William F Hanks
Biographic Data
| ID | 90807 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William F Hanks |
| GIVEN NAMES | William F |
| FAMILY NAME | Hanks |
| SIGNATURE | HANKS W F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 940 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Politics of Worlding: An Anthropological Contribution to Cosmopolitics
Recognizing the Role of Language in the Hidden Curriculum of Undergraduate Medical Education: Implications for Equity in Medical Training
Medical education involves a transition from “outsider” to “insider” status, which entails both rigorous formal training and an inculturation of values and norms via a hidden curriculum. Within this transition, the ability to “talk the talk” designates an individual as an insider, and learning to talk this talk is a key component of professional socialization. This Article uses the framework of “patterns of medical language” to explore the role o…
Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross
This pathbreaking synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives an unprecedented view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on an extraordinary range and depth of sources, William F. Hanks documents for the first time the crucial role played by language in cultural conquest: how colonial Mayan emerged in the age of the cross, how it was taken up by native writers to become the language…
Communicative interaction in terms of ba theory: Towards an innovative approach to language practice
This paper proposes an innovative approach to pragmatics that breaks away from the notion of individual as starting point in order to understand interactive context as a single integrated whole. This break is made by introducing the Japanese philosophical concept of ba and basho. The conceptualization of basho was initiated by Nishida Kitaro and his fellow philosophers at the Kyoto School in the first half of the twentieth century, and the ba pri…
Language & Communicative Practices
Introduction: Meaning and Matters of Context
The plurality of temporal reckoning among the Maya
This paper presents an overview of time reckoning in several domains of Maya language and culture, as observed in the Sierra region of Yucatan in the last decades of the twentieth century. It demonstrates that multiple systems of temporal reckoning and orientation co-operate in the traditional domains of daily practice, and it attempts to formulate principles by which different systems are combined in actional frameworks It is argued that most cy…
Context effects: Why we really need a theory of action and why it is so hard
Comment on Enfield, N. J. and Jack Sidnell. 2017. The concept of action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Présent passé, passé présent: Les enjeux de l’histoire régressive
L’anthropologie s’est longtemps interrogé sur le rapport entre la société comme système actuel d’une part, et l’histoire plus ou moins longue dont elle est issue, de l’autre. Sont impliqués les disciplines de l’archive et du terrain, la diachronie de l’histoire et la synchronie dynamique du présent, le passage du passé au présent, et son inverse, la contingence et la necessité, la valeur des pratiques culturelles du présent comme archive vivante …
Libana, El discurso ceremonial mesoamericano y el sermón cristiano
Alphabetic Literacy and Colonial Process in Yucatán
The article outlines the formation and spread of alphabetic writing and reading in Colonial Yucatán. Over the colonial period, Maya people adapted to, appropriated, and ultimately expropriated alphabetic writing for their own purposes. Drawing on what Matthew Restall has called the New Philology and on recent trends in missionary linguistics, this article explores the distinctive characteristics of alphabetic writing, which was a potent force in …
Introduction to emancipatory pragmatics, Special issue Part 3
Translating worlds: The epistemological space of translation
Translation has played an important but equivocal role in the history of anthropology and linguistics. At least since Saussure and Boas, languages have been seen as systems whose differences make precise translation exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. More recently, Quine has argued that, in purely abstract terms, reference is ultimately inscrutable and translation between languages is in principle indeterminate. From a Kuhn-inspired point …
The space of translation
This paper explores the space of translation spanning cross-cultural description and the verbal act of rendering in one language what is expressed in another. We make a three-way distinction between translation as a method of revealing difference and similarity, cultural interpretation, which is related but distinct, and endogenous translation that takes place within a single language or culture. Intracultural translation plays a constitutive rol…
Counterparts: Co-presence and ritual intersubjectivity
Evidentiality in social interaction
Preview this article: Evidentiality in social interaction, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ps.3.2.02for-1.gif
Modalities of co-participation
Birth of a Language: The Formation and Spread of Colonial Yucatec Maya
