John B Haviland
Biographic Data
| ID | 76792 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John B Haviland |
| GIVEN NAMES | John B |
| FAMILY NAME | Haviland |
| SIGNATURE | HAVILAND J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0125-3432 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 424 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Mastery, Modality, and Tsotsil Coexpressivity
Coexpressivity" is the property of utterances that marshal multiple linguistic elements and modalities simultaneously to perform the distinct linguistic functions of Jakobson's classic analysis (1960). This study draws on a longitudinal corpus of natural conversation recorded over six decades with an accomplished "master speaker" of Tsotsil (Mayan), adept at using his language to manage different aspects of social life. The research aims to elabo…
Cline and punishment: A comment on Angermeyer
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How and When to Sign "Hey!" Socialization into Grammar in Z, a 1st Generation Family Sign Language from Mexico
Z" is a young sign language developing in a family whose hearing members speak Tzotzil (Mayan). Three deaf siblings, together with an intervening hearing sister and a hearing niece, formed the original cohort of signing adults. A hearing son of the original signer became the first native signer of a second generation. Z provides evidence for a classic grammaticalization chain linking a sign requesting attention (HEY1) to a pragmatic turn-initiati…
Attention (and Joint Attention)
Joint attention is a term used to label episodes in which an infant and a caregiver concurrently attend, visually, to an external object, each sharing consciousness of the fact that the other is also attending. It is claimed to be a central element in word learning, by which a child comes to realize that the object in question is named or described by an interlocutor's words. It is also considered an important diagnostic for the child's growing a…
Little Rituals
Erving Goffman's insistence on placing talk in a wider interactive frame and his "interaction rituals" are obvious inspirations for the phrase "little rituals." Similarly, one could understand "ritualization" to be a displacement or recalibration of distinct but laminated contexts indexically projected, in Silverstein's parlance, by talk in interaction. Finally, the ritual echoes in quotidian Zinacantec interaction clearly reflect the generic lea…
Space as space and space as grammar: An anthropological journey through gesture(d) spaces
Research on narratives in an Australian language demonstrated surprising facts about speakers’ spatial orientation and knowledge both in the insistent use of morphologically hypertrophied spoken directional terminology and in accompanying gestures. Pursuing comparable phenomena in a Mayan language from the other side of the globe revealed correspondingly complex gestural devices for communicating about location and direction but with very differe…
Mayan Conversation and Interaction
When I first came to Zinacantán, early in the summer of 1966, I had been schooled in basic Tsotsil grammar and etiquette as part of preparation for fieldwork in highland Chiapas. This linguistic orientation went along with other sorts of training: practicing for involuntary bouts of heavy drinking, learning to take “fieldnotes” on ritual by attending my first Catholic Mass, and enrolling in a “field medicine” course in which I learned dosages for…
“But you said ‘four sheep’ …!”: (Sign) language, ideology, and self (esteem) across generations in a Mayan family
Shouts, shrieks, and shots: Unruly political conversations in indigenous Chiapas
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The emerging grammar of nouns in a first generation sign language: Specification, iconicity, and syntax
A first generation family homesign system, dubbed “Z”, from the Tzotzil-speaking township of Zinacantán, in Chiapas, Mexico, provides insight into how a new sign language can begin to distinguish formally different “part-of-speech” categories. After describing the small signing community, consisting of 3 deaf sibling and their intermediate hearing sister, plus a younger cousin — the entire set of fluent adult signers — plus the hearing child of t…
"Inside the Fence", the Social Basis of Privacy in Nabenchauk
The guarded privacy of peasant life has long been a commonplace of European folk wisdom, and is well-established in social theory as a principle element in the notion of tradition. The privacy -and inaccessability- of the peasant has been the object of strategic manoeuvre by colonial policymakers, revolutionary cadres and agents of political and economic development. Current sociological and anthropological accounts of Mediterranean, Latin Americ…
Lenguaje ritual sin ritual
