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

TitoloThe Symbolic Capital of Social Identities: The Genre of Bargaining in an Urban Guatemalan Market
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2000
AuthorsFrench, Brigittine M.
JournalJournal of Linguistic Anthropology
Volume10
Pagination155–189
Parole chiavebargaining, Barktin, Bourdieu, change, genre, Guatemala, hegemony, identity, ideology, market, social capital, social value
Astratto

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.