[Linganth] today on the CaMP blog

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Max Conrad interviews Eric Hoenes del Pinal on his book, *Guarded by Two
Jaguars: A Catholic Parish Divided by Language and Faith.*

www.campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: In communities in and around Cobán, Guatemala, a small but
steadily growing number of members of the Q’eqchi’ Maya Roman Catholic
parish of San Felipe began self-identifying as members of the Catholic
Charismatic Renewal. Their communities dramatically split as mainstream and
charismatic Catholic parishioners who had been co-congregants came to view
each other as religiously distinct and problematic “others.”


In Guarded by Two Jaguars, Eric Hoenes del Pinal tells the story of this
dramatic split and in so doing addresses the role that language and gesture
have played in the construction of religious identity. Drawing on a range
of methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, the author examines
how the introduction of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in the
parish produced a series of debates between parishioners that illustrate
the fundamentally polyvocal nature of Catholic Christianity. This work
examines how intergroup differences are produced through dialogue,
contestation, and critique. It shows how people’s religious affiliations
are articulated not in isolation but through interaction with each other.

Although members of these two congregations are otherwise socially similar,
their distinct interpretations of how to be a “good Catholic” led them to
adopt significantly different norms of verbal and nonverbal communication.
These differences became the idiom through which the two groups contested
the meaning of being Catholic and Indigenous in contemporary Guatemala,
addressing larger questions about social and religious change.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20250623/c04bd9e5/attachment.htm>