Son las doce del día del Viernes Santo, en el pueblo Tzotzil de Nabenchauk, "La Laguna del Rayo; en los Altos de Chiapas. Un sol brillante ilumina las paredes de la iglesia de Jch'ul-me'tik Valalupa -la Virgen de Guadalupe- donde el pueblo se ha reunido para acompañar a los ch' ul moletik -los Ancianos Sagrados quc cumplen con sus deberes tradicionales. El pueblo canta en la oscuridad de la iglesia, impregnada de olor a incienso, juncia, rosas, g…
Keremcita: Speech Relations and Social Relations in Highland Chiapas
The thesis of this paper is simple, unexceptionable, and largely obvious. I hope to save embarassment, thot my reader swill already subscribe to it implicitly, so that I will not need to argue for it so much as demonstrate it, in the context of relations between Tzotzil speaking Zinacanteco Indians of highland Chiapas, and Spanish speaking ladinos in the same region. There is clearly a relationship between the social organization of an aggregate …
(Mis)understanding and Obtuseness: "Ethnolinguistic Borders" in a Miniscule Speech Community
Building on two of Gumperz's foundational concerns-multilingual speech communities and linguistically linked intercultural miscommunication-I extend (or perhaps reduce) a couple of Gumperzian concepts to an almost limiting case: a single extended family in Chiapas, Mexico, where three deaf siblings interact with their hearing relatives of three generations. Here a spoken Mayan language (along with a little Spanish) is used side by side with a spo…
The life history of a speech community: Guugu Yimidhirr at Hopevale
The history of the Aboriginal community of Hopevale is discussed, with special focus on their Guugu Yimidhirr language. The evolution of the language over time is analysed, highlighting the retention of speech competence through the changes
How much food will there be in Heaven?’: Lutherans and Aborigines around Cooktown before 1900
Map 1 Tribal territory of the Guugu Y
Who Asked You, Condom Head
One kind of Mexican street vendor is a foulmouthed clown, whose off-color spiel uses racism, sexism, double-entendre, and nationalist chauvinism to assemble and entertain a crowd and, ultimately, to part its members from their money. Vulgar and highly formulaic, the clown's language reaches its creative peaks when the clown engages individuals-whether passers-by, shills, or marks-in direct interaction and subjects them to insult and verbal abuse …
Mu xa xtak'av: He Doesn't Answer
Society regiments argument: what one fights about, with whom, and the frontiers of possible resolutions. But arguments can catastrophically rearrange social relationships. I consider a Zinacantec theory of the links between mutual talk and sociality, then sequential facts of Zinacantec fighting, and wider sociopolitical constraints on who can fight with whom, as illustrated by an extended family dispute. Whereas orderly disputes may refashion soc…
Postscript: Plurifunctional narratives
In this brief postscript I reflect on these stimulating papers, starting with hopefully well-accepted general precepts, and then commenting on shared themes, from the nature of narrative entextualizations as objects to the interactive social engagements from which they emerge
Master Speakers, Master Gesturers: A String Quarter Master Class
Directional Precision in Zinacantec Deictic Gestures: (Cognitive ?) Preconditions of Talk About Space
Comparative work on human spatial cognition contrasts systems of calculating position and trajectory that involve body-relative reckoning -frequently where the body in question is that of an egocentric observer -with systems which rely on global coordinates such as compass directions not relative to the positions and orientations of moveable entities. I consider here a case -from a Tzotzil speaker from highland Chiapas, Mexico -in which spoken re…
Whorish Old Man" and "One (Animal) Gentleman
Language in Native Title. John Henderson , David Nash
Ideologies of Language: Some Reflections on Language and U.S. Law
I present two U.S. court cases in which I participated as a linguistic anthropological "expert" to show how language ideologies of the law both influence legal outcomes and conflict with "scientific" ideas about language. One case was the murder trial of a young Mixtec‐speaking Indian from Oaxaca; the other was a civil suit brought by four Hispanic women dismissed from an elder‐care center for speaking Spanish on the job. I identify in the lingui…
Gesture
Anchoring, Iconicity, and Orientation in Guugu Yimithirr Pointing Gestures
Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr at the Hopevale aboriginal community in Queensland use inflected forms of four cardinal direction words in all talk about location and motion. This article compares the pointing gestures in parallel episodes of two tellings of a single story, first to demonstrate that gestures too can be directionally anchored, and then to contrast other gestures that are emancipated from cardinal direction. Different sorts ofindexical…