This paper outlines the establishment of Catholic missions among the Maya in colonial Yucatan, Mexico. A central element in the broader project of reducción (re-ordering, subjugation, missionization) was conducted in the Maya language, which was also the language of governance and the Indian towns. As a result, the colonial period marks the emergence of a new variety of Maya language, born of translation, appropriated by Maya speakers, and ultima…
Converting WordsMaya in the Age of the Cross: Maya in the age of the cross
Introduction: The Field of Discourse Production The Making of a Translanguage * The Body as Totality * A Shifting Voice for Indian Authors Part I. The Scope of Reduccion 2. Perpetual Reduccion in a Land of Frontiers Notes on the Political Geography of Post-Mayapan Yucatan * Lopez Medel and the Spirit of the Laws * Reduccion in a Regional Perspective * A Land of Frontiers 3. To Make Themselves New Men Governance of the Guardiania * Disciplining th…
Comment établir un terrain d'entente dans un rituel
L'article analyse l'articulation entre savoir partagé et coopération dans une séquence interactionnelle au cours d'une séance divinatoire maya au Yucatan (Mexique) : un homme, accompagné de sa femme, s'adresse à un chamane pour qu'il fasse le diagnostic de sa maladie. Le chamane établit ce diagnostic à l'aide de cristaux divinatoires devant son autel. Il y a une forte asymétrie entre ce que le chamane et le patient savent et perçoivent respective…
Towards an emancipatory pragmatics
Fieldwork on deixis
Spatial frames of reference in language and thought
Stephen C. Levinson , Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity . Series in Language, Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii, 389. Pb $27.99. This is an important book that makes basic arguments of real consequence for current understanding of the relation among language, gesture, and mind. Convincing new experimental and field data from a wide range of languages are used to argue …
Pierre Bourdieu and the Practices of Language
This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines…
Explorations in the Deictic Field
This paper focuses on the ways in which speakers make reference to themselves, to one another, and to objects in the everyday settings of talk. Drawing on research in linguistic anthropology, sociology, and linguistics, it proposes an approach to language based on the concepts of communicative practice, deictic field, and socially constituted objects of reference. Found in all human languages, deictics are expressions like English this, that, her…
Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice
In order to analyze language use within a theory of social practice, it is necessary to develop a coherent approach to speech genres. This paper contributes to such an approach, by treating genres as elements of linguistic habitus, consisting of stylistic, thematic, and indexical schemata on which actors improvise in the course of linguistic production. The empirical focus is "official" Maya language documents produced in 16th-century colonial Yu…
Referential practice: Language and lived space among the Maya
Converting WordsMaya in the Age of the Cross: Maya in the age of the cross
Introduction: The Field of Discourse Production The Making of a Translanguage * The Body as Totality * A Shifting Voice for Indian Authors Part I. The Scope of Reduccion 2. Perpetual Reduccion in a Land of Frontiers Notes on the Political Geography of Post-Mayapan Yucatan * Lopez Medel and the Spirit of the Laws * Reduccion in a Regional Perspective * A Land of Frontiers 3. To Make Themselves New Men Governance of the Guardiania * Disciplining th…
Text And Textuality
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Explorations in the Deictic Field
This paper focuses on the ways in which speakers make reference to themselves, to one another, and to objects in the everyday settings of talk. Drawing on research in linguistic anthropology, sociology, and linguistics, it proposes an approach to language based on the concepts of communicative practice, deictic field, and socially constituted objects of reference. Found in all human languages, deictics are expressions like English this, that, her…
Pierre Bourdieu and the Practices of Language
This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines…
Translating worlds: The epistemological space of translation
Translation has played an important but equivocal role in the history of anthropology and linguistics. At least since Saussure and Boas, languages have been seen as systems whose differences make precise translation exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. More recently, Quine has argued that, in purely abstract terms, reference is ultimately inscrutable and translation between languages is in principle indeterminate. From a Kuhn-inspired point …
Authenticity and Ambivalence in the Text: A colonial Maya case
The Spanish conquest of Yucatan created a new discourse in which Maya and Spanish systems of representation were encompassed, interacted, and then produced hybrid cultural forms. The Maya nobility played an important role early on in this process, through their participation in both Spanish and indigenous sectors of colonial society. This paper explores the ambivalence of the nobility by analyzing their letters, addressed to the Spanish Crown, in…
Sanctification, Structure, and Experience in a Yucatec Ritual Event
The space of translation
