In Western doctrine and lingual theory. interjections—that is. words like oof. ouch. and bleah—have traditionally been understood to bespeak emotional provinces. This article offers an history of ejaculations in Q’eqchi’ Maya that illuminates their societal and dianoetic maps. In peculiar. it discusses the grammatical signifier of ejaculations. both in Q’eqchi’ and across linguistic communications. and characterizes the indexical objects and matter-of-fact maps of ejaculations in Q’eqchi’ in footings of a semiotic model that may be generalized for other linguistic communications. With these grammatical signifiers. indexical objects. and matter-of-fact maps in manus. it inside informations the assorted societal and dianoetic terminals that ejaculations serve in one Q’eqchi’ community. thereby casting visible radiation on local values. norms. ontological categories. and societal dealingss.

In short. this article argues against readings of ejaculations that focus on internal emotional provinces by supplying an history of their significances in footings of situational. dianoetic. and societal context. p a u cubic decimeter K o c k e l m a N is McKennan Post-Doctoral Fellow in Linguistic Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College ( Hanover. N. H. 03755. U. S. A. [ [ electronic mail protected ]] ) . Born in 1970. he was educated at the University of California. Santa Cruz ( B. A. . 1992 ) and the University of Chicago ( M. S. . 1994 ; Ph. D. . 2002 ) .

His publications include “The Collection of Copal among the Q’eqchi’-Maya” ( Research in Economic Anthropology 20:163–94 ) . “Factive and Counterfactive Clitics in Q’eqchi’-Maya: Stance. Status. and Subjectivity. ” in Documents from the Thirty-eighth Annual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society ( Chicago: Linguisticss Society. in imperativeness ) . and “The Interclausal Relations Hierarchy in Q’eqchi’ Maya” ( International Journal of American Linguistics 69:25–48 ) . The present paper was submitted 1 six 01 and accepted 27 twelve 02.

1. A longer version of this article was presented at the workshop “Semiotics: Culture in Context” at the University of Chicago in January 2001. Chris Ball. Anya Bernstein. John Lucy. and Michael Silverstein all provided really helpful commentary. This article besides greatly bene?ted from suggestions made by Benjamin S. Orlove and several anon. referees.

Western doctrine and lingual theory have traditionally considered ejaculations at the fringe of linguistic communication and primordially related to emotion. For illustration. the Latin grammarian Priscian de?ned ejaculations as “a portion of address meaning an emotion by agencies of an unformed word” ( Padley 1976:266 ) . Muller ( 1862 ) ? thought that ejaculations were at the bound of what might be called linguistic communication. Sapir ( 1921:6–7 ) said that they were “the nearest of all linguistic communication sounds to instinctive vocalization. ” Bloom?eld ( 1984 [ 1933 ] :177 ) said that they “occur under a violent stimulation. ” and Jakobson ( 1960: 354 ) considered them examples of the “purely affectional stratum of linguistic communication. ” While ejaculations are no longer considered peripheral to linguistics and are now carefully de?ned with regard to their grammatical signifier. their significances remain obscure and elusive. In peculiar. although ejaculations are no longer characterized strictly in footings of emotion. they are still characterized in footings of “mental provinces. ”

For illustration. Wierzbicka ( 1992:164 ) characterizes ejaculations as “ [ mentioning ] to the speaker’s current mental province or mental act. ” Ameka ( 1992a:107 ) says that “from a matter-of-fact point of position. ejaculations may be de?ned as a subset of points that encode speaker attitudes and communicative purposes and are contextbound. ” and Montes ( 1999:1289 ) notes that many ejaculations “ [ focal point ] on the internal reaction of affectedness of the talker with regard to the referent. ” Philosophers have offered similar readings. For illustration. Herder thought that ejaculations were the human equivalent of carnal sounds. being both a “language of feeling” and a “law of nature” ( 1966:88 ) . and Rousseau. prosecuting the beginnings of linguistic communication. theorized that protolanguage was “entirely interjectional” ( 1990:71 ) .

Indeed. such philosophers have posited a historical passage from ejaculations to linguistic communication in which the latter allows us non merely to index hurting and express passion but besides to denote values and exercising ground ( D’Atri 1995 ) . 2 Thus ejaculations have been understood as a semiotic artefact of our natural beginnings and the most crystalline index of our emotions. Such an apprehension of ejaculations is profoundly rooted in Western idea. Aristotle ( 1984 ) . for illustration. posited a incompatible relationship between voice. proper merely to worlds as instantiated in linguistic communication. and sound. shared by worlds and animate beings as instantiated in calls.

