Ruins and remnants of the past are endowed with life, rather than mere relics handed down from previous generations. Living Ruins explores some of the ways Indigenous people relate to the material remains of human activity and provides an informed and critical stance that nuances and contests institutionalized patrimonialization discourse on vestiges of the past in present landscapes. Ten case studies from the Maya region, Amazonia, and the Andes detail and contextualize narratives, rituals, and a range of practices and attitudes toward different kinds of vestiges. The chapters engage with recently debated issues such as regimes of historicity and knowledge, cultural landscapes, conceptions of personhood and ancestrality, artifacts, and materiality. They focus on Indigenous perspectives rather than mainstream narratives such as those mediated by UNESCO, Hollywood, travel agents, and sometimes even academics. The contributions provide critical analyses alongside a multifaceted account of how people relate to the place/time nexus, expanding our understanding of different ontological conceptualizations of the past and their significance in the present. Living Ruins adds to the lively body of work on the invention of tradition, Indigenous claims on their lands and history, "retrospective ethnogenesis," and neo-Indianism in a world where tourism, NGOs, and Western essentialism are changing Indigenous attitudes and representations. This book is significant to anyone interested in cultural heritage studies, Amerindian spirituality, and Indigenous engagement with archaeological sites in Latin America.

This book presents a collection of chapters on the nature, exibility and acquisition of lexical categories. These long-debated issues are looked at anew by exploring the hypothesis of lexical polycategoriality – according to which lexical forms are not fully, or univocally, speci ed for lexical category – in a wide number of unrelated languages, and within di erent theoretical and methodological perspectives. Twenty languages are thoroughly analyzed. Apart from French, Arabic and Hebrew, the volume includes mostly understudied languages, spoken in New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, Amazonia, Meso- and North America. Resulting from a long-standing collaboration between leading international experts, this book brings under one cover new data analyses and results on word categories from the linguistic and acquisitional point of view. It will be of the utmost interest to researchers, teachers and graduate students in di erent elds of linguistics (morpho-syntax, semantics, typology), language acquisition, as well as psycholinguistics, cognition and anthropology.

Le premier volume, intitulé L’agentivité : ethnologie et linguistique à la poursuite du sens (Ateliers d’anthropologie, 34|2010), proposait des matériaux principalement issus des cultures amérindiennes afin d’inscrire dans un projet d’ethnolinguistique l’étude des relations entre les humains et toutes autres entités entretenant avec eux des interactions langagières, sonores, gestuelles…, dans des contextes quotidiens et rituels. L’ethnosyntaxe était un horizon théorique propice à ces études, fruit des réflexions d’un séminaire du LESC réunissant ethnologues et linguistes « à la poursuite du sens ». Dans le second volume, les contributeurs approfondissent l’étude des actions et transactions tant entre humains qu’entre humains et non humains, tout en s’attachant à élucider ce qui définit les relations d’agentivité dans chaque cas analysé. La démarche tend à s’affranchir d’un modèle intentionnaliste et subjectiviste de l’action, en explorant les autres dimensions en jeu (type de causalité, contrôle, induction, engagement, responsabilité…). La perspective est relationnelle et contextuelle, et accorde un rôle central au langage. Les contributions, qui concernent des sociétés amazoniennes et mésoaméricaines, étudient ces transactions dans leur matérialité signifiante, en s’intéressant aux caractéristiques sémantiques et pragmatiques de la communication (rituelle, narrative, conversationnelle) et aux propriétés grammaticales de l’agentivité, que mettent au jour des études textuelles, dialogiques et interactionnelles de contextes précis de communication. Les articles analysent les formes de causalité impliquées dans divers types de narrations ou d’interactions rituelles ; ils abordent les termes et les constructions grammaticales, variables selon les langues, qui pourraient encoder sur le plan sémantique des significations sociales et culturelles ; ils soulignent le partage entre ce qui revient en propre à la syntaxe et ce qui est attribuable aux stratégies discursives des énonciateurs ; ils scrutent les liens entre actions, gestes et paroles (de la pragmatique gestuelle et rituelle explicite jusqu’aux routines inconscientes, du lexique jusqu’aux structures syntaxiques) ; ils recherchent ce qui compose et noue les actes illocutionnaires. Les auteurs, dans leur diversité, s’interrogent sur comment et à quels niveaux de profondeur cognitive peuvent s’articuler analyse linguistique et analyse anthropologique.

