Excerpt from Davidson Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 2
Social scientists (see Hollingshead, 1949j Warner, 1942, 1949; Winch, 1952; Sirjamaki, 1953; Cuber and Kenkel, 1954) concerned with family and class factors in American life have noted the importance of surnames in the deteritiination and limitation of social position. Particularly well documented is the significance of surnames in the socially most favored "old family" group. One of the clearest statements of the relevance of surname to status at all social levels in a contemporary New World society appears in the San Carlos study by Gillin (1951). In this Guatemalan community "everyone is placed by means of family name," For the non-Indian (Ladino) members of the community, surnames serve not only to mark the social separateness and inferiority of the Indian group but to specify social distinctions among themselves; "... an individual's class position is reckoned in terms of his family line (his surname) and... all family lines are ascribed places on the class scale," Gillin observes that the achievement of wealth and prominence will not raise the status of an individual beyond that of his family line, nor will lack of achievement lower it. In San Carlos from "upper" to "lower" social horizons name is more efficacious than fame.
In the present paper San Carlos is taken as the point of departure for a discussion of certain features of surname ranking in another Latin American commiinity, the Colombian pueblo of Coconuco. In Coconuco, as in San Carlos, the ascriptive value of surnames is high, but in the former community an interesting variation appears: the specific purpose of the present paper is to introduce and examine this variation.
Coconuco is a highland valley agricultural community situated approximately thirty-five kilometers southeast of Popayai, capital of the Department of Cauca. The people of Coconuco are the Mestizo descendants of non-Indian colonists. The indigenous population, after whom the pueblo was named, was moved to nearby reservation lands to make room for the colonists, and on these lands the Coconuco Indians still live. Hence the pueblo Mestizos have Indian neighbors. The term "Mestizo," as used in this paper, refers to a member of the large racially and culturally mixed non-Indian group of the area: the Mestizos, however many Indian skeletons may grace their family closits, speak only Spanish, prefer Western to native garb, and have no reser-zation land sjnstem. The Mestizos, as locally defined, are comparable to the San Carlos (and Mesoamerican) Ladinos.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Davidson Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 2 (Classic Reprint) (Davidson Anthropological Society)