The Heart of the Matter. Wesley M. Collins
4.3 Attaining b’a’n
4.4 Conclusion
Grammatical Aspects of Centeredness
5.1 Introduction
5.2 The centeredness of spatial deixis
5.3 Mam intransitive verbs of direction
5.4 Directional auxiliaries
5.5 Complex directionals
5.6 Extended use of -x and -tz
5.7 The discourse function of -tz and -x
5.8 Relational nouns as an instantiation of centeredness
5.9 Conclusion
Conclusion
6.1 What we’ve seen
6.2 Where do we go from here?
6.3 So why the commotion?
Appendix A: Text
Appendix B: List of Abbreviations
Appendix C: Notes on Orthography
References
Foreword
Being asked to write a foreword to a book can be a dangerous enterprise, as one is therefore forever associated with the work, whatever its merits or demerits may be. In this case, however, it is truly an honor to be able to be associated with this book, as author Dr. Wesley Collins has put together a meritorious volume that is both scholarly and interesting, as well as highly readable, a combination unfortunately all too infrequent in academia.
Dr. Collins examines certain aspects of the life and language of the Maya-Mam, speakers, numbering some 500,000 in all, of a Mayan language in the area in and around Comitancillo, Guatemala. Starting with the premise that the Maya-Mam have a focus in their lives on the “center” and on “centeredness,” Dr. Collins explores the ways this notion is manifest in both the culture the Maya-Mam live in and in the language which, as he says on p. 60, is available to the Maya-Mam for “the dual tasks of conceptualizing their world and enabling them to operate in it.” Centeredness is related to deixis, a basic, and crucial, notion that deals with how we orient ourselves in the world, relative to things and to people.
Author Collins sees centeredness as playing a key role in the Maya-Mam sense of well-being, city planning, the layout of their homes, and other aspects of Maya-Mam physical culture, as well as intangible cultural constructs such as religion, but also—and this is crucial to his argumentation and to his being take seriously as within linguistic anthropology (or anthropological linguistics, terms he sees as largely interchangeable (p. 3)—in the organizational structure of the grammar of their language. The existence of a link between culture and language informs his work from the very start, and pervades the discussion throughout the six chapters of the book. Collins says in Chapter 1 that his “frame or touch point will be this dual notion of grammatical and cultural theme…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,” and closes the book in Chapter 6 with the wish that he has “satisfied the hermeneutic approach to the problem” of whether “language and culture are interconstitutive in a measurable, empirical way” by showing that he has been able to interpret “data in a patterned way, consistent with how the Mam themselves view the world, how they see their place in it, their description of it, and their practice within it.”
Importantly, Collins is not simply giving impressions gained from thirty-some-odd years experience with the Mam; rather, he builds a solid case for his premise by examining details of Maya-Mam culture in Chapter 3, the structure of a sector of the lexicon in Chapter 4, and in Chapter 5 the formation and meaning of a closed class of intransitive verbs of motion and a set of preposition-like “relational nouns” that serve as deictic orientation markers. In each case, he demonstrates the relevance of “a reference location or deictic center” (p. 169), and thereby gives the anthropological linguist (or linguistic anthropologist) grist for his/her mill. Collins speaks with the authority of one who has “lived Mayan,” so to speak, and experienced Mam in a way that few outsiders ever do.
He is not afraid to take on controversy, e.g. regarding the interplay of centeredness and religion (both indigenous and Christian), and his reference throughout to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis concerning the relationship between thought and language, a notion which has been controversial from its first articulation in the first half of the 20th century. This willingness to address the provocative is good, for we are not given simply a whitewashed treatment of a feature here or a feature there, but rather we are treated to a deep delving into what makes Maya-Mam culture tick, so to speak.
Linguists may be disappointed that there is only one chapter that is fully language-oriented (centered on language, we might say), with a discussion of how centeredness manifests itself in the grammar. However there is sensitivity to language and structure throughout the book, and no chapter is devoid of linguistic material.
What consequences emerge from Dr. Collins’s work? What lessons can we learn? What conclusions can we draw? The answers lie in the direction of the study of the interaction between humans and their world, and thus there are consequences for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, for linguistic determinism, and for the examination of language in the world.
With all this said, I invite the reader to see for him/herself and to move to this most interesting book itself, which should, after all, be the true “center” of attention.
Brian D. Joseph
Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics, and
The Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Languages and Linguistics
The Ohio State University
10 June 2014
Preface: What to Expect
This book is about the Maya-Mam people of Guatemala. It’s also about linguistic anthropology, ethnography, cultural and linguistic research, the etic-emic distinction, history, architecture, pattern, health, religion, research methods, scholarship, and lots of people who have studied the Maya.
With a menu so varied, the metaphorical question might arise, “How does one go about eating an elephant?” The answer is, of course, “One bite at a time.” That’s how complex problems get solved.
That’s my plan here.
First off, there’s a lot about the Mam (pronounced “mom”) that I won’t talk about at all. We will narrow our field to the notion of “the center” and how this idea shows up and plays itself out in many divergent areas, both cultural and linguistic.
The format of the book goes along with what the old preacher said to his young disciple when queried about how to go about outlining his sermons. “First, you tell the congregation what it is that you intend to tell them. Then you tell them. Then you tell them what it was you just told them.”
Repetition is good pedagogical technique, one which I will make use of here, which is another take on what it takes to eat the proverbial elephant—perseverance over time.
In the first chapter I will introduce our theme in quite a bit of detail, not just as an introductory teaser. In terms of our sermon metaphor, I tell you what it is that I intend to tell you throughout the rest of the book. The basic notion is this: the idea of seeking the center—sometimes physically, sometimes metaphysically—is both a goal and an operating principle of the Maya-Mam people. We will come to see it as a common theme in Mayan architecture, in health and the cause and diagnosis of illness, in religious thought, and in the myriad decisions and observations of the practice of daily life. The astute reader will notice that sometimes I talk about the Maya-Mam, or just the Mam, and sometimes, more generally, about the Maya. The Mam constitute a branch of the Maya, descendants of the great Central American civilization that was occupying their own