• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1096

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Groupness and place narratives – The importance of “here” in identity constructions of a Guatemalan community

Authors: Vallentin, Rita Tamara
Submitted by: Vallentin, Rita Tamara (European University Viadrina, Germany)

Questioning the major identification mechanisms of Guatemalan rural communities along ethnic lines, the community members I want to present in this paper construe their collective identity through the relation to the place they live in. Their identity is anchored within the soil, less with ethnic indigenous categories, which are used as key identity markers by the majority of the rural Guatemalan population.

Group affiliation (“Zuordnung”, Hausendorf 2000) in this community is linguistically expressed in deictic terms and a specific narrative of the place, not, as could be expected, in terms of ethnic attributes, religion, or using a specific indigenous language. The making of the in-group and several out-groups (Tajfel 1974) is done employing deictic expressions. Even outside of the community the reference point of spatial orientation is always rooted in the communal space. This, possibly, is connected with the history of the community, where the inhabitants changed from plantation workers to autonomous owners of their land through a phase of struggle and suffering lasting for years.

The corpus comprises semi-structured interviews with 32 inhabitants of the community from 2009 and recorded discourses of community members’ everyday life as well as communications with people from outside, like state-agents, NGO staff or international tourists. The last part of the corpus has been recorded during summer 2011.

In the analysis, I want to show how the category of place and the repetitive relation to community space shapes the collective identity of the “Nueva Alianza” inhabitants. I will show salient deictical expressions in the linguistic data with which community members do not only draw a cognitive map of their world but also make sense of themselves as a place-bound group.

References:
Brubaker, Rogers (2004): Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.

Hausendorf, Heiko (2000):Zugehörigkeit durch Sprache. Eine Linguistische Studie am Beispiel der Deutschen Wiedervereinigung. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Jungbluth, Konstanze (2005): Pragmatik der Demonstrativpronomina in den iberoromanischen Sprachen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. (Beihefte der Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, Bd.329.)

Le Page, Robert B. / Tabouret-Keller, Andrée (1985): Acts of Identity. Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tajfel, Henry (1974): “Social identity and intergroup behaviour”. In: Social Science Information 13: 65-93.