Guugu Yimidhirr brother-in-law language
Aboriginal Australians are celebrated for their use of linguistic devices to mark the subtleties of social situation and relationship. Three sorts of phenomenon are widely reported (see Capell 1962; Dixon 1972: 19): (1) special vocabulary is often associated with male initiation (see, for example, Hale 1971); (2) there is often extensive word tabooing, usually involving strict prohibition on names of deceased people, as well as on words that soun…
Ideologies of Language: Some Reflections on Language and U.S. Law
I present two U.S. court cases in which I participated as a linguistic anthropological "expert" to show how language ideologies of the law both influence legal outcomes and conflict with "scientific" ideas about language. One case was the murder trial of a young Mixtec‐speaking Indian from Oaxaca; the other was a civil suit brought by four Hispanic women dismissed from an elder‐care center for speaking Spanish on the job. I identify in the lingui…
Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions
Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (GY) make heavy use in discourse of four roots that mean north, south, east, and west. Describing location with cardinal directions involves principles strikingly different from systems based on the anatomies of reference objects, including speakers and hearers themselves. Nonetheless, the relational and situated nature of cardinal term systems has been insufficiently appreciated. This article explores the linguistic d…
Whorish Old Man" and "One (Animal) Gentleman
Sure, sure: Evidence and Affect
Gossip as Competition in Zinacantan
Journal Article Gossip as Competition in Zinacantan Get access John Beard Haviland John Beard Haviland 1John Beard Haviland is Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, Institute of Advanced Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra. His work in Zinacantan began in 1966 under the auspices of the Harvard Chiapas Project, and his book, Gossip, Reputation, and Knowledge in Zinacantan, is soon to be published by the University of…
Early Pointing Gestures in Zincantán
Starting with naturally occurring (proto-) pointing gestures of two infants, I examine the role and nature of early gesture in language acquisition and socialization in the Tzotzil-speaking community of Zinacantán, in Chiapas, Mexico. Early "words" are, not surprisingly, only part of the story, since verbalizations are embedded in wider communicative routines that characteristically involve gesture. Although the precursors to gesture have been li…
The emerging grammar of nouns in a first generation sign language: Specification, iconicity, and syntax
A first generation family homesign system, dubbed “Z”, from the Tzotzil-speaking township of Zinacantán, in Chiapas, Mexico, provides insight into how a new sign language can begin to distinguish formally different “part-of-speech” categories. After describing the small signing community, consisting of 3 deaf sibling and their intermediate hearing sister, plus a younger cousin — the entire set of fluent adult signers — plus the hearing child of t…
That was the last time I seen them, and no more: Voices through time in Australian Aborigina autobiography
In the 1920s, Aboriginal Australians in northern Queensland were removed from the bush by force and deposited on missions, where they grew up, were educated, and often lived the rest of their lives. Their autobiographical memories-from conversation-about life in the bush and the events that sundered people from their families are framed in languages provided by subsequent mission life and are discursively shaped by the facts both of the moment an…
Mu xa xtak'av: He Doesn't Answer
Society regiments argument: what one fights about, with whom, and the frontiers of possible resolutions. But arguments can catastrophically rearrange social relationships. I consider a Zinacantec theory of the links between mutual talk and sociality, then sequential facts of Zinacantec fighting, and wider sociopolitical constraints on who can fight with whom, as illustrated by an extended family dispute. Whereas orderly disputes may refashion soc…
"Te xa setel xulem"[The buzzards were circling]: Categories of verbal roots in (Zinacantec) Tzotzil
La semantique du zinacantec tzotzil montre une apparente preoccupation pour l'espace, la forme, la position et la configuration, qui apparait dans tous les aspects de l'usage normal de la langue. Les notions spatiales sont generalement associees aux etats et aux actions. Les radicaux des verbes de surface derivent des racines verbales qui peuvent etre divisees en types formels sur la base de possibilites derivationnelles. Ces types formels, en re…
Shouts, shrieks, and shots: Unruly political conversations in indigenous Chiapas
