UC San Diego

This dissertation examines emerging difference in the communicative practices of two distinct but related religious communities. It examines the different ways in which Q'eqchi'-Maya Catholics belonging to the Charismatic Catholic Renewal and Mainstream Catholicism approach ritual speech in a single parish in the city of Cobán, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. This differentiation can be seen in patterns of language choice between Spanish and Q'eqchi, norms of gesture and bodily comportment, as well as the social processes through which ritual specialists are authorized. I argue that the differences are engendered by two distinct language ideologies that correspond to different theologies, each with its own mode of personal piety and model of the religious community. These different practices and the ideologies that support them have led to a low-level, but tense debate among members of the two communities about what it means to be a Q'eqchi'- Maya Catholic. The central issue in this debate is what role, if any, Spanish should have in Q'eqchi'-Maya Catholic worship. Whereas Mainstream Catholics tend to be relatively consistent speakers of Q'eqchi' in their rituals, converts to Charismatic Catholicism have incorporated certain uses of Spanish in their rituals. I argue that Charismatics have incorporated Spanish into their rituals as a means to make their worship style "freer" and also to mark themselves as a unique religious community. Likewise, the new norms of bodily communicative practices that they have adopted and the institutional structures that legitimize ritual specialist speakers reinforce a vision of the religious subject that foregrounds the individual's unmediated relationship to God. In contrast, Mainstream Catholics' practices and ideologies foreground an ideal of the religious subject as a belonging to a hierarchical structure, and promote an ethos of individual control and constraint. Because of the relationship between language and ethnic identity in Guatemala, even though this debate is about the use of language in a specific social domain (Catholic rituals), it has important implications for parishioners' constructions of what it means to be Maya. As Q'eqchi'- Maya reconfigure their ideas about language, religion, ethnicity and social solidarity, they are participating in regional and transnational discourses that affect the politics of ethnicity in Guatemala and the institutional configuration of the Catholic Church. My focus on the two communities' conflicting uses of language and views of what constitutes proper religious practice affords me the opportunity to address several current areas of interest in anthropology. First, the ethnographic case adds to the growing literature on the Anthropology of Christianity by examining how a local set of social actors negotiate the meaning of what it means to be a 'good Christian' through a discourse about communicative practice and its relationship to personal piety and community solidarity. Secondly, this study's focus on language use and language ideologies places it in dialogue with linguistic anthropologists' interest in the role that people's ideas about language shape their social worlds. Its focus on ritual language use allows me to address questions of language ideology in a context that is marked as highly specialized and through a mode of language use that is considered to be closely related to constructions of moral personhood. Finally, by focusing part of the study on gesture and bodily communicative practices more generally, and considering these to be integral parts of language use, I seek to expand the analysis of language ideologies to include multimodal communicative phenomena, such as gesture