The Heart of the Matter. Wesley M. Collins

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