William F. Hanks

Referential Practice is an anthropological study of language use in a contemporary Maya community. It examines the routine conversational practices in which Maya speakers make reference to themselves and to each other, to their immediate contexts, and to their world. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Oxkutzcab, Yucatán, William F. Hanks develops a sociocultural approach to reference in natural languages. The core of this approach lies in treating speech as a social engagement and reference as a practice through which actors orient themselves in the world. The conceptual framework derives from cultural anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, interpretive sociology, and cognitive semantics. As his central case, Hanks undertakes a comprehensive analysis of deixis—linguistic forms that fix reference in context, such as English I, you, this, that, here, and there. He shows that Maya deixis is a basic cultural construct linking language with body space, domestic space, agricultural and ritual practices, and other fields of social activity. Using this as a guide to ethnographic description, he discovers striking regularities in person reference and modes of participation, the role of perception in reference, and varieties of spatial orientation, including locative deixis. Traditionally considered a marginal area in linguistics and virtually untouched in the ethnographic literature, the study of referential deixis becomes in Hanks's treatment an innovative and revealing methodology. Referential Practice is the first full-length study of actual deictic use in a non-Western language, the first in-depth study of speech practice in Yucatec Maya culture, and the first detailed account of the relation between routine conversation, embodiment, and ritual discourse.

Language and Lived Space Among the Maya

Referential Practice

This book brings together papers written by William F. Hanks over the last decade, organized around the three central themes that have been emerged in his work: indexicality and referential practices; discourse genres and textuality; and the historical embeddedness of language. Together, they present the main elements of a coherent, synthetic approach to language in context.

Writings on Language, Utterance, and Context

Intertexts

Carlo Severi

As the discipline of anthropology continues to chart a course along various turns (ontological, ethical, and otherwise), in this pathbreaking volume Carlo Severi and William Hanks return to the question of knowledge and translation as a theoretical and ethnographic guide for twenty-first century anthropology. Translation has played an important but equivocal role in the history of anthropology and linguistics. At least since Ferdinand de Saussure and Franz Boas, languages have been seen as systems whose differences make precise translation exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. Others have argued that, in purely abstract terms, translation between languages is in principle indeterminate. This collected volume suggests that the challenge posed by the constant confrontation of incommensurable paradigms, or worlds, may be the most""fertile ground for state-of-the-art ethnographic theory and practice. With contributions on topics that range from the philosophical to the ethnographic (with refelctions on themes as diverse as tourism in New Guinea, shamanism in the Amazon, the globally ubiquitous restaurant menu, and oral traditions in the Himalayas), this volume provides a new anthropological way to define translation, not only as a key technique for understanding ethnography, but also as a general epistemological principle. "

The Epistemological Space of Translation

Translating Worlds

Don Stephen Rice

Explores the extent and pattern of job discrimination against people with cancer. Part one reviews work histories of cancer patients, with chapters on recovered patients and survivors of childhood and adolescent cancer. Part two makes research and policy recommendations to maximize the productive activity of cancer patients. This volume brings together studies of the linguistic and compositional principles of written discourse, iconography, and symbolic representation, linking these to cosmology and the institutional context of Maya kingship. Architectural, artistic, and glyphic archeological data are brought to bear on the character of Maya civilization. Handsomely produced, with many glyphic and iconographic figures. Not indexed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

William F. Hanks

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