This paper explores the space of translation spanning cross-cultural description and the verbal act of rendering in one language what is expressed in another. We make a three-way distinction between translation as a method of revealing difference and similarity, cultural interpretation, which is related but distinct, and endogenous translation that takes place within a single language or culture. Intracultural translation plays a constitutive rol…
Fieldwork on deixis
Towards an emancipatory pragmatics
Evidentiality in social interaction
Preview this article: Evidentiality in social interaction, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ps.3.2.02for-1.gif
An Epoch of Miracles: Oral Literature of the Yucatec Maya
Grammar, Style, and Meaning in a Maya Manuscript
Comment établir un terrain d'entente dans un rituel
L'article analyse l'articulation entre savoir partagé et coopération dans une séquence interactionnelle au cours d'une séance divinatoire maya au Yucatan (Mexique) : un homme, accompagné de sa femme, s'adresse à un chamane pour qu'il fasse le diagnostic de sa maladie. Le chamane établit ce diagnostic à l'aide de cristaux divinatoires devant son autel. Il y a une forte asymétrie entre ce que le chamane et le patient savent et perçoivent respective…
Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross
This pathbreaking synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives an unprecedented view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on an extraordinary range and depth of sources, William F. Hanks documents for the first time the crucial role played by language in cultural conquest: how colonial Mayan emerged in the age of the cross, how it was taken up by native writers to become the language…
Birth of a Language: The Formation and Spread of Colonial Yucatec Maya
This paper outlines the establishment of Catholic missions among the Maya in colonial Yucatan, Mexico. A central element in the broader project of reducción (re-ordering, subjugation, missionization) was conducted in the Maya language, which was also the language of governance and the Indian towns. As a result, the colonial period marks the emergence of a new variety of Maya language, born of translation, appropriated by Maya speakers, and ultima…
Alphabetic Literacy and Colonial Process in Yucatán
The article outlines the formation and spread of alphabetic writing and reading in Colonial Yucatán. Over the colonial period, Maya people adapted to, appropriated, and ultimately expropriated alphabetic writing for their own purposes. Drawing on what Matthew Restall has called the New Philology and on recent trends in missionary linguistics, this article explores the distinctive characteristics of alphabetic writing, which was a potent force in …
Communicative interaction in terms of ba theory: Towards an innovative approach to language practice
This paper proposes an innovative approach to pragmatics that breaks away from the notion of individual as starting point in order to understand interactive context as a single integrated whole. This break is made by introducing the Japanese philosophical concept of ba and basho. The conceptualization of basho was initiated by Nishida Kitaro and his fellow philosophers at the Kyoto School in the first half of the twentieth century, and the ba pri…
Counterparts: Co-presence and ritual intersubjectivity
The Language of the Canek Manuscript
The Canek manuscript is written in a distinctive linguistic style, probably a local variant of Spanish influenced by Yucatec Maya and archaic forms of Spanish. It also reflects a curiously ambivalent perspective on the Itza king Canek, at once aligning him with the pagan Indians and suggesting an affinity with Saint Francis. Like many other colonial texts, the four extant folia of this manuscript show a blending of verbal genres. This paper prese…
Spatial frames of reference in language and thought
Stephen C. Levinson , Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity . Series in Language, Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii, 389. Pb $27.99. This is an important book that makes basic arguments of real consequence for current understanding of the relation among language, gesture, and mind. Convincing new experimental and field data from a wide range of languages are used to argue …
Intertextualité de l'espace au Yucatan
Hanks William F. Intertextualité de l'espace au Yucatan. In: L'Homme, 1992, tome 32 n°122-124. La Redécouverte de l'Amérique. pp. 53-74
Introduction to emancipatory pragmatics, Special issue Part 3
An Epoch of Miracles: Oral Literature of the Yucatec Maya
Sanctification, Structure, and Experience in a Yucatec Ritual Event
The Proportionality of Shifters in Yucatec
A Grammar of Mam, a Mayan Language
Abbreviations Used in the Examples * Introduction * The Language and People * Research * Personnel * Previous Studies * Overview of the Grammar *1. Phonology * Phonemic Inventory * Phonemic Description * Summary of Phonological Processes * Stress * The Syllable * Juncture * Notes *2. Morphophonemics * Vowels * Glottals * Nasal Alternation *3. Roots and Words * Verbs * Nouns * Non-Verbal Predicates * Summary of Inflection * Positionals * Adjective…
Authenticity and Ambivalence in the Text: A colonial Maya case
