Three groups living off the same rainforest habitat manifest strikingly distinct behaviors, cognitions, and social relationships relative to the forest. Only the area's last native Maya reveal systematic awareness of ecological complexity involving animals, plants, and people and practices clearly favoring forest regeneration. Spanish-speaking immigrants prove closer to native Maya in thought, action, and social networking than do immigrant Maya. There is no overriding ''local,'' ''Indian,'' or ''immigrant'' relationship to the environment. Results indicate that exclusive concern with rational self-interest and institutional constraints do not sufficiently account for commons behavior and that cultural patterning of cognition and access to relevant information are significant predictors. Unlike traditional accounts of relations between culture, cognition, and behavior, the models offered are not synthetic interpretations of people's thoughts and behaviors but are emergent cultural patterns derived statistically from measurements of individual cognitions and behaviors.
Nearly all psychological research on basic cognitive processes of category formation and reasoning uses sample populations associated with large research institutions in technologically-advanced societies. Lopsided attention to a select participant pool risks biasing interpretation, no matter how large the sample or how statistically reliable the results. The experiments in this article address this limitation. Earlier research with urban-USA children suggests that biological concepts are (1) thoroughly enmeshed with their notions of naive psychology, and (2) strikingly human-centered. Thus, if children are to develop a causally appropriate model of biology, in which humans are seen as simply one animal among many, they must undergo fundamental conceptual change. Such change supposedly occurs between 7 and 10 years of age, when the human-centered view is discarded. The experiments reported here with Yukatek Maya speakers challenge the empirical generality and theoretical importance of these claims. Part 1 shows that young Maya children do not anthropocentrically interpret the biological world. The anthropocentric bias of American children appears to owe to a lack of cultural familiarity with non-human biological kinds, not to initial causal understanding of folkbiology as such. Part 2 shows that by age of 4-5 (the earliest age tested in this regard) Yukatek Maya children employ a concept of innate species potential or underlying essence much as urban American children seem to, namely, as an inferential framework for understanding the affiliation of an organism to a biological species, and for projecting known and unknown biological properties to organisms in the face of uncertainty. Together, these experiments indicate that folkpsychology cannot be the initial source of folkbiology. They also underscore the possibility of a species-wide and domain-specific basis for acquiring knowledge about the living world that is constrained and modified but not caused or created by prior non-biological thinking and subsequent cultural experience.
In this article, we examine the omnipredicativity hypothesis (LAUNEY 1994, 2004) in the context of Yucatec Maya. The hypothesis implies three requirements: 1) most words are predicative, 2) the focus of a sentence is its main predicate, 3) arguments are subordinate predicates of the main predicate. Based on the analysis of the personal indexation patterns, morphosyntactic and semantic properties of non-verbal predicates, the use of the existential
Este artículo contribuye a demostrar que el recurso discursivo del paralelismo en la tradición maya juega un papel esencial en diferentes niveles de organización discursiva, y no sólo en cuanto al verso y unidades contiguas como se ha señalado generalmente. Analizamos la variedad de niveles en los cuales se pueden desarrollar los paralelismos, así como la relación con otras figuras retóricas, en especial la ciclicidad, que se destaca como un recurso importante para el despliegue de paralelismos entre unidades distanciadas. El análisis se hace mediante el estudio detallado de un diálogo ritual de la peregrinación de San Juan Bautista entre los mayas macehuales (cruso’ob) de Quintana Roo (México). Confirma que los paralelismos discursivos se deben considerar no sólo como elementos estéticos o poéticos, con sus efectos emocionales y enfáticos, sino también como procesos de organización macrodiscursiva, con funciones temáticas, semánticas y pragmáticas.
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