Please join us for a meeting of the Language Variation & Change workshop, next Thursday, April 11 at 4:30pm, in Haskell 101. A reception will follow.

Introducing Mayan from Cunén: Constructing an ethnography from the inside out
Perry Wong, UChicago

Summary: I provide an introduction to the focal site for this study: Cunén, El Quiché, Guatemala. The lead question I develop in this chapter is: If distinct “Mayan languages” and “ethnolinguistic communities” are ideas only recently brought in from the outside, what are the methods and topics for a more realistic project of “language” documentation and description? Borrowing a critical device from a recent Americanist historiographic ethnography (Palmié 2013), I differentially build my own authorial position through a series of illustrated considerations of how not to study “Mayan in Cunén.” The purpose of this critical stance is heuristic and constructive. By revising more familiar “outside in” research perspectives as I introduce them, I begin to chart a complementary movement, from the discursive “inside out.” I offer and exemplify five such framings:

A. While not about “a language” and its diachrony, this study is about changing ideas about “language;”
B. While not a history of a distinct local population, this study is about discursive horizons of societal transformation;
C. While not about distinct “ethnolinguistic communities,” this study is about ongoing dynamics of aggregate migration, settlement, and segregation;
D. While not about synchronic “languages in contact,” this study is about real histories of encounter and (diplomatic) negotiation between people in contact.
E. While not about “a local (language) community,” this study is about the political issues and more general circumstances that have motivated particular people to organize and present themselves as collectivities (or not);

In the process of setting the critical narrative scene for later thematically-organized chapters, I model the ethnographic approach to reporting on the real social life of local discourse that I have adopted. I end with a brief description of logistics and planning in the periodic travel to Cunén that informs this study.

This is a joint meeting with the Semiotics: Culture in Context workshop. For a copy of the paper, please e-mail Rachel Howard (rhoward3@uchicago) or Grigory Gorbun (ggorbun@uchicago).