they who are the holders of the emic categories and are the ultimate goal of the research. This characteristic of the researcher-as-participant is what ethnographers mean when they say that they themselves are the research instrument. Members of the group being studied answer questions for the ethnographer; they give advice, teach, and learn skills, share meals, and help solve problems in ways that include the researcher in the local life of the group. In such a context, ethnographic researchers plumb their own thoughts and responses to how they are included (or not) in the local scene and they study the language and practices of inclusion and exclusion. In this way, ethnography is reactive and iterative. Questions are never fully answered. Rather, more and more data are brought to bear on how an issue is to be understood in different ways under different circumstances. In this way, researchers can write not about some objectified/sterile sense of what behaviors are exhibited by group members, but they can talk of life in context from the point of view of the cultural insider. That is our goal.
Ethnography is holistic. Ethnographers start with some cultural detail—for example, a cockfight (Geertz 1973:412–453) or a short proverb (Becker 1996:142–159)—and begin to explore it. In the exploration, more and more context is brought to bear upon its interpretation. Questions are asked. Contrasts are sought. Both Geertz and Becker expand the scope of their original topics to include much larger issues of local life, language and thought, Geertz beginning with culture, Becker beginning with language. And yet both end up in a similar place, a thickly described slice of local life with adequate perspective to show us how that slice fits into the larger life of the group.14
The product of effective participant observation is thick description (Geertz 1973), where a researcher looks first at what seems to be going on, at which point he or she begins to add layers of further description by discussing language use, linguistic and cultural categories, local interpretations of events, and further relevant detail. It is this multi-layering that makes the description “thick.” This contrasts with “thin” description which merely states the physical facts, the etic layer with no interpetation. Thick description is reflective as well as recursive, going back over details again and again, and thinking about them from different perspectives and answering new and further research questions until all emic moisture is wrung out of both real-time observation and further discussion with actual participants. This emic wringing Geertz calls “interpretive anthropology,” where the explication of worldview is plumbed, along with how this worldview is realized in linguistic and cultural practice.
Thick description not only extracts the emic from the etic (or the meaningful from the mundane), but it also explains the use of language in culturally accepted and socially expected ways. In essence, thick description is an amalgam of how both cultural insiders and participant observers view a social situation and its relevant context, and it is the technique I use to plumb the idea of centeredness as a cultural theme. What makes Geertz particularly appropriate here is his integration of linguistic and cultural data encompassing two points of view. Both are important. The first has to do with what the data themselves show, the story that Geertz sees. The second point of view emerges from Geertz’s own language and culture, who he is as a person and not just as a scholar. This helps him to relate closely with his audience, and they see the “foreign” story through his eyes, whereby it loses much of its foreignness. This would not be possible if Geertz were to stick with just one side of the story. For example, in his article on Balinese cockfights (1973:412–451) Geertz shows that an ethnographer must look at what he calls the microscopic details of a single event (the etic layer), while also addressing the broader issues of how those details fit into the larger picture of cultural/linguistic life by comparing them with others in contrastive life situations and texts. It is this layering of analysis that is the essence of thick description, which includes ethnolinguistic techniques for probing semantic categories, seeking information and asking questions around topics like kinship, work, religion, or, as in the present case, centeredness and balance.
Geertz’s emic study gives us a powerful ethnographic model to emulate. For Geertz, ethnographic participant observation is different from a simple parade of anecdotes in that it is purposeful, integrated, holistic, contextualized, and centered not only on the researcher’s rendition of what is happening, but on local analysis as well. The ethnographic report based on participant observation is not merely the retelling of anecdotes. Anecdotes are flat—told from a single point of view. They are also streamlined—trying to make a single point. An ethnographer, rather, tells the story from many angles—her own, both personally and professionally, as well as from that of the speakers/doers themselves. The ethnographic story is layered and nuanced.
