The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurable Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala’s Cloud Forest by Paul Kockelman (review)

Origins

Paul Kockelman’s book The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurable Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala’s Cloud Forest is an ethnography of life in the Guatemalan indigenous Q’eqchi’ Maya community of Chicacnab. The ethnographer’s attention moves from an ecotourism project aimed at protecting the cloud forest and the quetzal birds that inhabit it, to local collective labor parties and political structures, to house construction and the materialization of value, to the (im)material labor of verbal interaction, to chickens and the women who keep them. Why chickens? Where the author focuses on chickens, the concern is the ways in which these humble birds stand in, and stand for, relationships. The relationships can be social, affective, interactional, political, and economic, but to Kockelman’s ethnographic eye they are all also semiotic. The Chicken and the Quetzal is exemplary of semiotic ethnography, a thriving genre in linguistic anthropology that details much more than the linguistic aspect of social life.

Semiotic ethnography responds to the longstanding assumption that language’s unique capacity for transmission of symbolic information could best provide a way to understand other, not strictly linguistic, communicative or meaningful phenomena. While it is true that language is symbolic, it is also indexical and iconic, and it is precisely the capacities of indexes to point to causes and icons to disclose similarities that connect linguistic and cultural systems. The move to indexes and icons in linguistic anthropology is part of a larger move to examine semiosis, wherein the relation between an object and its interpretant is always mediated by a third element, a sign (Peirce 1932). In this way, a variety of things, thoughts, dispositions, and actions can be seen as roots and fruits of semiotic processes of mediation.

Chapter 1 of The Chicken and the Quetzal introduces the Q’eqchi’ village of Chicacnab from the perspective of the NGO “Proyecto Eco-Quetzal.” The themes that the ethnography reveals about the NGO’s project are familiar to anyone who has worked around development. The NGO hit upon a beautifully “simple idea.” If they could incentivize tourists to come to see the shrinking cloud forest and its avifauna, and the Q’eqchi’ to stop cutting down the forest habitat of the quetzal by replacing farming income with ecotourist cash, everyone wins. We travel along with the ethnographer and a group of European tourists by bus and on slippery feet through the mud up the mountain to the village. The gulf between tourists’ and local Q’eqchi’ people’s expectations about what should be happening as they meet is described in rich detail. The tourists are winded, disappointed, and see only chickens in the village and no quetzal in the forest. Kockelman offers that an easy interpretation might be that “notwithstanding all the NGO’s efforts, the tourists felt cheated, the villagers felt surveilled, the cloud forest receded, and the number of quetzals dwindled. Only the anthropologist walked off with a surplus (of materials)” (40). The rest of the book shows how the situation is more complex than that.

The second chapter addresses the historical and current values of the chicken in Guatemala and in Chicacnab. Chickens are taxonomically associated with women (as opposed to the male cock) and with foreignness (as they were originally brought by the Spanish), with the poor and prosaic as opposed to the elite quetzal (also the name of Guatemalan money), and with powerlessness as opposed to the predatory chicken hawk. The chapter culminates in a dramatic account of the attack of a chicken hawk and the ensuing pandemonium, making the point that such attacks threaten not only chickens, but also village women’s selfhood, as women are caregivers to chickens much as they are to their children. In an especially evocative ethnographic vignette Kockelman tells how “a boy, grab-assing with his cousin by the hearth, stepped on a chick. Several hours later, half dead...