Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T15:30:09.940Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Mayan ontology of poultry: Selfhood, affect, animals, and ethnography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2011

Paul Kockelman
Paul Kockelman
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article has three key themes: ontology (what kinds of beings there are in the world), affect (cognitive and corporeal attunements to such entities), and selfhood (relatively reflexive centers of attunement). To explore these themes, I focus on women's care for chickens among speakers of Q'eqchi' Maya living in the cloud forests of highland Guatemala. Broadly speaking, I argue that these three themes are empirically, methodologically, and theoretically inseparable. In addition, the chicken is a particularly rich site for such ethnographic research because it is simultaneously self, alter, and object for its owners. To undertake this analysis, I adopt a semiotic stance towards such themes, partly grounded in the writings of the American pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and George Herbert Mead, and partly grounded in recent and classic scholarship by linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists. (Linguistic anthropology, political economy, ontology, affect, selfhood, animals, chickens, Mesoamerica, Maya, Q'eqchi')*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , September 2011 , pp. 427 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Averill, James R. (1985). The social construction of emotion: With special reference to love. In Gergen, Kenneth J. & Davis, Keith E. (eds.), The social construction of the person, 89–109. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlin, Brent (1992). Ethnobiological classification: Principles of categorization of plants and animals in traditional societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boas, Franz (1910/1989). Psychological problems in anthropology. In Stocking, George W. Jr. (ed.), Franz Boas reader, 243–54. Chicago: Midway Reprints.Google Scholar
Boas, Franz (1911). Introduction. In Handbook of American Indian languages, 1–83. (Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40:1) Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Bulmer, Ralph (1967). Why is the cassowary not a bird? Man 2:5–25.Google Scholar
Conklin, Harold (1954). The relation of Hanunoo agriculture to their plant world. New Haven: Yale University dissertation.Google Scholar
Ekman, Paul, & Davidson, Richard J. (eds.) (1994). The nature of emotions: Fundamental questions. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. (1940). The Nuer: A description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1997). Technologies of the self. In Rabinow, Paul (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and truth, 223–52. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Frank, Robert H. (1988). Passions within reason: The strategic role of the emotions. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Paul E. (1997). What emotions really are. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanks, William F. (1991). Referential practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Keil, Frank C. (1989). Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H., & Mannheim, Bruce (1992). Language and world view. Annual Review of Anthropology 21:381–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, William (1985). The self. In Psychology: The briefer course, 43–83. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kockelman, Paul (2002). Ride of the chicken-hawks: The libidinal economy of poultry husbandry. In Minding language and measuring labor: Stance and subjectivity under neoliberal globalization, 323–96. Chicago: University of Chicago dissertation.Google Scholar
Kockelman, Paul (2003). The meaning of interjections in Q'eqchi'-Maya: From emotive reaction to social and discursive action. Current Anthropology 44(4):467–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kockelman, Paul (2005). The semiotic stance. Semiotica 157(1):233–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kockelman, Paul (2006). A semiotic ontology of the commodity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16(1):76–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kockelman, Paul (2007a). Inalienable possessions and personhood in a Mayan community. Language in Society 36:343–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kockelman, Paul (2007b). Enclosure and disclosure. Public Culture 19(2):303–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kockelman, Paul (2010). Language, culture, and mind: Natural constructions and social kinds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kockelman, Paul (2011). Biosemiosis, technocognition, and sociogenesis: Selection and significance in a multiverse of sieving and serendipity. Current Anthropology 52(5), to appear.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leach, Edmund (1964). Anthropological aspects of language: Animal categories and verbal abuse. In Lenneberg, Eric H. (ed.), New directions in the study of language, 123–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Levy, Robert I. (1973). Tahitians: Mind and experience in the Society Islands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lockhart, James (1992). The Nahuas after the conquest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Lucy, John A. (1992). Grammatical categories and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mead, George Herbert (1934). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behavioralist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Medin, Douglas L. & Atran, Scott (eds.) (1999). Folkbiology. Cambridge, MA: Bradford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1955a). Logic as semiotic: The theory of signs. In Buchler, Justus (ed.), Philosophical writings of Peirce, 98–119. New York: Dover.Google Scholar
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1955b). Pragmatism in retrospect: A last formulation. In Buchler, Justus (ed.), Philosophical writings of Peirce, 269–89. New York: Dover.Google Scholar
Postone, Moishe (1993). Time, labor and social domination: A reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quine, Willard V. (1969a). Ontological relativity. In Ontological relativity and other essays, 26–68. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quine, Willard V. (1969b). Natural kinds. In Ontological relativity and other essays, 114–38. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosaldo, Michelle Z. (1980). Knowledge and passion: Ilongot notions of self and social life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sapir, Edward (1927/1985). The unconscious patterning of behavior in society. In Mandelbaum, David G. (ed.), Selected writings in language, culture, and personality, 544–59. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Shweder, Richard A. (1994). “You're not sick, you're just in love”: Emotion as an interpretive system. In Ekman, Paul & Davidson, Richard J. (eds.), The nature of emotion: Fundamental questions, 127–30. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In Blunt, Ben G. (ed.), Language, culture, and society: A book of readings, 187–221. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (2006). Old wine, new ethnographic lexicography. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:481–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tambiah, Stanley J. (1969). Animals are good to think and good to prohibit. Ethnology 8:423–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veblen, Thorstein (1898/1998). The beginnings of ownership. In Ardzrooni, Leon (ed.), Essays in our changing order, 32–49. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1956). Grammatical categories. In Carroll, John B. (ed.), Language, thought, and reality, 87–101. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Wilce, James M. (2009). Language and emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wilk, Richard R. (1991). Household ecology: Economic change and domestic life among the Kekchi Maya in Belize. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Michael R. (1972). A highland Maya people and their habitat: The natural history, demography and economy of the K'ekchi'. Eugene: University of Oregon dissertation.Google Scholar
Wilson, Richard (1995). Maya resurgence in Guatemala. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar