Browsing by Subject "Ways of speaking"
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Item Discourse, social cohesion and the politics of historical memory in the Ixhil Maya region of Guatemala(2012-05) García, María Luz; England, Nora C.; Sherzer, Joel F.; Hale, Charles R.; Strong, Pauline; Epps, PatienceThis dissertation will examine the speech practices of collectives of Ixhil Mayas in post-war Guatemala. Specifically I analyze the way that historical memory of the recent period of violence, which culminated in genocide in the 1980s, is encoded in Ixhil ways of speaking and constitutes social action among Ixhil collectives. I propose an ethnographically situated framework within which to consider Ixhil historical memory which includes Ixhil concern for relationships with the dead, proper treatment of cornfields, innovations on community practices that were threatened during the war, and discourses about the injustice of an unarmed population confronted with armed soldiers of the government of Guatemala. Such a framework critiques views that see historic memory as externally imposed or as a manifestation of trauma and brokenness. Rather, the framework I offer allows us to see how discourses of historical memory make use of the resources of the Ixhil language and the conventions of various Ixhil ways of speaking in order to continue to constitute Ixhil communities and the collectives of political society. In this dissertation I likewise propose a broader view of the politics arising from Ixhil historical memory. In addition to the simultaneously spiritual and overtly political reburial ceremonies for the wartime dead, political rallies, and formal exhumations, the post-war politics of historical memory includes a proliferation of community-based organizations which have begun to take key positions in Ixhil communities. Ixhil genres of prayer, political speech, meeting talk, collective narratives, funeral speeches, and the talk used when visiting the sick provide the discursive tools to encode historical memory and new forms of community. In the aftermath of genocide that sought to destroy Mayas’ ability to exist as a collective, these acts of community-making among groups formed in response to the peace accords offer a version of post-war politics of historical memory.Item The social life and sound patterns of Nanti ways of speaking(2010-05) Beier, Christine Marie; England, Nora C.; Sherzer, Joel; Woodbury, Anthony C.; Keating, Elizabeth L.; Crowhurst, Megan J.; Hanks, William F.This dissertation explores the phenomenon of ways of speaking in the Nanti speech community of Montetoni, in southeastern Peruvian Amazonia, between 1999 and 2009. In the context of this study, a 'way of speaking' is a socially meaningful, conventionalized sound pattern, manifest at the level of the utterance, that expresses the speaker's orientation toward some aspect of the interaction. This study closely examines both the sound patterns and patterns of use of three Nanti ways of speaking — matter-of-fact talk, scolding talk, and hunting talk — and describes each one in relation to a broader set of linguistic, social, and cultural practices characteristic of the speech community at the time. The data for this study is naturally-occurring discourse recorded during multi-party, face-to-face interactions in Montetoni. Bringing together methods developed by linguists, linguistic anthropologists, conversation analysts, and interactional sociologists, this study explores the communicative relations among participants, interactions, situations of interaction, and the utterances that link them all, attending to both the individual-level cognitive (subjective) facets of interpersonal communication and the necessarily intersubjective environment in which communication takes place. In order to disaggregate the multiple levels of signification evidenced in specific utterances, tokens are examined at four levels of organization: the sound form, the sentence, the turn, and the move. The data are presented via audio files; acoustic analyses; sequentially-organized and temporally-anchored interlinearized transcripts; and composite visual representations, all of which are framed by detailed ethnographic description. Nantis' ways of speaking are shown to consistently and systematically convey social aspects of 'meaning' that are crucial to utterance interpretation and, therefore, to successful interpersonal communication. Based on the robust correspondences between sound form and communicative function identified in the Nanti communicative system, this study proposes that ways of speaking are a cross-linguistically viable level of organization in language use that awaits discovery and description in other speech communities. The research project itself is framed in terms of the practical issues that emerged through the author's own experiences in learning to communicate appropriately in monolingual Nanti society, and the ethical issues that motivate community-oriented documentation of endangered language practices.