Ce numéro est consacré au thème de l’agentivité, analysant et comparant les relations diverses de dépendance et de causalité entre les humains et les entités « surnaturelles » manifestées par les ...

Amerindian languages have often borrowed the lexical terms of colonial languages that refer to "culture," "tradition," or "heritage," or else created neologisms for them. Amerindian languages, however, express related notions through grammatical forms, rather than with lexical terms. In contrast to lexical terms, grammatical elements are normally more constrained, less open to reflexivity for the speaker but nonetheless manipulable while also being the product of recurrent verbal and interactional practices. This article focuses on three grammatical domains: temporal configurations, expressions of person and agency, and epistemicity. For each of these, we study the contextual use of relevant linguistic constructions, especially in situations in which speakers can resort to different expressions to refer to "cultural" practices, each of which implies different attitudes towards "culture." The study is based on three languages—two Mayan languages from Mexico (Yucatec and Chol), and one Tupian from Brazil (Suruí of Rondônia)—whose speakers experience very different situations regarding the definition of their "culture," by themselves and by others.

À partir de la découverte récente de carnets manuscrits mayas vieux de plus d’un siècle retrouvés chez un sorcier bibliomane, qualifiés d’écriture nocturne et reliés à des généalogies d’écrits sacrés et subversifs, cet article s’attache à élucider les différents sens que ces carnets et l’écriture revêtent dans la société maya des descendants des Mayas cruzo’ob de la guerre des Castes (Quintana Roo, Mexique). L’article débute par un récit personnel d‘Hilario Chi Canul, à qui furent remis ces écrits. L’article est publié dans un dossier "Livres sorciers".

Cette session est consacrée à une réflexion sur l’interaction entre les régimes de temporalité et d’historicité des sociétés amérindiennes, et les nouvelles pratiques patrimoniales qui aujourd’hui s’y développent ou s’y refusent. La temporalité est comprise à diverses échelles, depuis les conceptions du devenir des objets les plus quotidiens jusqu’aux relations entretenues avec les vestiges les plus monumentaux, depuis le temps éphémère de ce que l’on abandonne ou détruit, jusqu’aux différents temps longs de ce que l’on conserve ou transforme, régénère ou remémore. Les études vont des Andes aux Basses Terres amazoniennes pour remonter jusqu’en Mésoamérique. Elles offrent des comparaisons jouant de différents contrastes (culturels, sociopolitiques et historiques) qui permettent de décliner des réactions variées à des initiatives extérieures, lesquelles tendent à mettre l’accent sur la pérennité et la continuité des choses et des relations, alors que les configurations temporelles et présentielles locales suivent souvent d’autres chemins., Esta sesión tiene como principal enfoque la interacción entre los regímenes de temporalidad y de historicidad de las sociedades amerindias, y las nuevas prácticas patrimoniales que se desarrollan, o se rechazan, en dichas sociedades. La temporalidad se entiende a diferentes niveles, desde las concepciones del destino de los objetos más cotidianos hasta las relaciones con los vestigios más monumentales, desde el tiempo efímero de lo que se abandona o destruye, hasta los diversos tiempos de larga duración de lo que se conserva o convierte, regenera o recuerda. Los estudios abordan áreas que van desde los Andes hasta Mesoamérica, pasando por Amazonía. Las comparaciones que se presentan juegan con contrastes (culturales, sociopolíticos e históricos) que permiten declinar diversas reacciones frente a inciativas externas de patrimonialización. Éstas suelen centrarse en la perennidad y la continuidad de las cosas y de las relaciones, mientras que las configuraciones temporales y presenciales locales siguen a menudo otros caminos.

Este artículo contribuye a demostrar que el recurso discursivo del paralelismo en la tradición maya juega un papel esencial en diferentes niveles de organización discursiva, y no sólo en cuanto al verso y unidades contiguas como se ha señalado generalmente. Analizamos la variedad de niveles en los cuales se pueden desarrollar los paralelismos, así como la relación con otras figuras retóricas, en especial la ciclicidad, que se destaca como un recurso importante para el despliegue de paralelismos entre unidades distanciadas. El análisis se hace mediante el estudio detallado de un diálogo ritual de la peregrinación de San Juan Bautista entre los mayas macehuales (cruso’ob) de Quintana Roo (México). Confirma que los paralelismos discursivos se deben considerar no sólo como elementos estéticos o poéticos, con sus efectos emocionales y enfáticos, sino también como procesos de organización macrodiscursiva, con funciones temáticas, semánticas y pragmáticas.