Preview this article: Shouts, shrieks, and shots, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/prag.7.4.05hav-1.gif
(Mis)understanding and Obtuseness: "Ethnolinguistic Borders" in a Miniscule Speech Community
Building on two of Gumperz's foundational concerns-multilingual speech communities and linguistically linked intercultural miscommunication-I extend (or perhaps reduce) a couple of Gumperzian concepts to an almost limiting case: a single extended family in Chiapas, Mexico, where three deaf siblings interact with their hearing relatives of three generations. Here a spoken Mayan language (along with a little Spanish) is used side by side with a spo…
Owners versus Bubu Gujin: Land Rights and Getting the Language Right in Guugu Yimithirr Country
Recent Queensland Aboriginal land rights legislation and court decisions have produced a series of land claims since 1992. Many claims involve speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (GY), residents of Hopevale Aboriginal Community who are descended both from local Aborigines and from others. Much of the support for claims of "traditional" ownership flows from putative owners' knowledge of GY speech practices. Yet legal constructions of such practices accord…
How much food will there be in Heaven?’: Lutherans and Aborigines around Cooktown before 1900
Map 1 Tribal territory of the Guugu Y
Who Asked You, Condom Head
One kind of Mexican street vendor is a foulmouthed clown, whose off-color spiel uses racism, sexism, double-entendre, and nationalist chauvinism to assemble and entertain a crowd and, ultimately, to part its members from their money. Vulgar and highly formulaic, the clown's language reaches its creative peaks when the clown engages individuals-whether passers-by, shills, or marks-in direct interaction and subjects them to insult and verbal abuse …
How and When to Sign "Hey!" Socialization into Grammar in Z, a 1st Generation Family Sign Language from Mexico
Z" is a young sign language developing in a family whose hearing members speak Tzotzil (Mayan). Three deaf siblings, together with an intervening hearing sister and a hearing niece, formed the original cohort of signing adults. A hearing son of the original signer became the first native signer of a second generation. Z provides evidence for a classic grammaticalization chain linking a sign requesting attention (HEY1) to a pragmatic turn-initiati…
Introduction: Spatial conceptualization in Mayan languages
Minimal Maxims: Cooperation and Natural Conversation in Zinacantan
Los procesos de la inferencia pragmática, combinados con los principios cooperativos conocidos como 'máximas conversacionales,' estructuran la comunicación en los intercambios verbales. Este trabajo investiga la aplicación etnográfica del estudio comparativo de los patrones conversacionales en una comunidad tzotzil
Gossip, Reputation, and Knowledge in Zinacantan
Linguistics: Tzeltal Numeral Classifiers: A Study in Ethnographic Semantics. Brent Berlin
Gesture
Linguistics: Tzeltal Numeral Classifiers: A Study in Ethnographic Semantics. Brent Berlin
A Last Look at Cook's Guugu Yimidhirr Word List
Yalálag: Changing Town . Script by Carol Jopling, film by John P. Jopling, narrated by Maria Machicado
Gossip as Competition in Zinacantan
Journal Article Gossip as Competition in Zinacantan Get access John Beard Haviland John Beard Haviland 1John Beard Haviland is Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, Institute of Advanced Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra. His work in Zinacantan began in 1966 under the auspices of the Harvard Chiapas Project, and his book, Gossip, Reputation, and Knowledge in Zinacantan, is soon to be published by the University of…
R. M. W. Dixon, A grammar of Yidiny. London: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Pp. xxiii+563
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Gossip, Reputation, and Knowledge in Zinacantan
Guugu Yimidhirr brother-in-law language
Aboriginal Australians are celebrated for their use of linguistic devices to mark the subtleties of social situation and relationship. Three sorts of phenomenon are widely reported (see Capell 1962; Dixon 1972: 19): (1) special vocabulary is often associated with male initiation (see, for example, Hale 1971); (2) there is often extensive word tabooing, usually involving strict prohibition on names of deceased people, as well as on words that soun…
Kin and country at Wakooka Outstation: An Exercise in Rich Interpretation
Article Kin and country at Wakooka Outstation: an exercise in rich interpretation was published on January 1, 1982 in the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language (volume 1982, issue 36)
Fighting Words: Evidential Particles, Affect, and Argument
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 343-354
The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantan with Grammatical Analysis and Historical Commentary, Volume I: Tzotzil-English
