Margarita Valdovinos
Research interests: Amerindian cultures and languages, ritual practices, verbal art, historic collections, language learning and socialization.
The construction of Yucatec Maya. From local language classes to the French Mayanist School
This research aims to consider the processes through which languages are constantly redefined by their speakers, amidst social, political, institutional and identity-related influences. Here, a very peculiar variant of Yucatec maya –the second most spoken Amerindian language in Mexico– is considered: the “cultivated variant” taught in French academic contexts in Paris. First, it will be analyzed from a linguistic perspective, and later, through the study of its theoretical and methodological implementation in language classes, as well as through the analysis of the sociocultural context of its production and dissemination.
The underlying hypothesis of this research is the idea that any expression of the language that entails a grammatical proposition should be considered as a variant of that language and thus, may be analyzed in relation to other existing variants. Thus, this project aims to reach a better understanding of the circulation of linguistic ideas through the study of both, the grammar-oriented variant used in the context of the French Mayanist School, and the influence that this variant may exert over –or receive from– previously registered “cultivated variants” identified in local classrooms among Native teachers back in the Yucatan Peninsula.
After obtaining her PhD in Ethnology at the Université Paris Nanterre (2008), she conducted postdoctoral research on Linguistics and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin (2010-2011), and on History of Anthropology and Ethnographic collections at the Ethnologisches Museum and the Iberoamerikanisches Institut at Berlin (2012-2014). In 2014, she became associate professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas –Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)–, in Mexico City (tenure in 2017).
For twenty years, she worked on the ritual poetic practices of the Náayeri People of Western Mexico and on the ethnographic and phonographic collections gathered by the German ethnologist, Konrad Theodor Preuss, between 1905 and 1907 (1998-2018). Since 2019, she undertook a new research direction concerning the linguistic and cultural practices around the use of Yucatec Maya in urban and semiurban contexts, as she became a temporary visiting researcher at the Centro Peninsular en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (CEPHCIS- UNAM) in Mérida (Yucatán). There, she has been learning Yucatec Maya and getting to know more about the Mayan communities and the linguistic practices that emerge around their language.