John Haviland

University of California, San Diego | UCSD · Department of Anthropology

Research on narratives in an Australian language demonstrated surprising facts about speakers’ spatial orientation and knowledge both in the insistent use of morphologically hypertrophied spoken directional terminology and in accompanying gestures. Pursuing comparable phenomena in a Mayan language from the other side of the globe revealed correspon...

Joint attention is a term used to label episodes in which an infant and a caregiver concurrently attend, visually, to an external object, each sharing consciousness of the fact that the other is also attending. It is claimed to be a central element in word learning, by which a child comes to realize that the object in question is named or described...

The thesis of this paper is simple, unexceptionable, and largely obvious. I hope to save embarassment, thot my reader swill already subscribe to it implicitly, so that I will not need to argue for it so much as demonstrate it, in the context of relations between Tzotzil speaking Zinacanteco Indians of highland Chiapas, and Spanish speaking ladinos...

The guarded privacy of peasant life has long been a commonplace of European folk wisdom, and is well-established in social theory as a principle element in the notion of tradition. The privacy -and inaccessability- of the peasant has been the object of strategic manoeuvre by colonial policymakers, revolutionary cadres and agents of political and ec...

Son las doce del día del Viernes Santo, en el pueblo Tzotzil de Nabenchauk, "La Laguna del Rayo; en los Altos de Chiapas. Un sol brillante ilumina las paredes de la iglesia de Jch'ul-me'tik Valalupa -la Virgen de Guadalupe- donde el pueblo se ha reunido para acompañar a los ch' ul moletik -los Ancianos Sagrados quc cumplen con sus deberes tradicion...

Gossip in the Who's Who Zinacantecs gossip continually about the doings of their kinsmen, their neighbours, local officials, ritual officeholders, their friends and their enemies. Among Zinacantecs the great bulk of conversation is just this kind of gossip, targeted at specific people. Stories told ‘on’ a person may be scandalous or innocent, but t...

Comparative work on human spatial cognition contrasts systems of calculating position and trajectory that involve body-relative reckoning -frequently where the body in question is that of an egocentric observer -with systems which rely on global coordinates such as compass directions not relative to the positions and orientations of moveable entiti...

This dictionary of Tzotzil (Mayan) vocabulary from the town of Zinacantan, Chiapas, Mexico, was edited by the author over a period of nine years. The original manuscript, compiled by an anonymous Domimcan friar, probably at the close of the 16th century, disappeared during the Mexican Revolution but a manuscript copy of 351 pages survives. It was m...

This dictionary of Tzotzil (Mayan) vocabulary from the town of Zinacantan, Chiapas, Mexico, was edited by the author over a period of nine years. The original manuscript, compiled by an anonymous Domimcan friar, probably at the close of the 16th century, disappeared during the Mexican Revolution but a manuscript copy of 351 pages survives. It was m...

This dictionary of Tzotzil (Mayan) vocabulary from the town of Zinacantan, Chiapas, Mexico, was edited by the author over a period of nine years. The original manuscript, compiled by an anonymous Domimcan friar, probably at the close of the 16th century, disappeared during the Mexican Revolution but a manuscript copy of 351 pages survives. It was m...