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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]
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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

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