The collection of documents known as the Kaqchikel Chronicles consists of rare highland Maya texts, which trace Kaqchikel Maya history from their legendary departure from Tollan/Tula through their migrations, wars, the Spanish invasion, and the first century of Spanish colonial rule. The texts represent a variety of genres, including formal narrative, continuous year-count annals, contribution records, genealogies, and land disputes.
While the Kaqchikel Chronicles have been known to scholars for many years, this volume is the first and only translation of the texts in their entirety. The book includes two collections of documents, one known as the Annals of the Kaqchikels and the other as the Xpantzay Cartulary. The translation has been prepared by leading Mesoamericanists in collaboration with Kaqchikel-speaking linguistic scholars. It features interlinear glossing, which allows readers to follow the translators in the process of rendering colonial Kaqchikel into modern English. Extensive footnoting within the text restores the depth and texture of cultural context to the Chronicles. To put the translations in context, Judith Maxwell and Robert Hill have written a full scholarly introduction that provides the first modern linguistic discussion of the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic structure of sixteenth-century Kaqchikel. The translators also tell a lively story of how these texts, which derive from pre-contact indigenous pictographic and cartographic histories, came to be converted into their present form.
Kaqchikel is one of approximately thirty Mayan languages spoken in Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, and, increasingly, the United States. Of the twenty-two Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala, Kaqchikel is one of the four "mayoritarios," those with the largest number of speakers. About half a million people living in the central highlands between Guatemala City and Lake Atitlán speak Kaqchikel. And because native Kaqchikel speakers are prominent in the field of Mayan linguistics, as well as in Mayan cultural activism generally, Kaqchikel has been adopted as a Mayan lingua franca in some circles.
This innovative language-learning guide is designed to help students, scholars, and professionals in many fields who work with Kaqchikel speakers, in both Guatemala and the United States, quickly develop basic communication skills. The book will familiarize learners with the words, phrases, and structures used in daily communications, presented in as natural a way as possible, and in a logical sequence. Six chapters introduce the language in context (greetings, the classroom, people, the family, food, and life) followed by exercises and short essays on aspects of Kaqchikel life. A grammar summary provides in-depth linguistic analysis of Kaqchikel, and a glossary supports vocabulary learning from both Kaqchikel to English and English to Kaqchikel. These resources, along with sound files and other media on the Internet at ekaq.stonecenter.tulane.edu, will allow learners to develop proficiency in all five major language skills—listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, and sociocultural understanding.
Like the original Harvest of Violence, published in 1988, this volume reveals how the contemporary Mayas contend with crime, political violence, internal community power struggles, and the broader impact of transnational economic and political policies in Guatemala. However, this work, informed by long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Mayan communities and commitment to conducting research in Mayan languages, places current anthropological analyses in relation to Mayan political activism and key Mayan intellectuals' research and criticism. Illustrating specifically how Mayas in this post-war period conceive of their social and political place in Guatemala, Mayas working in factories, fields, and markets, and participating in local, community-level politics provide critiques of the government, the Maya movement, and the general state of insecurity and social and political violence that they continue to face on a daily basis. Their critical assessments and efforts to improve political, social, and economic conditions illustrate their resiliency and positive, nonviolent solutions to Guatemala’s ongoing problems that deserve serious consideration by Guatemalan and US policy makers, international non-government organizations, peace activists, and even academics studying politics, social agency, and the survival of indigenous people.
Walter E. Little is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Albany, SUNY.
Timothy J. Smith is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Appalachian State University.
CONTRIBUTORS
Abigail E. Adams / José Oscar Barrera Nuñez / Peter Benson / Barbara Bocek / Jennifer L. Burrell / Robert M. Carmack / Monica DeHart / Edward F. Fischer / Liliana Goldín / Walter E. Little / Judith M. Maxwell / J. Jailey Philpot-Munson / Brenda Rosenbaum / Timothy J. Smith / David Stoll
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