Language and Ethnicity Among the K'Ichee' Maya

ISBN-13: 9781607813972 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 166 str.

Sergio Romero

Opis

This book explores the articulation between accent and ethnic identification in K ichee, a Mayan language spoken by more than one million people in the western highlands of Guatemala. Basedon years of ethnographic work, it is the first anthropological examination of the social meaning of dialectal difference in any Mayan language. Romero deconstructs essentialist perspectives on ethnicity in Mesoamerica and argues that ethnic identification among the highland Maya is multiple and layered, the result of a diverse linguistic precipitate created by centuries of colonial resistance.

In K ichee, dialect stereotypes accents act as linguistic markers embodying particular ethnic registers. K ichee speakersuse and recombine their linguistic repertoire colloquial K ichee, traditional K ichee discourse, colloquial Spanish, Standard Spanish, and language mixing in strategic ways to mark status and authority and to revitalize their traditional culture. The book surveys literary genres such as lyric poetry, political graffiti, and radio broadcasts, which express new experiences of Mayan-ness and anticolonial resistance. It also takes a historical perspective in examining oral and written K ichee discourses from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, including the famous chronicle known as the Popol Vuh, and explores the unbreakable link between language, history, and culture in the Maya highlands.
"