Nqab’än Repetir las Mismas Palabras: Entextualization as Ideological Constraint in a Bilingual Kaqchikel Maya Wedding

NQAB’ÄN REPETIR LAS MISMAS PALABRAS: ENTEXTUALIZATION AS IDEOLOGICAL CONSTRAINT IN A BILINGUAL KAQCHIKEL MAYA WEDDING Timothy W. Knowlton Associate Professor, Anthropology Berry College This essay is about the decisions bilingual indigenous people in Latin America have to make when speaking authoritatively in public. Only in a few places in Latin America are indigenous languages co-official with a colonist language such as Spanish. Historically, indigenous languages often have been barred from official use in the contexts of government or religious institutions. So what happens when such formal restrictions are loosened? In what ways might centuries of linguistic inequality continue to affect how indigenous speakers perform authoritative discourse in their own communities? In this essay, I document the impact of historical processes of entextualization (Bauman 2004; Bauman and Briggs 1990) on contemporary code choice among bilingual speakers of a Mayan language in Guatemala. Contemporary paradigms in linguistic anthropology (e.g. Bauman 2004; Goodman et al 2014; Kuipers 2013) share with the work of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981; Vološinov 1973) an appreciation of how speakers use techniques like reported speech to lend authority to their discourse. For Bakhtin (1981:342) “the authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher.” One way speakers connect their discourse to this authoritative past is through what linguistic anthropologists call entextualization. Entextualization refers to the process by which discourse is rendered as a detachable unit, a text that can be lifted out of its interactional setting. Once an instance of discourse is entextualized, it can be repeatedly recontextualized within a potentially unlimited number of performances by a potentially unlimited number of persons. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the globe, Richard Bauman (2004) has illustrated how authoritative discourse can be enacted, diffused or challenged through how a speaker chooses to relate an entextualized “source utterance” within the “target utterance” of their spoken performance. Speakers often make choices like these in light of what their audience’s expectations of performance are understood to be (Bauman 2011). My own argument begins with the observation that entextualizing a source utterance presupposes a source code (language variant), at least C  2016 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1111/tla.12068 47 The Latin Americanist, March 2016 implicitly, as there is no such thing as a code-less utterance. Therefore, in bilingual interactions, code choice serves as a dimension of how one relates an entextualized source utterance with the target utterance being performed. In the Guatemalan case discussed here, I demonstrate that even when formal “high” forms of indigenous language discourse are used in an official context, certain authoritative words continue to circulate as Spanish because of their previous institutional histories of entextualization . Of course, the phenomenon of code choice itself has generated an immense literature across a wide range of grammatical and social settings (Gardner-Chloros 2009). But my narrowed focus here explores its relationship to entextualization in authoritative discourse. I argue that the long-held association of Spanish with governmental and religious institutions in Guatemala acts as an ideological constraint on bilingual speakers, even once legal constraints against using Mayan languages in this capacity have been formally abolished. I illustrate this through an ethnographic case study of an ecumenical civil wedding by bilingual Kaqchikel Maya in the Guatemalan community of San José Poaquil. Historical and Sociolinguistic Background The last several decades have witnessed the growth of ethnic social movements in numerous regions of Latin America (Jackson and Warren 2005; Wade 2010). In Guatemala, where over forty percent of the population is indigenous (Yoshioka 2010), speakers of twenty-one different Mayan languages have struggled to establish their rights as citizens and to valorize a pan-Maya ethnicity (Asociación Maya Uk’u’x B’e 2005; Cojtı́ Cuxil 1997; Fischer and Brown 1996; Montejo 2005; Warren 1998). The ethnographic case study presented here involves bilingual speakers of both Spanish and Kaqchikel Mayan languages in an overwhelmingly indigenous community. Before proceeding with the case study, it is important to first review the relevant historical and sociolinguistic data regarding Kaqchikel’s status relative to Spanish. Kaqchikel is a Mayan language currently...