Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Writing About Aj Pop B'Atz': Bruce Grindal And The Transformation Of Ethnographic Writing, Sarah Ashley Kistler

Faculty Publications

The works of Bruce Grindal teach us many things about anthropology’s humanistic tradition. With examples such as Redneck Girl and “Postmodernism as Seen by the Boys at Downhome Auto Repair,” Bruce Grindal demonstrated how we can creatively engage our ethnographic writing to reflect lived experiences. In this article, I examine Bruce’s influence on my ethnographic writing and collaborative research in the Maya community of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala. Since 2006, I have worked collectively with a group of Chamelqueños to investigate the story of their local hero, Aj Pop B’atz’. In the sixteenth century, Aj Pop B’atz’ welcomed Spanish invaders …

On Swearwords And Slang, Robert Moore

Faculty Publications

Slang lexemes and swearwords are commonly discussed in conjunction with each other as though they were slightly different versions of the same phenomenon. However, they clearly are not, as a careful consideration of their different prototypical functions reveals. Each of these lexical categories has a central or core function, and in each case this function is linked to the obligatory expression of affect. Different kinds of affect are entailed in the prototypical uses of slang and of swearwords, but in the case of both of these lexical types, this affect is incompatible with the formality and deference of honorifics, or, …

Reflections On Sudanese Languages Of War And Peace, Richard A. Lobban

Faculty Publications

This pap er started as a casual reflection and was not especially scholarly in style, mainly following the 2009 Sudan Studies Association conference theme of war and peace.(1) It just sought to explore some linguistic concepts of war and peace in some Sudanese languages for which I had dictionaries at hand. I had no a priori views or hypotheses and was motivated mainly by my curiosity into Sudanese linguistics. As this survey has evolved, patterns emerged about these concepts that nudged me to look more at the context and etymology . The result is incomplete, but hopefully heuristic . A …

Interest, Use, And Interest In Uses In Folk Biology, Terence E. Hays

Faculty Publications

In this work on folk biological taxonomy, Terence Hays the author, calls upon various works of previous field studies conducted over a long-term period including those by Bulmer, Everyman, Hunn, Brown, and Hymes. Hays looks back to works by Ralph Bulmer and his co-workers where taxonomies of five or six levels deep were not surprising. Hays points out that this is a stark contrast to Everyman, Alexander Portnoy's study regarding the simplicity of Westerners folk systems and then posits why "the folk" classify their environment in great detail. Hays brings to light that it has much to do with the …

"Tribe": A Socio-Political Analysis, Richard A. Lobban Jr., Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Linda Zangari

Faculty Publications

In 1974 we authored an essay entitled "Tribe and Tribalism" which recommended that the term "tribe" be dropped from scientific usage by anthropologists because of its pejorative connotations associated with non-European peoples and because the term is arbitrarily, rather than systematically applied.

Increasing numbers of scholars are putting quotation marks around the word "tribe" or are using the phrase "the so-called tribal societies." Still others are presenting a critical review of the term "tribe" before abandoning it or using it in the text in modified or altered form. The term "primitive" has undergone a similar evolution in recent years.