The Symbolic Capital of Social Identities: The Genre of Bargaining in an Urban Guatemalan Market

This article examines bartering speech in a Guatemalan market as a particulartype of discourse, the genre of bargaining. It also investigates marketers' uses
of that discourse as facilitating a process of negotiating their identities as social
actors. The article examines, first, how the invocation of the genre of bargaining
orders marketers' speech into a stable and coherent discourse; second, how
the genre's connections with social, ideological, and political-economic relations
invest marketers' speech with pre-established associations; and third,
how marketers may manipulate social and ideological associations established
by past conventions in order to negotiate the social value of their identities
at present.