Inalienable possession and personhood in a Q'eqchi'-Mayan community

Abstract

This essay interprets the relation between inalienable possessions and personhood among speakers of Q'eqchi'-Maya living in the cloud forests of Guatemala. In the broadest sense, inalienable possessions are things that are inherently possessed by human beings, such as arms and legs, mothers and fathers, hearts and names. The relation between inalienable possessions and human possessors is analyzed across a variety of domains, ranging from grammatical categories and discursive practices to illness cures and life-cycle rituals. While this relation is figured differently in each domain, a strong resonance between such relations is shown to exist across such domains. For example, the gain and loss of inalienable possessions is related to the expansion and contraction of personhood. This resonance is used as a means to interpret Q'eqchi' understandings of personhood in relation to classic ideas from William James and Marcel Mauss: on the one hand, a role-enabled and role-enabling nexus of value-directed reflexive capabilities; and on the other hand, the material, social, and semiotic site in which this nexus is revealed.This essay was presented to the anthropology departments of Case Western University and Barnard College, the Mesoamerica Workshop at SUNY Albany, and workshops on linguistic anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago. It has greatly benefited from discussions with participants in these forums, especially Asif Agha, Anya Bernstein, Thomas Chordas, Courtney Handman, Walter Little, Elizabeth Povinelli, Lesley Sharp, Michael Silverstein, and Greg Urban. Above all, a course I took from John Lucy, entitled “The Self,” was fundamental to the topic choice and theoretical framing.