Relatively Speaking: Language, Thought, and Kinship among the Mopan Maya (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics)

Based upon 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork among the Mopan Maya in Belize, Eve Danziger examines the semantic complexity of particular kinship terms used among Mopan women and children and shows that a culture-specific analysis of their terms is superior to other non-ethnographically-based methods. In doing so she contributes not only to theoretical semantics and the ethnography of that area, but to the cross-cultural study of child development and language acquisition. Contents......Page 8 Guide to Abbreviations and Orthography......Page 10 Mopan Kinship......Page 14 Kinship Theory: Universal and Relative......Page 15 Linguistic Relativity......Page 18 Psychological Reality......Page 23 Abstract of Method......Page 25 Ethnographic Setting......Page 29 The Ethnographer's Expectations and Experiences......Page 34 The Piagetian Definition Task......Page 36 The Question of Kinship......Page 39 The Tzik Relationship Terms of Mopan......Page 41 The Native Speaker's View......Page 49 Mopan Life Ich Naj ('in the House')......Page 54 Tzik Relationships and Their Socialization......Page 58 Ritually Established Relationships......Page 64 Acquiring Relationships through Marriage......Page 67 Performative Aspects of Tzik Appellation......Page 72 What Does Generation Mean?......Page 75 Semantic Analyses......Page 79 Acquisition Outcomes and Linguistic Relativity......Page 88 Putting the Question......Page 90 Data Tabulation......Page 94 Data Analysis......Page 98 Review......Page 104 Some Explanatory Explorations......Page 110 Conclusion......Page 114 Notes......Page 116 References......Page 124 G......Page 134 M......Page 135 W......Page 136 Using 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork among the Mopan Maya in Belize, the author examines the semantic complexity of particular kinship terms used among Mopan women and children, showing that a culture-specific analysis of their terms is superior to other non-ethnographically-based methods.