The Heart of the Matter. Wesley M. Collins

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