Eve Danziger


Eve Danziger Associate Professor Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 1991 Brooks Hall, Room 200
Both within and across speech communities, the maintenance of a particular variety of language reflects and supports a personal psychological commitment to a particular socialized identity. Speakers everywhere must engage with the `meaning' of their language -- not only in the referential, but also in the communicative and indexical sense: Both kinds of engagement could have consequences for what Benjamin Lee Whorf called "habitual thought". Since 1986, I have been doing ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork with the Mopan Maya people of Central America. The Mopan are a comparatively little-known group, although they occupy a central position in the Maya area. Some of my work therefore contributes at a basic level to general and comparative regional knowledge. But the theoretical focus of my research has been on the role which cultural meaning-systems play in individual psychology. I have taken a strong interest in the linguistic structures of subjectivity -- such as deictic demonstratives, but also including lexical shifter terms like those that encode kinship and spatial relations. Whenever a form of this kind is used, issues of social action and of individual mental state are raised, alongside those of cultural classification. My initial Mopan research addressed classical concerns about psychological reality in the kinship domain. I concluded that because Mopan 'kinship' categories are motivated by their relevance to culturally meaningful action in particular contexts, they reflect at the psychological level neither a disembodied and universal objective reality, nor a cross-culturally common and pan-contextual `human-sized' experience. In my more recent research, I have directly addressed specific proposals about the universality of spatial reference and spatial cognition across languages and cultures.Cognitive science had tended to view spatial cognition as an area of universal cross-cultural bedrock. But, working with colleagues from several disciplines, I have shown that speakers actually encode spatial relationships in radically different ways across languages. And, in a strongly relativistic result, the team has also shown that this linguistic variation has strict analogues in non-linguistic spatial problem-solving. Lately, I have been most concerned with the relationship of ways of thinking to ways of speaking. In this connection, I have been investigating on the one hand, Mopan beliefs about language, truth, and representation, and on the other, the differences between Mopan men and Mopan women in communicative opportunity, speech patterning, and approaches to non-linguistic problems. My newest project investigates the ways in which the nature of Deaf identity is related to the form of the gestural code which has been created by four adult deaf members of a single Mopan family. Specializations Linguistic Relativity; Mayan Linguistics; Social Organization and Social Identity; Shifter Terms and Subjectivity in Language; Spontaneous Sign Languages; Ideologies of Symbolic Representation; Relationship between Semantics and Grammar. Graduate Courses Courses Taught: Ethnopsychologies, Sociolinguistics, Language and Prehistory, Language and Thought, Linguistic Anthropology. Selected Publications 2001. Relatively Speaking: Language, Thought and Kinship in Mopan Maya. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, Oxford U. Press USA. 1996. Split Intransitivity and Active-Inactive Patterning in Mopan Maya. International Journal of American Linguistics. 62(4): 379-414. 1996. Parts and their Counter-Parts: Social and Spatial Relationships in Mopan Maya. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , incorporating MAN 2(1): 67-82.

Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 1991

Brooks Hall, Room 200

Both within and across speech communities, the maintenance of a particular variety of language reflects and supports a personal psychological commitment to a particular socialized identity. Speakers everywhere must engage with the `meaning' of their language -- not only in the referential, but also in the communicative and indexical sense: Both kinds of engagement could have consequences for what Benjamin Lee Whorf called "habitual thought".

Since 1986, I have been doing ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork with the Mopan Maya people of Central America. The Mopan are a comparatively little-known group, although they occupy a central position in the Maya area. Some of my work therefore contributes at a basic level to general and comparative regional knowledge. But the theoretical focus of my research has been on the role which cultural meaning-systems play in individual psychology. I have taken a strong interest in the linguistic structures of subjectivity -- such as deictic demonstratives, but also including lexical shifter terms like those that encode kinship and spatial relations. Whenever a form of this kind is used, issues of social action and of individual mental state are raised, alongside those of cultural classification.

My initial Mopan research addressed classical concerns about psychological reality in the kinship domain. I concluded that because Mopan 'kinship' categories are motivated by their relevance to culturally meaningful action in particular contexts, they reflect at the psychological level neither a disembodied and universal objective reality, nor a cross-culturally common and pan-contextual `human-sized' experience. In my more recent research, I have directly addressed specific proposals about the universality of spatial reference and spatial cognition across languages and cultures.Cognitive science had tended to view spatial cognition as an area of universal cross-cultural bedrock. But, working with colleagues from several disciplines, I have shown that speakers actually encode spatial relationships in radically different ways across languages. And, in a strongly relativistic result, the team has also shown that this linguistic variation has strict analogues in non-linguistic spatial problem-solving.

Lately, I have been most concerned with the relationship of ways of thinking to ways of speaking. In this connection, I have been investigating on the one hand, Mopan beliefs about language, truth, and representation, and on the other, the differences between Mopan men and Mopan women in communicative opportunity, speech patterning, and approaches to non-linguistic problems. My newest project investigates the ways in which the nature of Deaf identity is related to the form of the gestural code which has been created by four adult deaf members of a single Mopan family.

Specializations

Linguistic Relativity; Mayan Linguistics; Social Organization and Social Identity; Shifter Terms and Subjectivity in Language; Spontaneous Sign Languages; Ideologies of Symbolic Representation; Relationship between Semantics and Grammar.

Graduate Courses

Courses Taught: Ethnopsychologies, Sociolinguistics, Language and Prehistory, Language and Thought, Linguistic Anthropology.

Selected Publications

2001. Relatively Speaking: Language, Thought and Kinship in Mopan Maya. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, Oxford U. Press USA.
1996. Split Intransitivity and Active-Inactive Patterning in Mopan Maya. International Journal of American Linguistics. 62(4): 379-414.
1996. Parts and their Counter-Parts: Social and Spatial Relationships in Mopan Maya. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) , incorporating MAN 2(1): 67-82.