The Heart of the Matter. Wesley M. Collins
with the “houses for the saints” with the “navel of the earth” at its center. This is in opposition to the “undomesticated domain populated by wild plants, wild animals and demons” (ibid.), where civilizing centeredness is unknown.
It is this sense of order, equilibrium, fairness, and harmony that typifies the world as it should be: centered—not extreme, nor unbalanced nor skewed. At the same time, the world is rarely so nicely organized, so centeredness becomes a goal to work toward and a cultural value that comprises that which is ultimately b’a’n, good and meaningful. I will continue to spell this out as we look at data from a variety of contexts.
So the distinction between what Hale calls World View-1 and World View-2 is not as neat as the finite numbers may have intimated: first one, then the other. Rather, the two are “interconstitutive, through overlap and interplay between people’s cultural practices and preoccupations and the grammatical structures they habitually employ” (Enfield: 2002).
To understand another culture, it isn’t enough to simply note their practices, even less so the physical coordinates and measurements of the bodies that “do” those practices. Rather, such understanding is built up in community and over time. It includes the perspective and practice of history, both the acquisition and augmentation of cultural knowledge, as well as how that knowledge has been appropriately expressed throughout reported history. This sense of “that’s how things are and how they have always been” lays down extremely powerful cultural norms for regulating and interpreting behavior. Language gives us a powerful tool for understanding and interpreting these norms.
Of course, we can only hope to approximate, rather than attain, a truly local or emic analysis of culture—particularly a culture other than our own—but to strive to do so leads us into an analysis of the practices and cultural knowledge of a people, both of which can be expressed in language. This is what Geertz means when he says that culture is public—it is “out there” where it can be seen, discovered, learned, taught, acted out, and interpreted. It isn’t magic. It’s real—if not fully material. In this study, I am assuming that both grammatical and cultural themes are indeed public, “out there” and discoverable in the world as it is understood by the Maya-Mam.
My goal in this study is to establish the Maya-Mam integrating value of centeredness as a cultural and grammatical theme, and to posit the relevance of such a theme to our understanding of the relationship between language and culture. I show that the particular overlap of the cultural and grammatical theme of centeredness is specific to Maya-Mam and basic to the Mam conception of the world. As such, this notion supports the concept of linguistic relativity, according to which language affects culture (language is a force for structuring the world). But it also shows that culture affects language (language is a construct built up by the articulation of our understanding of the world and how it works).
1.2 How might we show that language and culture are cut from the same cloth?
What kinds of evidence would we consider adequate to such an enterprise? First, England and Martin agree that grammatical and cultural themes need to be verified independently. In other words, grammatical themes should emerge from the formal analysis of naturally occurring texts in addition to the meanings and distribution of individual lexical items (words and affixes). And they should operate both across and within levels of the linguistic hierarchy—lexical, morphological (the make-up of words), and syntactic (the make-up of sentences), as well as in discourse.9 I suggest that deictic centeredness as a formal grammatical theme operates on just these levels of Mam grammar. We will talk more about deixis a little later and also in chapter five, but for now we will let a few examples stand for the whole.
The difference between the verbs bring and take is a deictic distinction; the topic of discussion is called deixis. When someone brings something, it comes toward or to the speaker. When someone takes something, it goes away from the speaker or from where the speaker was when he or she articulated the phrase. The speaker occupies a “center space” from which the orientation of this kind of motion (toward or away from the speaker) is determined. The words here and there and this and that also define a deictic center space from which location is measured. Here and this are near me as the speaker (this book that I have here in my hand). There and that code things that are not near to the speaker, at least when compared to here and this (that cat over there). This can get complicated as we will see later.
We will find the notion of the deictic center or origo to be extremely productive in Mam grammar.
In addition, the meanings of lexical items should be construed within an overarching semantic domain which is meaningful to locals. This is possible by comparing and contrasting both use and meaning of words and affixes as they occur in daily practice, grounding centeredness in the daily lives and speech of the Mam. Centeredness is indeed ”a big-ticket item” among the Mam.
Likewise, to posit centeredness as a cultural theme requires independent, nonlinguistic, or paralinguistic verification across a number of cultural areas—religion, daily life, construction, the use of space, health and illness etiology, etc. This is just what Hoijer, Hymes, Hale, Martin, England, and Enfield are asking for—establishing cultural and grammatical themes independently of each other and then comparing them for similarities and overlap. Still, any generalizations that we reach must be cross-checked with cultural insiders to prevent the “eye of the beholder” effect, where things seem perfectly clear to an outside researcher but remain opaque to locals. Of course, pattern unrecognized is still pattern, but my claim is that grammatical and cultural themes converge in local meaning, so pattern, though crucial, isn’t enough. We seek local interpretation in order to show meaningful linkage between linguistic and cultural material.
Enfield, like Hale, cautions against the overzealous positing of causal, non-arbitrary links between linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena, yet he claims that “exploratory attempts at explanation can be extremely valuable” (2002:24) in that they give us an idea where to look for strong arguments supporting these links. He suggests that these arguments may well be psychological in nature, wrapped up in the meaning assigned by native speakers to linguistic and cultural phenomena. To that end, “it is well worth exploring the idea that a language’s morphosyntactic resources are related to the cultural knowledge, attitudes, and practices of its speakers” (idem). So, although we’re skating on thin ice when we posit that language causes certain cultural responses or that culture is behind certain grammatical structures, this is just the vocation that Enfield and Hale call us to.
As mentioned above, Itkonen claims that proof in anthropology, sociology, history, and other human sciences is different in a number of ways from proof in the natural sciences. First, for the natural sciences, “Since each centimeter or second is identical with each other centimeter or second, the differences and similarities between (physical) things and events can be ascertained in a precise and perfectly general way” (1978:25, parenthetical comment his). In the human sciences, on the other hand, such measurement is either impossible or trivial. Cultural phenomena such as values, contentment, faith, and honor, are not readily reducible to numbers and precise calculation. Of course, there are physical, spatio-temporal coordinates to cultural phenomena, but to reduce the phenomena themselves to the location where they take place and to the measured movements of bodies in space, though not unimportant, is to a large degree orthogonal—or at best minimally relevant—to what it is that cultural anthropologists are trying to find out. Second, whereas positivistic proof requires the precise measurement of calculable phenomena—observable “objects” in space and time—the human sciences strive not to measure but to understand or interpret observations not reducible to such calculable phenomena: things like attitudes, cultural values, and worldview. Third, a positivist scientist attempts to stand outside of the universe of measurement and the things to be measured, and in this way, to be truly “objective,” whereas social scientists “investigate something which they themselves, qua scientists, are part of” (ibid.:30).
Itkonen says that proof (and data) for the more “human” sciences is hermeneutic, rather than positivistic. He defines this by suggesting that “it might be said that hermeneutics acquires its data through understanding meanings, intentions, values, norms, or rules, and the hermeneutic analysis consists in reflection upon what has been understood” (ibid.:20).