Etnoanatomía. La categorización lingüística del cuerpo humano

Abstract

The human body is an elementary point of reference of the human significance and knowledge. The ethnolinguistic analysis of the forms of the human body categorization, its parts and other components and aspects associated to it, was begun over three decades ago as a part of ethnoscience research. Some of those studies referred to the corporal partinomies in indigenous languages of Mexico and were performed by American linguists. The pioneer works of A. López Austin, which analyzed the conception of the body from the ancient nahuas, must be added to those mentioned studies. In recent times, it has been renewed the interest on studying the processes of linguistic characterization of the human body and its parts under the context of the so-called cognitive anthropology. The semantic domain of the human body is particularly considered as the proper means to get a better comprehension of the cognoscitive, universal, or specific processes associated to different languages through the interlinguistic comparison. As a part of a model of research on semantic typology, it will be presented an ellicitation process of linguistic data that refer to the human body which are used for field research and work in indigenous languages.