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E-book Language and Belonging : Local Categories and Practices in a Guatemalan Highland Community

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Penilaian

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It was a damp morning during the summer of 2009 in Guatemala when Lola1climbed up a steep path with her eldest daughter and myself to collect ripe maca-damia nuts from her small parcel of land. During a short break, and with a view over the community houses, smoke billowing from their hearths, she points to a small piece of land where the cemetery lies. She tells me that her grandparents are buried there because they were born ‘here’, that her father is buried there as he was also born ‘here’ and that, one day, she too will be buried in the very same cemetery because aquí nací y aquí voy a morir ‘I was born here and here I’m go-ing to die’. As unanticipated as LOA’s articulation of life and death that morning on our way to work was, it was deeply revealing regarding her understanding of local attachment through the trajectory of generations. It pointed to a specific spatially bound conceptualization of belonging.Arriving at this conclusion, and, hence, the overall topic of this book, has been a long journey. It started when I traveled to Guatemala as a Master’s student in 2009. I was doing research on global connectedness and its repercussions on community members’ perceptions of being part of a global imagined community (Anderson, 1983) based on the experiences of a rural community in the western highlands of Guatemala, the Nueva Alianza. The Alianza has an extraordinary story of strug-gle, and, as a result, its local people today run several projects with links to na-tional and international governmental and non-governmental institutions. This is quite unusual given that it is a small village of just 350 inhabitants located in the mountains near Quetzaltenango. During the two months I stayed in the com-munity, I participated in long hours of routine daily work, and in the evenings spent time with the families and attended organized projects and meetings. I have analyzed the interviews I conducted at that time for their content on relations of the community with outsiders and their experience with global topics such as or-ganic and fair-trade farming, environmentalism and peasant struggle. However, while focusing on the relations of the community with the outside world, insights into the actual collective self-conceptions of the community as consolidated and linked to place and group emerged as a side topic to my initial interview read-ings. In particular, the narratives unfolding at the beginning of each interview seemed to be a favorable locus for interlocutors to establish their self-conceptions. Moreover, I noticed that certain topics and linguistic means repeated themselves n the narratives. There was “something” to the narratives and the interactions with the community members during my first research stay that I could not yet pin down in succinct analysis. Neither could I use them to form a concise research question back then. Because of this, I returned to the community in 2011, this time focusing on interactions of the community members with “outsiders” other than me, as well as in-group meetings among themselves.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

306.44 VAL l

Penerbit

Switzerland : Peter Lang International Academic Publishers., 2019

Deskripsi Fisik

322 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783631768921

Klasifikasi

306.44

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Sociolinguistics

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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