The Spanish conquest of Yucatan created a new discourse in which Maya and Spanish systems of representation were encompassed, interacted, and then produced hybrid cultural forms. The Maya nobility played an important role early on in this process, through their participation in both Spanish and indigenous sectors of colonial society. This paper explores the ambivalence of the nobility by analyzing their letters, addressed to the Spanish Crown, in…
Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice
In order to analyze language use within a theory of social practice, it is necessary to develop a coherent approach to speech genres. This paper contributes to such an approach, by treating genres as elements of linguistic habitus, consisting of stylistic, thematic, and indexical schemata on which actors improvise in the course of linguistic production. The empirical focus is "official" Maya language documents produced in 16th-century colonial Yu…
Grammar, Style, and Meaning in a Maya Manuscript
Text And Textuality
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Referential practice: Language and lived space among the Maya
Foreword by William F. Hanks
In this important theoretical treatist, Jean Lave, anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, computer scientist, push forward the notion of situated learning - that learning is fundamentally a social process. The authors maintain that learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process they call legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). Learners participate in communities of practitioners, moving toward full parti…
The Language of the Canek Manuscript
The Canek manuscript is written in a distinctive linguistic style, probably a local variant of Spanish influenced by Yucatec Maya and archaic forms of Spanish. It also reflects a curiously ambivalent perspective on the Itza king Canek, at once aligning him with the pagan Indians and suggesting an affinity with Saint Francis. Like many other colonial texts, the four extant folia of this manuscript show a blending of verbal genres. This paper prese…
Intertextualité de l'espace au Yucatan
Hanks William F. Intertextualité de l'espace au Yucatan. In: L'Homme, 1992, tome 32 n°122-124. La Redécouverte de l'Amérique. pp. 53-74
Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya
Indexicality
Pierre Bourdieu and the Practices of Language
This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines…
Explorations in the Deictic Field
This paper focuses on the ways in which speakers make reference to themselves, to one another, and to objects in the everyday settings of talk. Drawing on research in linguistic anthropology, sociology, and linguistics, it proposes an approach to language based on the concepts of communicative practice, deictic field, and socially constituted objects of reference. Found in all human languages, deictics are expressions like English this, that, her…
Spatial frames of reference in language and thought
Stephen C. Levinson , Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity . Series in Language, Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii, 389. Pb $27.99. This is an important book that makes basic arguments of real consequence for current understanding of the relation among language, gesture, and mind. Convincing new experimental and field data from a wide range of languages are used to argue …
Comment établir un terrain d'entente dans un rituel
L'article analyse l'articulation entre savoir partagé et coopération dans une séquence interactionnelle au cours d'une séance divinatoire maya au Yucatan (Mexique) : un homme, accompagné de sa femme, s'adresse à un chamane pour qu'il fasse le diagnostic de sa maladie. Le chamane établit ce diagnostic à l'aide de cristaux divinatoires devant son autel. Il y a une forte asymétrie entre ce que le chamane et le patient savent et perçoivent respective…
Towards an emancipatory pragmatics
Fieldwork on deixis
Converting WordsMaya in the Age of the Cross: Maya in the age of the cross
Introduction: The Field of Discourse Production The Making of a Translanguage * The Body as Totality * A Shifting Voice for Indian Authors Part I. The Scope of Reduccion 2. Perpetual Reduccion in a Land of Frontiers Notes on the Political Geography of Post-Mayapan Yucatan * Lopez Medel and the Spirit of the Laws * Reduccion in a Regional Perspective * A Land of Frontiers 3. To Make Themselves New Men Governance of the Guardiania * Disciplining th…
Evidentiality in social interaction
Preview this article: Evidentiality in social interaction, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ps.3.2.02for-1.gif
Modalities of co-participation
Birth of a Language: The Formation and Spread of Colonial Yucatec Maya
This paper outlines the establishment of Catholic missions among the Maya in colonial Yucatan, Mexico. A central element in the broader project of reducción (re-ordering, subjugation, missionization) was conducted in the Maya language, which was also the language of governance and the Indian towns. As a result, the colonial period marks the emergence of a new variety of Maya language, born of translation, appropriated by Maya speakers, and ultima…
Counterparts: Co-presence and ritual intersubjectivity
Philosophy (24 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Linguistics (20 works) · History (14 works) · Archaeology (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · History (10 works) · Latin American history and culture (10 works)