This dictionary of Tzotzil (Mayan) vocabulary from the town of Zinacantan, Chiapas, Mexico, was edited by the author over a period of nine years. The original manuscript, compiled by an anonymous Domimcan friar, probably at the close of the 16th century, disappeared during the Mexican Revolution but a manuscript copy of 351 pages survives. It was made around 1906 at the behest of the Bishop of Chiapas, Francisco Orozco y Jimenez. The approximatel…
Minimal Maxims: Cooperation and Natural Conversation in Zinacantan
Los procesos de la inferencia pragmática, combinados con los principios cooperativos conocidos como 'máximas conversacionales,' estructuran la comunicación en los intercambios verbales. Este trabajo investiga la aplicación etnográfica del estudio comparativo de los patrones conversacionales en una comunidad tzotzil
Paisanos and Chamulitas: Speech and social relations in (and around) Zinacantán
Sure, sure: Evidence and Affect
Linguistic Anthropology: Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, Volume 4. Language: The Socio‐Cultural Context. Frederick J. Newmeyer , ed
That was the last time I seen them, and no more: Voices through time in Australian Aborigina autobiography
In the 1920s, Aboriginal Australians in northern Queensland were removed from the bush by force and deposited on missions, where they grew up, were educated, and often lived the rest of their lives. Their autobiographical memories-from conversation-about life in the bush and the events that sundered people from their families are framed in languages provided by subsequent mission life and are discursively shaped by the facts both of the moment an…
The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán, with Grammatical Analysis and Historical Commentary
He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children. Marjorie Harness Goodwin
The syntax of Tzotzil Auxiliaries and directionals: The grammaticalization of "motion"
Anchoring, Iconicity, and Orientation in Guugu Yimithirr Pointing Gestures
Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr at the Hopevale aboriginal community in Queensland use inflected forms of four cardinal direction words in all talk about location and motion. This article compares the pointing gestures in parallel episodes of two tellings of a single story, first to demonstrate that gestures too can be directionally anchored, and then to contrast other gestures that are emancipated from cardinal direction. Different sorts ofindexical…
"Te xa setel xulem"[The buzzards were circling]: Categories of verbal roots in (Zinacantec) Tzotzil
La semantique du zinacantec tzotzil montre une apparente preoccupation pour l'espace, la forme, la position et la configuration, qui apparait dans tous les aspects de l'usage normal de la langue. Les notions spatiales sont generalement associees aux etats et aux actions. Les radicaux des verbes de surface derivent des racines verbales qui peuvent etre divisees en types formels sur la base de possibilites derivationnelles. Ces types formels, en re…
Introduction: Spatial conceptualization in Mayan languages
Owners versus Bubu Gujin: Land Rights and Getting the Language Right in Guugu Yimithirr Country
Recent Queensland Aboriginal land rights legislation and court decisions have produced a series of land claims since 1992. Many claims involve speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (GY), residents of Hopevale Aboriginal Community who are descended both from local Aborigines and from others. Much of the support for claims of "traditional" ownership flows from putative owners' knowledge of GY speech practices. Yet legal constructions of such practices accord…
Early Pointing Gestures in Zincantán
Starting with naturally occurring (proto-) pointing gestures of two infants, I examine the role and nature of early gesture in language acquisition and socialization in the Tzotzil-speaking community of Zinacantán, in Chiapas, Mexico. Early "words" are, not surprisingly, only part of the story, since verbalizations are embedded in wider communicative routines that characteristically involve gesture. Although the precursors to gesture have been li…
Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions
Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr (GY) make heavy use in discourse of four roots that mean north, south, east, and west. Describing location with cardinal directions involves principles strikingly different from systems based on the anatomies of reference objects, including speakers and hearers themselves. Nonetheless, the relational and situated nature of cardinal term systems has been insufficiently appreciated. This article explores the linguistic d…
Gesture
Philosophy (24 works) · Linguistics (23 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · History (15 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Hearing Impairment and Communication (9 works)