The objective of this study is to critically examine the philologicalethnographic work of several European and Latin American researchers who previously contributed consciously or inadvertently to the exacerbation or resolution of political crises in LatinAmerica. Focusing on the Guatemalan case, we try to determine which philologist and ethnologists addressed the issue of language regulation and reflected on the political consequences of intervening in the linguistic cultures of certain regions. Utilizing methods of critical discourse analysis with a glottopolitical focus, we contrast the linguistic representations and ethnographic descriptions elaborated by several, mostly German, philologists who worked in Guatemala with those of Rodolfo Lenz regarding the creole spoken by an informant from Curaçao and popular speech in Chile. We try to juxtapose Lenz’s ethnographically critical philology with the institutionalized philological practices. Our results show that the degrees of commitment between philologists and the social groups they studied varied depending on the degrees of hegemonic compulsion and detachment felt by these philologists and the value of a given language in the different contexts of social struggles.
Keywords:
philology, ethnography, linguistic representation, Leonhard Schultze-Jena, Guatemala, Rodolfo Lenz
Valdez, J. R., & Jansen, S. (2020). Between goodwill and hegemonic compulsion: the political implications of the latin american- german philological exchange. Boletín De Filología, 54(2), pp. 351–371. Retrieved from https://revistateatro.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/55958
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