Centeredness As a Cultural and Grammatical Theme in Maya-Mam
CENTEREDNESS AS A CULTURAL AND GRAMMATICAL THEME IN MAYA-MAM DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Wesley M. Collins, B.S., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2005 Dissertation Examination Committee: Approved by Professor Donald Winford, Advisor Professor Scott Schwenter Advisor Professor Amy Zaharlick Department of Linguistics Copyright by Wesley Miller Collins 2005 ABSTRACT In this dissertation, I look at selected Maya-Mam anthropological and linguistic data and suggest that they provide evidence that there exist overlapping cultural and grammatical themes that are salient to Mam speakers. The data used in this study were gathered largely via ethnographic methods based on participant observation over my twenty-five year relationship with the Mam people of Comitancillo, a town of 60,000 in Guatemala’s Western Highlands. For twelve of those years, my family and I lived among the Mam, participating with them in the cultural milieu of daily life. In order to help shed light on the general relationship between language and culture, I discuss the key Mayan cultural value of centeredness and I show how this value is a pervasive organizing principle in Mayan thought, cosmology, and daily living, a value called upon by the Mam in their daily lives to regulate and explain behavior. Indeed, I suggest that centeredness is a cultural theme, a recurring cultural value which supersedes social differences, and which is defined for cultural groups as a whole (England, 1978). I show how the Mam understanding of issues as disparate as homestead construction, the town central plaza, historical Mayan religious practice, Christian conversion, health concerns, the importance of the numbers two and four, the notions of agreement and forgiveness, child discipline, and moral stance are all instantiations of this basic underlying principle.
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