One’s point of view is not readily reducible to proofs and numbers. In the same way, any connection between language and culture is not so much something subject to measurement as it is to interpretation. Cultural studies don’t enable us necessarily to predict cultural phenomena, but rather to understand them. A Geertzian interpretation, as mentioned above, has both etic (the description) and emic (the meaning) components.
As mentioned earlier, the researcher supports his or her construal of events by triangulation, where generalizations are pursued across the variety of observations, which may or may not seem to be related on the surface, but at a deeper level may be instantiations of the same theme. My goal in this study is in one sense, as Hymes (1966:117) says, to seek not proof, but pattern. But beyond Hymes, we are seeking local interpretation of this pattern. Pattern alone is not enough. Where language and culture come together is in the minds of native speakers. So it is this emic perspective—local meaning—that I’m seeking in this study. How is centeredness, as realized in cultural and grammatical theme, conceived and reflected in talk among the Mam themselves?
What I try to do then, as an ethnographer, is attempt to live the life of a Maya-Mam—at least to a limited degree. What I hope to discover is whether what ends up in my own head and behavior as I endeavor to live that life, corresponds to the way that the Mam themselves think and act. My goal is for them to say, when we talk about my findings: Tzuyxpetzin tu’n. ‘Yep, you got it’.
These ethnographic methods together with their respective ethnographic products give us a clear goal to shoot for.15 I hope to emulate in chapter four the fine work of Hymes, Geertz, Becker, and Duranti (whom we’ll meet later). In that chapter we will look in depth, and in ethnographic style, at a Mam agreement ritual.
1.3.2 Linguistic methods and models
Linguistically, I follow Charles Fillmore and John Lyons in terms of my discussion of deixis. We talked about this (if not about Fillmore and Lyons) a number of pages back. Deixis projects from a traditional “egocentric” idea of the deictic center. Actually, deictic notions aren’t limited to here and there, although these will be the most relevant in our study since it is spatial relations that particularly concern us. Regarding the fuller notion of deixis, Fillmore says: “I carry around with me, everywhere I go, my own private world. The spatial centre of this world is my location (here)…the temporal centre of this world is the passing moment of my consciousness (now)…the social centre of this world is me” (1998:40–41) (1998:40–42, parenthetical glosses, WMC). The speaker—ego—is the center point from which all deictic notions (person, place, and time) are determined. By virtually all accounts, deixis is quintessentially egocentric, based on where the speaker is at the moment of utterance. This deictic center serves like a surveyor’s monument stake, a binding starting point from which all deictic measurements are calculated. This deictic center anchors the meaning of the words you and me, this and that, now and then. These words don’t have an exact denotation like the word dog or joy or Ralph, things we can point to. Indeed, the term “deictic” means to point or indicate. The meaning of deictic terms is determined contextually. When I am speaking, the words I and me refer to me. But when the conversation swings and you are speaking, your use of I and me refers to you, not me. The same holds for here and there. Here is close to me and there is away from me; but when you wrest the floor from me and you are doing the talking, here is close to you and there is away from you—perhaps close to me. Which is which depends on who is speaking, and to whom. As complicated as this seems to be, deictics are among the early lexical forms that children acquire, albeit not without some confusion.
The present study is not specifically about deixis, at least not directly; rather it deals with the formal, grammatical apparatus the Mam use that relates to and is defined by centeredness, of which the idea of a deictic center is the prime formal example.
I also talk in chapter five about a field of linguistics called discourse analysis. The basic question here is, What makes a text a unified whole as opposed to a simple gluing together of unrelated sentences? A classic work in the field was done by M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (1976), where they identify what they call ties between what comes earlier in a text and what comes later, like pronouns and their antecedents, and related vocabulary that moves a text forward as it unfolds. The study of discourse has tended to have two emphases. One deals with the mechanics of discourse, how the grammar of a language links what comes next to what has come before. The other downplays the grammar of discourse16 for a number of reasons and is more interested in the connected ideas themselves, how the story or the arguments flow from one proposition to the next.