This incompatible relation was so compared with other correspondent incompatible dealingss. in peculiar. value and pleasure/pain. polis and family. and bios ( the good life. or political life proper to worlds ) and zoe ( pure life. shared by all living things ) . Such a contrast is so permeant that modern philosophers such as Agamben ( 1995 ) have devoted much of their scholarly work to the believing out of this tradition and others built on it such as id versus self-importance in the Freudian paradigm. In short. the common people differentiation made between ejaculations and linguistic communication 2. D’Atri ( 1995:124 ) argues that. for Rousseau. “interjections. . . are sounds and non voices: they are inactive registerings and as such do non presuppose the intercession of will. which is what characterizes human Acts of the Apostless of address. ”

Proper maps onto a larger set of differentiations in Western idea: emotion and knowledge. animal nature and humanity. nature and civilization. female and male. passion and ground. bare life and the good life. hurting and value. private and public. and so on ( see. e. g. . Lutz 1988. Strathern 1988 ) . In this article I avoid such abstracting and dichotomising traps by traveling directly to the bosom of ejaculations: their mundane use in existent discourse when seen in the context of local civilization and grounded in a semiotic model. I begin by qualifying the lingual and ethnographic context in which I carried out my research and travel on to associate ejaculations to other lingual signifiers. demoing how they are both similar to and distinct from other categories of words in natural linguistic communications.

Following I provide and exemplify a semiotic model. generalizable across linguistic communications. in footings of which the indexical objects and matter-of-fact maps of ejaculations can best be characterized. Then I detail the local use of the 12 most normally used ejaculations in Q’eqchi’ and demo the manner in which they are tied into all things cultural: values. norms. ontological categories. societal dealingss. and so on. I conclude by discoursing the comparative frequence with which the assorted signifiers and maps of ejaculations are used. In short. I argue against readings of ejaculations that focus on emotional provinces by supplying an history of their significances in footings of situational. dianoetic. and societal context.

Linguistic and Ethnographic Context

While I am trying to supply as broad a theoretical history of ejaculations as I can. thereby supplying a metalanguage for talking about similar mark phenomena in other linguistic communications. I am besides seeking to capture the grammatical justnesss of Q’eqchi’ Maya and the dianoetic and societal specialnesss of one Q’eqchi’-speaking small town in peculiar. Before I begin my analysis. so. I want to chalk out the lingual and ethnographic context in which I worked. Q’eqchi’ is a linguistic communication in the Kichean subdivision of the Mayan household. spoken by some 360. 000 talkers in Guatemala ( in the sections of Alta Verapaz. Izabel. and Peten ) and Belize ( Kaufman 1974. Stewart 1980 ) .

3 Lin? guistically. Q’eqchi’ is comparatively good described: bookmans such as Berinstein ( 1985 ) . Sedat ( 1955 ) . Stewart ( 1980 ) . Stoll ( 1896 ) . and Chen Cao et Al. ( 1997 ) have discussed its sentence structure. morphology. phonemics. and vocabulary. and I have detailed assorted morphosyntactic signifiers ( encoding grammatical classs such as temper. position. evidentiality. taxis. and unalienable ownership ) as they intersect with sociocultural values and contextual characteristics and as they illuminate local manners of personhood ( Kockelman 3. Typologically. Q’eqchi’ is a morphologically ergative. head-marking linguistic communication. In Q’eqchi’ . vowel length ( signaled by duplicating letters ) is phonemic ; /k/ and /q/ are velar and uvular stop consonants. severally. and /x/ and /j/ are palato-alveolar and velar spirants. severally. All other phonemes have their standard IPA values.

2002. 2003a. B ) . This article is therefore portion of a larger undertaking in which I examine how knowing and appraising stances are encoded in natural linguistic communications and the dealingss that such stances bear to local manners of subjectiveness. Alta Verapaz. the original centre of the Q’eqchi’-speaking people who still make up the bulk of its population. has had a unusual history even by Guatemalan criterions. In 1537. after the Spanish Crown had failed to suppress the autochthonal peoples populating at that place. the Dominican Friar Bartolome de Las Casas was permitted to ? lenify the country through spiritual methods. Having succeeded. he changed the name of the country from Tezulutlan ( Land of War ) to Verapaz ( True Peace ) . and the Dominicans were granted full control over the area—the province censoring secular in-migration. taking all military settlements. and invalidating old land grants. In this manner. for about 300 old ages the country remained an stray enclave. comparatively protected by the paternalism of the church in comparing with other parts of Guatemala ( King 1974. Sapper 1985 ) .

This ended suddenly in the late 1800s. nevertheless. with the coming of java turning. broad reforms. and the in?ux of Europeans ( Cambranes 1985. Wagner 1996 ) . Divested of their land and forced to work on java plantations. the Q’eqchi’ began migrating north into the unpeopled lowland woods of the Peten ? and Belize ( Adams 1965. Carter 1969. Howard 1975. Kockelman 1999. Pedroni 1991. Saa Vidal 1979. Schwartz 1990. Wilk 1991 ) . In the past 40 old ages this migration has been fueled by a civil war that has ravaged the Guatemalan countryside. with the Q’eqchi’ ?eeing non merely scarce resources and labour quotas but besides their ain nation’s soldiers—often forcibly conscripted talkers of other Mayan linguistic communications ( Carmack 1988. IWGIA 1978. Wilson 1995 ) .

