The Heart of the Matter - Wesley M. Collins

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with kind eyes. Boas, Malinowski, Sapir, Whorf, Hoijer, Hockett, Pike, Hymes, Bourdieu, Geertz, Gossen, Hale, Zaharlick, England, Martin, Wierzbicka, Boroditsky, Enfield, and others have become colleagues and mentors in our quest for understanding the heartbeat of Maya-Mam culture.

      These people are modern linguists, which means that we all are interested in the commonalities of languages around the world. It is truly astounding that, despite the obvious differences among the world’s languages in terms of their sounds and meanings and structures, nonetheless there is a tremendous amount of similarity and even “universality” among them. This look at the forest rather than the trees is Chomsky’s major contribution to modern linguistics, indeed, it virtually defines modern linguistics. But in our quest for the universal, we must not overlook the beauty and reality of linguistic and cultural diversity. Although languages seem to be cut from the same cognitive cloth, the variety of that cloth is also astounding and worthy of study. This is the purview of linguistic anthropology, trying to keep both the universal and the particular in focus.

      In addition to these “heavy hitters” we’ve also heard from my friend Eugenio about the power of the center for orienting behavior and for providing a template for understanding how the world is supposed to work. We will hear from many others, since ethnography is a multi-voiced and many-layered discipline. My hope is that the mix of scholarship with the earthiness of data and observations drawn from the real lives of real people will enrich us, both intellectually and humanly. And you, gentle reader, will decide for yourself if I have cleared the high bar of good ethnography which requires hearty entertainment, solid teaching, accurate reporting, and integrated analysis.

      This is what good ethnography is about. We’ll be working this out together through the rest of the book.

      This study combines various methodologies drawn from linguistics and linguistic anthropology, ethnography, and discourse analysis. It is a mix of the scholarship of others and my own research. My contribution is largely in the arrangement and interpretation of the data, although much of the linguistic data is a result of my own investigation. I have corroborated among Central Mam speakers all the data that I have included from others and I have, to my thinking, made the data from other sources “my own,” in the sense that I’ve attempted to find analogues in the speech and culture of Comitecos (people from Comitancillo, where Central Mam is spoken) concomitant with the data of others that I have cited in the cultural fields of architectonics, health and illness, religion and conversion, and in daily life and speech.

      1.3.1 Ethnographic methods

      My life among the Mam has been largely as a participant observer, although not exactly as an ethnographer. When my wife and I moved to Comitancillo in 1980 I had had a single graduate cultural anthropology course, although I had fairly extensive SIL training in second language acquisition (which had a strong cultural component).11 I also had my recent Spanish acquisition experience to aid me in approaching a third language. Our language-learning program was socially, not academically, based. It was basically learning by wandering around and getting involved in activities and conversations wherever and whenever possible. This has ended up being the main strength within my ethnographic contribution via this book, since good ethnography is based on native-language participation.

      In 1980 not a lot had been published about Mam beyond a few dissertations. These were especially helpful for providing some advance notice of what to look for. Yet today, although much more is available about the language, including a great deal written by the Mam themselves, England still maintains, in a personal communication, that Mam is extremely underrepresented in the scholarly literature.

      My Mam language-learning experience centered around a “route” that I walked several times a week, meeting people in store fronts and visiting in homes or in the plaza, or in the lines of people waiting to get into the municipal buildings to pay a fee or see the mayor. In these different contexts, I recited a short, memorized monologue with the dozens of people willing to listen to a gringo stumble over their language.

      Later that day, after evaluating my performance and dealing with any questions that arose, I would learn another short monologue and repeat the process. At the end of each week, I would review my progress, write up any interesting cultural or linguistic observations, and plan for the following week.

      This route-based system of language learning was founded on the work of Tom and Betty Sue Brewster, a married team of language-acquisition gurus who taught that learning a language is as natural as having a baby. Rather than turning the experience over to the language schools and “experts,” they proclaimed that we should embrace the naturalness of the language acquisition situation and learn a language socially rather than formally.12 This made sense to us since there were no schools in Comitancillo for learning Mam, nor were there any Mam-101 instructors, nor texts of any kind.

      While we were still in Guatemala City, before moving to Comitancillo, both my wife, Nancy, and I walked Spanish language-learning “routes” each day. I found that, after moving to Comitancillo, memorizing Mam monologues was much more challenging than learning Spanish routines. I was unable to learn enough overnight to warrant another foray into the community the following day. I usually made these visits of several hours in length two or three times a week.

      An acquaintance (and eventually an employee), Gilberto, worked several hours with me each afternoon, helping me construct grammatically correct monologues that would answer questions people had about my wife and me and our newborn daughter. Where were we from? Were our parents living? Why did we have just one child? Why had we come to Comitancillo? What was life like in the United States? Did I have a real job? Did we eat tortillas?

      When Gilberto and I had prepared a short monologue (usually just three or four sentences), he would record it three times in its entirety on a cassette recorder. I would listen to this recording over and over, often putting it on an everlasting tape loop, and I would try to match Gilberto’s rate of speech and his intonation by speaking the monologue together with the advancing tape. Then he would record it again, going through the text a phrase at a time, leaving a short dead space after each phrase so I could repeat it after him. Then he would tape another exercise, building the phrases up to full sentences for repetition, eventually to the point where I could say the entire text verbatim and at normal speed. I would often listen to these tapes and recite my text hundreds of times before trying it out on people in town. Gilberto would also note sounds that were difficult for me to produce and we would create taped exercises to focus on those sounds. We would also develop exercises to help me learn verb tense and aspect, person marking and new vocabulary. So although I claim that I learned language socially rather than academically (there being no schools to attend or adequate programmed materials to work through), there was still a strong formal component to my methodology,13 much of which Gilberto and I developed as we went along. The difference in the Brewsters’ system and a more typically formal one is based on the Brewsters’ insistence on self direction, a very strong social component, and learning things as needed rather than according to a predetermined scope and sequence. After some six months dedicated to learning Spanish in the streets of Guatemala City, I spent almost two years concentrating pretty much full time on learning to speak Mam. Although I’ve never been mistaken for a native speaker, I was usually/often able to understand what was going on around me, and word spread about my language ability, which was usually overstated in the telling. In a way, this is a sad situation. Since there have been so few outsiders who have made even a stab at learning to speak this wonderful language, any that do become hot news. People often ask me how long it took me to “learn Mam.” I usually tell them quite truthfully, “I’m still learning,” which is certainly true. It did indeed take all of two years before I felt comfortable speaking Mam even in limited contexts.

      The social and formal components of my language-learning experience were bolstered by the technical work of translation. This is where I learned much about Mam language and culture as I worked with native speakers to try to understand together with them Biblical content and the best way to get this content across in Mam. Using Mam as the medium of communication and participation has been crucial to any insight I’ve been able to put forth in this study.

      Good ethnography is based on just such participant

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