Relatively Speaking: Language, Thought, and Kinship Among the Mopan Maya

Eve Danziger's study re-addresses the issue of language and thought by viewing linguistic utterances as fully integrated into both the particular context of their use and the larger cultural context that makes it possible to use them at all. Using fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among the Mopan Maya in Belize, she examines the semantic complexity of particular kinship terms used among Mopan women and children and shows that a culture-specific analysis of their terms is superior to other non-ethnographically-based methods of analysis.