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Centeredness As a Cultural and Grammatical Theme in Maya-Mam

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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. ii I also suggest that centeredness, in addition to being a pervasive Mam cultural principle, is also a grammatical theme, what Hale calls a “lexico-semantic…motif which functions as an integral component in a grammar” (1986: 234). This grammatical theme is instantiated in large measure, by the formal notion of origo, the “space-time-social centre” of the world (Levinson, 1983, 64). I show that the idea of spatial centeredness (or recenteredness (Hanks, 1990)) as a grammatical theme is evidenced in the Mam lexicon, as well as in aspects of the morphology, syntax and narrative discourse structure of naturally occurring Mam texts. These Mam data show that language and culture are interconstitutive (Enfield, 2000), structured and structuring cultural practice via the grammatical structures habitually employed. iii Dedicated to the Mam people Noqit ax Qman kyuk’i’y kykyaqilxa iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A dissertation is normally the harried completion of a project that has been a long haul. Many people helped to move this particular project forward. Thanks to my advisor, Don Winford, who was demanding, but never unrealistic (at least in retrospect). The others on my committee, Scott Schwenter and Amy Zaharlick offered timely encouragement as well as intellectual assistance and stimulation. I’m grateful to Nora England and Laura Martin for helpful discussion of centeredness. Their idea of the overlap of cultural and grammatical theme is the basis of this dissertation. Of course, whether I’ve done justice to their input will be up to the reader. Many SIL colleagues also offered insight from their many years of work among the Maya, particularly Ed Beach and Paul Townsend. I’m also grateful for the practical and administrative support of SIL over these last twenty-five plus years. I owe special gratitude to the Mam of Comitancillo. Not only did they put up with me and my myriad foibles and questions, but in the process they became some of my best friends anywhere. I mention just a few by name: Antonio Pérez, Eberardo Feliciano (Q.E.P.D.), Filiberto López, Misael Salvador, Pedro Témaj, Agusto Miranda, Serapio Coronado, Eduardo Ambrocio, Rodolfo Matías, Octavio Ramírez, Juan Témaj, Héctor López, Olimpia López, Eusebio López, and Luis Crisóstomo. v I’m also extremely grateful for the academic community at Ohio State, particularly those of my cohort and the rest of my graduate student colleagues. In addition to my Dissertation Committee, I’m grateful to Rich Janda and Brian Joseph for their encouragement and friendship. My wife, Nancy, has been my partner in all this and my best friend. Her work among the Mam and the love they express to and for her continue to be a blessing and motivation to me. While in Guatemala, she gave birth to our three precious children, now young adults, and she went on to home school them for many years. She and they are the source of deep joy and perspective. I also thank the many people who supported our work among the Mam for so many years by their visits, their financial partnership, their friendship and their prayers. Most of all, I thank God for the privilege of knowing each of the people I’ve mentioned here and countless others who I’ve been blessed to cross paths with during the trek which has become this dissertation. vi VITA July 13, 1951............................................Born – Cleveland, Ohio 1973..........................................................B.S. Education, Ashland University 1978..........................................................M.A. Linguistics, University of Texas at Arlington 1980 – present .........................................Field Worker, Summer Institute of Linguistics 1993-1994, 1998-1999 ............................Adjunct Professor, Ashland University and Ashland Theological Seminary 1994-1995 ................................................Professor, Universidad Mariano Gálvez Guatemala City, Guatemala 2002 – present..........................................Graduate Teaching Associate The Ohio State University 2004-2005 ................................................Graduate Teaching Fellow The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS Research Publication 1. Wesley M. Collins, Codeswitching avoidance as a strategy for Maya-Mam linguistic revitalization. International Journal of American Linguistics, 2005, Vol. 71. No. 3 pp. 239-276. 2. Wesley M. Collins, Maya Mam. Typological Studies in Negation, Peter Kahrel and René Van den Berg, eds. John Benjamins Publishing Co. (1994), pp. 365- 381. 3. Filiberto López Gabriel and Wesley M. Collins, Diccionario de Verbos Mames [Dictionary of Mam Verbs]. Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. (1991). vii 4. Eberardo Feliciano and Wesley M. Collins, Un bosquejo de la negación en Maya-Mam [An outline of negation in Maya-Mam], Winak, vol. 6, pp. 117-144. (1991). 5. Thomas James Godfrey and Wesley M. Collins, Una encuesta dialectal en el área Mam de Guatemala [A dialect survey in the Mam area of Guatemala]. Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. (1987). 6. Wesley M. Collins, Apuntes sobre tipos de contacto lingüístico en el área mam [Comments regarding types of linguistic contact in the Mam area], Winak, vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 20-26. (1986). FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Linguistics Minor Fields: Linguistic Anthropology, Sociolinguistics, Ethnography viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication.......................................................................................................................... iv ii Acknowledgments................................................................................................................v Vita.................................................................................................................................... vii List of Tables .................................................................................................................... xii xi List of Figures.................................................................................................................. xiii xii Abbreviations .................................................................................................................. xiv xiii Orthography employed ......................................................................................................xv Chapters: 1 Introduction..............................................................................................................1 1.1 Centeredness as a cultural and grammatical theme .....................................1 1.2 An overview of this dissertation ................................................................14 1.3 Some comments on Mam culture ..............................................................16 1.3.1 Socio-economic situation...............................................................17 1.3.2 Educational situation......................................................................24 1.3.3 Religious situation .........................................................................25 1.3.4 Sociolinguistic situation.................................................................27 1.4 Some comments on Mam language ...........................................................32 1.4.1 Mam as an endangered language and efforts at revitalization.......34 1.5 The occasion for research ..........................................................................39 1.6 What’s new in this disertation?..................................................................44
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