The Politics and Semiotics of Sounds – Mayan Linguistics and Nation-Building in Guatemala

This paper discusses the development Mayan linguistics as an authoritative field of knowledge in Guatemala. In particular, it links missionary linguists’ and Maya linguists’ activities with shifting nationalist agendas from the 1920s in to the late 1980s. It is argued that during the historical and intellectual moment that linguistics becomes an authoritative epistemology, phonetic analysis functions as a creative index that constitutes »expert« knowledge for particular semiotic and ideological reasons tied to competing versions of the Guatemalan imagined community

Memorias mayas del genocidio en Guatemala y el habla de los sobrevivientes kaqchikeles

This paper analyzes Maya-Kaqchikel survivor testimony from the genocide in Guatemala through a review of victims’ memories in truth commissions and their perspectives in post-conflict transitional justice processes. It shows that an exclusive focus on what facts survivors narrate is incomplete because of broader questions about power and culture embedded in Indigenous narration. It examines how survivors narrate their experiences based on an understanding that Mayan languages and the speech of the Kaqchikels are cultural vehicles that transmit historic memory through the centuries for speakers of Mayan languages. Thus, it argues the manner in which survivors tell their stories conveys often unrecognized cultural epistemologies and ones that often are undervalued by non-Indigenous interlocutors. Accordingly, the article presents phonological, morphological, syntactic, and discursive data from witnesses’ speech to show the pervasiveness of Kaqchikel linguistic and cultural elements that function as central vehicles of Maya epistemologies. It concludes that analytic perspectives from linguistics and anthropology provide a deepened knowledge of silenced voices in state terrorism.En el presente estudio analizamos los testimonios de personas kaqchikeles sobrevivientes del genocidio en Guatemala mediante una revisión de las memorias de las víctimas en las comisiones de la verdad y sus perspectivas en los procesos de justicia transicional posconflicto. Examinamos cómo las memorias con las que se cuenta son incompletas por cuestiones de poder y cultura, y revisamos cómo las personas sobrevivientes narraron sus experiencias, con base en la consideración de que los idiomas mayas y el habla de los kaqchikeles son y han sido vehículos culturales para transmitir la memoria histórica de sus hablantes a lo largo de los siglos. Argumentamos que las maneras de hablar y narrar conllevan aspectos epistemológicos culturales mayas desconocidos y a veces menospreciados por los interlocutores no indígenas, y presentamos datos sobre los niveles fonológicos, morfológicos, sintácticos y discursivos del habla de los testigos para mostrar la omnipresencia de elementos lingüísticos y culturales kaqchikeles como vehículos de las epistemologías mayas. Concluimos que las perspectivas analíticas de lingüística y antropología aportan un conocimiento más profundo de las voces silenciadas sobre terrorismo de Estado.   &nbsp

Repealing Ireland's Eighth Amendment: abortion rights and democracy today

In 2018, the Irish public voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which since 1983 banned abortion in the country. While this was a watershed moment in Irish history, it was not unconnected to wider discussions now taking place around the world concerning gender, reproductive rights, the future of religion, Church–State relationships, democracy and social movements. With this Forum, we want to prompt some anthropological interpretations of Ireland's repeal of the Eighth Amendment as a matter concerning not only reproductive rights, but also questions of life and death, faith and shame, women and men, state power and individual liberty, and more. We also ask what this event might mean (if anything) for other societies dealing with similar issues

Philosophical Anthropology

Human beings have always constructed images of themselves out of the need to know their nature and give a sense to their existence. From classical philosophy up until the contemporary era there have emerged multiple visions of the human being that are closely tied to the general philosophical conceptions from which they originated. Homo religiosus, homo sapiens, homo faber, homo dionysiacus and homo creator are the principal images that human beings have elaborated of themselves. In the twentieth century, thanks to the enormous development of the sciences, the need was felt to reconsider the human being and to understand it in its entirety, synthesizing, integrating and harmonizing the results of the scientific investigations in order to recompose in a unity the multiple aspects investigated and thus achieve a corresponding global image. Placing oneself at the crossroads between philosophy, human sciences and natural sciences, philosophical anthropology wishes to retie the threads of a discussion so as to help human beings recuperate the understanding of themselves and identify the characteristic traits of their existence. Contemporary philosophical anthropology thus consists, to express it with a formula, in a reflection on the results of the sciences that in some way deal with the human being, in order to recuperate its “global image”. Scheler, Gehlen and Plessner are the authors who have provided this discipline with a new approach that is in step both with philosophical thought and with the modern developments of the sciences. Max Scheler, considered the initiator of this doctrine, was the first to feel the need to found an anthropology upon biological bases, but through the filter of a philosophical reflection. The other two Authors have continued along this line even though following a different path. All three of them have in any case felt the need to emphasize the difference between human beings and other living beings in such a way as to attribute to human beings a particular position in the cosmos. This is the preunderstanding that the three authors have in common in spite of their different itineraries, approaches and problematics