Indigenous American Language, Writing, and Literature

The goal of this FIG is to teach students the way language is used to record and create histories, with a focus on concerns of indigenous peoples of the Americas, cultural representation, the reasons that motivate history making, and the effects that texts have, particularly in the political realm. The heart of the FIG will be Anthropology 120, Deciphering Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, and the point of departure Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts. Anthropology 120 will be part seminar and part workshop that teaches students how to read Maya hieroglyphs, and students will spend at least an hour each week deciphering a text. The course begins with an introduction to the Maya calendrical system and the system of hieroglyphic writing. It then moves into a discussion of the grammatical structure and thematic content of the texts. Students will begin doing rudimentary decipherments beginning in Week 2, and they will learn new glyphs each week. We will study texts as historical chronicles, but also as political documents that were produced with specific goals in mind.

The FIG also includes Anthropology 376: First Semester Yucatec Maya. In this language class, students learn basic grammar and vocabulary of the Yucatec Maya language, spoken today by over 500,000 people in Mexico and Belize, as well as its cultural content. This linguistic knowledge will serve them well while they are deciphering texts. It also includes History 241: Modern Latin America, 1780-1930. This course covers the history of Latin America during that period, with close attention paid to the changing and complex relationships between indigenous peoples and the nation-states in which they lived.