Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Words And Things In Yucatán: Poststructuralism And The Everyday Life Of Mayan Multiculturalism, Fernando Armstrong-Fumero

Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This article draws on ethnographic examples to examine how rural Maya-speakers in the Mexican state of Yucatán ground the experience of identity politics in quotidian engagements with pre-Hispanic objects and utterances in the Maya language. My argument is intended as a revision of models of critical scholarship that have been influenced by poststructuralism and that place an overwhelming emphasis on discourse as a modality through which politically viable identities are created and performed. Specific examples show how vernacular multiculturalism is shaped by the agency of forms of language use and physical objects that have been a part of local life-worlds …