Kristine Kaya Whipple and Dr. John Hawkins, Anthropology
During the summer of 2005, I lived and worked among the indigenous Maya-K’iche’ of the Guatemalan highlands. Prior to leaving, I had anticipated examining kinship terms in a bilingual country and whether the use of K’iche’ terms vs. Spanish terms would indicate a difference in the type of kinship relationship created. Upon arrival, I learned that I would spend the season in a rural, monolingual K’iche’ hamlet. Without my informants knowing any Spanish, I abandoned my bilingual project altogether and studied, instead, the native conceptions of communication and how these conceptions interplayed with their models of kinship and family. Having abandoned the pre-field research and project development, I then discovered the cultural inappropriateness of formal interviews or written methods. Subsequently, my research was built from the primary native mode of sharing information: informal conversation.
Maya-K’iche’ Cultural Constructs of Communication
From daily dinner chats and greeting neighbors to complex business transactions and flowery prayer recitation, language represents one of the most pervasive elements of social life. Specifically among the Maya-K’iche’, the largely monolingual and illiterate population places verbal language at the center of all relationships. Explicitly tied to ethnic and community identity, the ability to speak the K’iche’ language is a strong prerequisite to being Maya-K’iche’. While recognizing bloodlines and ethnic distinction, primary self-descriptions of what it meant to be Maya-K’iche’ included speaking the K’iche’ language. The perceptions surrounding that cultural identity marker of language, then, greatly affect the relationships among speakers.
The K’iche’ language is still primarily oral and reliant upon a complex informal social network (primarily of kin) of face-to-face communication. A personal sacrifice in visiting is required to maintain strong kinship ties. Conversation, the transferal of information, and language in general are described with verbs and concepts typically used to describe physical objects. Among this cultural setting, language is a physical substance given and received in the reciprocal exchange of family visiting and conversation. Family members are believed to have power over the health and well-being of their fellow family members, and the act of verbally visiting with family members is believed to affect the physical, mental, and emotional health of the entire family. In having such physical power, language can also be misused. The specific K’iche’ verb for calling upon someone for a visit (ch’ab’ej) is also a common euphemism for sexual misconduct, adultery, and particularly incest.
There are also strong spatial requirements linking verbal language to a required face-to-face interaction. This is evidenced by specific K’iche’ demonstratives (this, that), locatives (here, there), and anatomical phenomena using the speaker’s body as a reference point, which are dependent on the speaker and addressee sharing the same visible, contextual space. In other words, the K’iche’ verbs have both implicit and explicit markers separating their immediate, physical reality from the greater reality outside of their vision. When this contextual space is interrupted through non-traditional modes of communication (such as the telephone or written forms), not only is the conversation considered insufficient, ineffectual, and secondary, but is a dangerous replacement as the lack of visual contact excludes the physical connection and reciprocal exchange of shared substance. While my individual research did not study the connection to the great number of emigrants whose sole connection to their illiterate family is through cell phone calls, it would merit additional research to discover a possible connection between K’iche’ language conceptions and emigrant abandonment rates.
Factors Limiting Effectual Verbal Communication
Among community members, visiting and communication is highly regulated by gender roles, environment constraints, and folklore surrounding the dangers of roads and traveling. As demonstrated by the sexual connotations of language and ch’ab’ej, cross-gender conversation is dangerous and highly taboo in most social situations. Particularly, married individuals are prohibited from talking one-on-one with married individuals of the opposite sex. Many parents dislike the current Westernized school system as it separates children by age groups without regard to gender and encourages group activities with both sexes actively working together.
From the rugged geography and the yearly monsoon season, the compact dirt trails connecting the scattered homesteads present a tangible physical threat to visiting a family member outside your home. Economically constrained from cars or bikes as well as not having many paved roads to assist them, travel is primarily done on foot. Beyond this limitation, there are strong negative connotations to the road and the danger of venturing beyond the home compound. Traditionally guarded over by the village elders, the roads represent a source of foreign influences, thieves, drunkards, and danger in general. At the same time, roads are the lifeline connection to the market and outside information. Consistent with the cosmological founding of the Maya populations that all things carry a positive and negative potential, the roads must be utilized within appropriate venues (typically regulated by gender roles, family obligations, and the traditional subsistence economy) to avoid the ramifications of the unpredictability of the road. These restrictions particular to the rural Maya-K’iche’ further emphasize the sacrifice of visiting while giving a culturally-appropriate purpose for traveling.
This research presents interesting opportunities for further research into native linguistic perceptions, the effects of non-traditional modes of communication, and the developing infiltration of Western-based transportation, education, economics, and social structures.
Acknowledgements
I conducted this research as a participant in the 2005 Guatemala Anthropology Field Study in coordination with Dr. John Hawkins and Dr. Walter Adams. It was generously funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office for Research and Creative Activities at Brigham Young University.