As a effect. the past century has seen the Q’eqchi’ population spread from Alta Verapaz to the Peten and ?nally to Belize. Mexico. and even the ? United States. Indeed. although merely the 4th largest of some 24 Mayan linguistic communications. Q’eqchi’ is thought to hold the largest per centum of monolinguals. and the cultural group is Guatemala’s fastest-growing and most geographically extended ( Kaufman 1974. Stewart 1980 ) . The two cardinal descriptive anthropologies of Q’eqchi’-speakers have been written by Wilk ( 1991 ) and Wilson ( 1995 ) . the former treating family ecology in Belize and the latter turbulences in village life and individuality at the tallness of the civil war in upland Guatemala during the 1980s.

In add-on to these monographs. there are besides a figure of thesiss and articles on the history ( King 1974. Sapper 1985. Wagner 1996 ) . ecology ( Carter 1969. Secaira 1992. Wilson 1972 ) . and migration ( Adams 1965. Howard 1975. Pedroni 1991 ) of Q’eqchi’-speaking people. The information for this article are based on about two old ages of ethnographic and lingual ?eldwork among talkers of Q’eqchi’ . most of it in Ch’inahab. a small town of some 80 households ( around 650 people ) in the municipality of San Juan Chamelco. in the section of Alta Verapaz. At an height of about 2. 400 m. Ch’inahab is one of the highest small towns in this country. with an one-year precipitation of more than 2. 000 millimeter. It is besides one of the most distant. entree to the closest route necessitating a three-hour hiking down a steep and boggy single-track trail.

Its comparatively high height and remote location provide the perfect scene for cloud wood. and such a cloud wood provides the perfect scene for the resplendent quetzal. being place to what is thought to be the highest denseness of such birds in the universe. Because of the being of the quetzal and the cloud wood in which it makes its place. Ch’inahab has been the site of a successful eco-tourism undertaking the conditions and effects of which are detailed in my thesis ( Kockelman 2002 ) . While the bulk of villagers in Ch’inahab are monolingual talkers of Q’eqchi’ . some work forces who have served clip in the ground forces or worked as itinerant bargainers speak some Spanish.

All the villagers are Catholic. Ch’inahab is divided by a mountain extremum with homes on both of its sides and in the environing vales. It takes about 45 proceedingss to boost across the small town. At one terminal there is a biological station kept by the eco-tourism undertaking and used periodically by European ecologists. and at the other there is a Catholic church and a graveyard. In the centre there is a little shop. a school for primary and secondary classs. and a association football ?eld.

The surrounding landscape is cloud forest giving manner to scattered house sites. agricultural packages. grazing land. and ?elds now fallow. All villagers engage in corn-based. or milpa. agribusiness. but really few have adequate land to ful?ll all of their subsistence demands. 4 For this ground. many adult females in the small town are dedicated to chicken farming. most work forces in the small town engage in seasonal labour on plantations ( up to ?ve months a twelvemonth in some instances ) . and many households engage in itinerant trade ( adult females weaving baskets and fabrics for the work forces to sell ) and eco-tourism ( the adult females hosting tourers and the work forces steering them ) . Brooding sites frequently contain a sprinkling of houses in which reside an older twosome and their married boies. all of whom portion a H2O beginning and a grazing land.

The single households themselves frequently have two houses. a comparatively traditional thatched-roof house in which the household cooks and slumbers and a comparatively new house with a Sn roof in which they host festivals and in which older kids and ecotourists may kip. Because of eco-tourism and the in?ux of money and aliens that it brings. there has been an addition in the building of such tin-roofed houses. and. as will be seen. many of my illustrations of ejaculations come from such building contexts. My information on the usage of ejaculations among villagers in Ch’inahab comes from 14 months of ?eldwork carried out between 1998 and 2001.

The informations aggregation con4. Before 1968. what is now Ch’inahab was owned by the proprietor of a plantation. Q’eqchi’-speakers who lived in the small town of Popobaj ( located to the South of and lower than Ch’inahab ) were permitted to do their milpa in this country in exchange for two hebdomads of labour per month on the ?nca ( Secaira 1992:20 ) . Merely in 1968. when a group of villagers got together to organize a land acquisition commission. were some 15 caballer?as ( 678 hour angle ) of land purchased from the proprietor ? for 4. 200 quetzals ( US $ 4. 200 ) . This land. while lawfully owned by the full community. was divided among the original 33 villagers as a map of their original parts.