Nearly all psychological research on basic cognitive processes of category formation and reasoning uses sample populations associated with large research institutions in technologically-advanced societies. Lopsided attention to a select participant pool risks biasing interpretation, no matter how large the sample or how statistically reliable the results. The experiments in this article address this limitation. Earlier research with urban-USA children suggests that biological concepts are (1) thoroughly enmeshed with their notions of naive psychology, and (2) strikingly human-centered. Thus, if children are to develop a causally appropriate model of biology, in which humans are seen as simply one animal among many, they must undergo fundamental conceptual change. Such change supposedly occurs between 7 and 10 years of age, when the human-centered view is discarded. The experiments reported here with Yukatek Maya speakers challenge the empirical generality and theoretical importance of these claims. Part 1 shows that young Maya children do not anthropocentrically interpret the biological world. The anthropocentric bias of American children appears to owe to a lack of cultural familiarity with non-human biological kinds, not to initial causal understanding of folkbiology as such. Part 2 shows that by age of 4-5 (the earliest age tested in this regard) Yukatek Maya children employ a concept of innate species potential or underlying essence much as urban American children seem to, namely, as an inferential framework for understanding the affiliation of an organism to a biological species, and for projecting known and unknown biological properties to organisms in the face of uncertainty. Together, these experiments indicate that folkpsychology cannot be the initial source of folkbiology. They also underscore the possibility of a species-wide and domain-specific basis for acquiring knowledge about the living world that is constrained and modified but not caused or created by prior non-biological thinking and subsequent cultural experience.

Surprising as it may sound, today’s Yucatec Maya tend to be rather unfamiliar with the most spectacular remnants of their forebears’ architecture. Indeed, while minor ruins—sometimes little more than heaps of stones—play a prominent role in their daily spiritual lives, this is not the case when it comes to pyramids, temples, palaces, and other majestic ruins.¹ This became clear to me while I was filming a documentary on the concept of vestiges, and I invited a group of Maya comadres, compadres, and friends from the villages I have been visiting for almost twenty-five years to explore the Coba...

Tikal in Guatemala, Machu Picchu in Peru, Marajó in Brazil, broken pots or stone axes in grandma’s kitchen hut, most anywhere in Native South American or Mesoamerican villages … Many if not most contemporary Amerindian peoples live surrounded by ruins, relics, and other vestiges of the past. Some, such as pyramids, fortresses, or petroglyphs, are tokens of bygone splendor. Others are mere heaps of stone or modest pottery sherds half buried in backyards, swidden gardens, or the garbage piles of abandoned villages. Some are major tourist attractions, well-maintained or even revered; others are simply ignored, by locals and foreigners alike,...

This article aims to disentangle values related to evidence, epistemic judgement, and (inter)subjectivity as conflated in two epistemic markers of Yucatec Maya. The particles míin and ma’ak are partial support inferential markers that contrast on the (inter)subjectivity parameter. The analysis, based on a wide and varied corpus approached through token-level usage, provides support for considering (inter)subjectivity as a separate dimension of epistemicity, and proposes that it should be organized among three poles (subjective/intersubjective/ collective-general knowledge).

Over the years, research in ethno-linguistics contributed to gather corpora in a wide range of languages, cultures and topics. In the present work, we are investigating ritual speech in Yu-catec Maya. The ritual discourse tends to have a cyclic structure with repetitive patterns and various types of parallelisms between speech sections. Previous studies have revealed an intricate connexion between a speech's structure and vocal productions , in particular through temporal aspects including rhythm, pauses and durations of different speech sections. To further investigate our findings by relying more strongly on the acoustic recordings, automatic speech recognition tools may become of great help, in particular to test various linguistic and ethno-linguistic hypotheses. Unfortunately, Yucatec Maya, with less than one million native speakers, is an under-resourced language with respect to digital resources. As a total, 24 minutes of ritual speech from three performances were manually transcribed by expert linguists in Yucatec and a basic pronunciation dictionary for Yucatec was created accordingly. The transcribed acoustic recordings were then automatically time-aligned on a phonetic and lexical basis. Automatic segmentations were used to measure tempo changes, durations of breath units as well as to examine their link with the structure of the ritual text.