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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

Maya-K'iche', Guatemalan highlands, social identity, kinship relationship

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Anthropology

Abstract

During the summer of 2005, I lived and worked among the indigenous Maya-K’iche’ of the Guatemalan highlands. Prior to leaving, I had anticipated examining kinship terms in a bilingual country and whether the use of K’iche’ terms vs. Spanish terms would indicate a difference in the type of kinship relationship created. Upon arrival, I learned that I would spend the season in a rural, monolingual K’iche’ hamlet. Without my informants knowing any Spanish, I abandoned my bilingual project altogether and studied, instead, the native conceptions of communication and how these conceptions interplayed with their models of kinship and family. Having abandoned the pre-field research and project development, I then discovered the cultural inappropriateness of formal interviews or written methods. Subsequently, my research was built from the primary native mode of sharing information: informal conversation.

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