This monograph examines mind through the lens of language and culture. On the one hand, it takes what is most public and uses it to pose questions about what is most private. On the other hand, it takes what is most community-specific and uses it to pose questions about what is most human-general. Its central goal is to weave together the linguistic and ethnographic details of a particular speech community (in this case, that of the Maya, living in highland Guatemala), and the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural framework in which these details must be rendered (in this case, that of modern cognitive, social, and linguistic science). It aims to develop a theoretical framework within which both community-specific and human-general features of mind may be contrasted and compared.
More specifically, the empirical content of this monograph analyzes the linguistic and cultural mediation of mind among speakers of Q'eqchi'-Maya living in the cloud-forests of highland Guatemala. It is based on almost two years of ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork, most of it undertaken in a village of some 650 people, the majority of whom are monolinguals. It focuses on a variety of grammatical structures and discursive practices, wherein mental states are encoded and whereby social relations are expressed. These are: inalienable possessions, such as body parts and kinship terms; interjections, such as 'ouch' and 'yuck'; complement-taking predicates, such as 'believe' and 'desire'; and grammatical categories such as status and evidentiality, which indicate degrees of commitment to, and sources of evidence for, one's claims. These linguistic resources have been chosen because they are discursively frequent, grammatically elaborate, cross-culturally salient, and cross-linguistically comparable. Moreover, they are also locally relevant, subject to rich interpretations by speakers themselves, and thereby caught up in Mayan theories of mind: from childhood inculcation and public ascription, to medical diagnosis and religious prohibition.