The Language Ideologies of Courtship Ritual: Maya Pentecostals and Folk Catholics

Abstract

This article examines the traditional Mayan practice of negotiating marital alliances, which is played out in a series of ritualized dialogues between two families. A Pentecostal hybrid ceremony incorporates evangelical symbols and speech forms that index a religious identity and ideology founded on biblical authority. In intergroup marriage negotiation, Mayan Pentecostals and traditionalists employ an accommodated form of ritual speech that works around irreconcilable differences pertaining to authority and the relationship with the divine.

Ritual speech in traditional societies is a relatively stable linguistic form, but formal speech practices are, nevertheless, sensitive to historical processes (Kuipers 1998:5-7). In a rural Mayan village in Quintana Roo, Mexico, marriage brokers offer gifts of bride-price to the girl's father on behalf of the boy's father, using ritual speech to evoke common identity and interest. The emergence of an evangelical form of the ceremony, which introduces Bible reading and new ways of speaking, underscores the fact that Protestantism has become an integral part of the social landscape of the community. In addition, intermarriage between Mayan Evangelicals and traditionalists (also called "folk Catholics" in this article) provides a context for constructive dialogue between the two parties. This article examines the ways in which ritual speech is linked to forms of religious practice. It compares a traditional marriage negotiation event with a Pentecostal variant that combines traditional and Pentecostal ways of speaking in a format that models a Pentecostal prayer service. Analysis of a third event, a marriage negotiation between a Pentecostal and a traditionalist family, demonstrates that ritual performance has the power to ratify and enact substantive change in the social order. Rules governing ritual speech guide the formation of mixed marriages, once considered unacceptable.

The existence of variant speech forms that are supposedly "ancient" linguistic genres indicates that a significant social transformation and realignment is taking place in Yucatec society. Marriage negotiation is a ritual frame in which the families act out proper relations, as they arrange for the customary transfer of "property." As life-cycle rituals that define a network of social relations, shifting courtship practices clearly "lie at the heart of the production and reproduction-and transformation and change-of the sociocultural order" (Lave 1993:30). Chief among the factors impinging on contemporary marriage customs is the emergence of evangelical Protestant groups in rural communities that once were (at least nominally) folk Catholic. In a pluralistic Mayan community where various religious groups struggle to get along with one another, ritual marital negotiation was the sole context of shared intergroup religious expression that I observed in two years of fieldwork.

Part of this research is grounded in practice theory (Bourdieu 1977), which focuses on how social interactions affirm the social order and relations of power, but it goes beyond examining how the everyday ways of speaking, dressing, eating, et cetera (habitus) foster group solidarity. The first example of ritual speech, the traditional Mayan courtship, illustrates the connection between ritual speech and social identities shared by the participants. The second example, Pentecostal courtship practice, investigates how shifting speech styles index an evangelical identity and arouse new kinds of interests among participants. In Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's terms (1991), speech forms and practices cultivated in a Pentecostal "community of practice" are grafted onto the traditional framework of courtship ritual. The third example considers how power relations are mediated between folk Catholic practice rooted in Mayan tradition and Mayan Pentecostal practice authorized by the Bible. The negotiation of an interreligous marriage, a match once stigmatized but now considered acceptable by some, suggests that a traditional hierarchy, empowering wife-givers over wife-takers, mediates the emergent relation between families from different faith communities.

Many Voices, Many Ways of Speaking

Mayan parents are preoccupied by the need to arrange "proper" marriages for their children, unions that are sanctioned by True God.¹ For example, Don Pedro, a desperately poor farmer, visited three times the home of the girl his son wished to marry, each time laden with generous gifts for her and her family. On one occasion, he had presented clothes and gold...