“WE BELIEVED THE WORD OF GOD”

The Tzotzil language belongs to the family of Mayan languages, and early anthropological work made much of the idea that many cultural traits inherited directly from the once-great Mayan civilization could still be observed in places like the Tzotzil municipio of Zinacantán (e.g., Vogt 1970:1–2). Culturally, Tzotzil people have managed to remain quite distinct from the surrounding Spanish-speaking world despite centuries of intensive contact. They are usually monolingual corn producers and live in dispersed villages throughout the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. The religious beliefs traditionally held by Tzotzil speakers, though subsumed under the rubric of Catholicism, are mainly indigenous, including beliefs about supernatural causes of illness, ancestor spirits, different types of souls, and shamanistic curing. This syncretism of indigenous religion and Catholicism has endured for centuries. However, the past two decades have brought a change to the highlands that has been strong enough to shake that balance. Unconventional communities have been formed by Tzotzil speakers who have converted to evangelical Christianity. These evangelicals (following the Latin American designation for Protestant converts, evangélicos) entirely reject both indigenous and Catholic religious practices and systems of power, and many have been violently forced to leave their ancestral hamlets.

The focus of this study is Vualtik, a community settled entirely by indigenous Protestant converts originally from the Tzotzil municipio of San Miguel Mitontic (hence the designation “Miguelero” for this group). The bulk of the fieldwork on which this analysis is based was carried out over four months in 1996 when I lived full time with a Presbyterian family in this community. The investigation was expedited by two and a half years of prior intensive language study begun in early 1994. I returned to the highlands for three months in 1997 and followed that stay with shorter visits in 1999, 2000, and 2001. In all, I spent eight months in close association with Tzotzil Protestants.

The San Miguel converts left their home villages in Mitontic after months of being jailed, psychologically tortured, and even physically harmed. After leaving Mitontic, they spent about five years in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the commercial center of the highlands. Conditions there were crowded for them, and they began to look for land on which to start a new village and farm. After a long period of unsuccessful searching, the evangelicals, helped by a connection with a government official through missionaries, were given the land that would become Vualtik. When invited out to the land for the first time to see “if their hearts could arrive there,” they were pleased to see a place where everything could grow, including luxury foods such as tropical fruits. After thanking God in prayer for the gift of land, the people moved out to begin building their new village in July 1994.

Vualtik at the time of this research had about 400 inhabitants, mostly Presbyterian with a small group of Pentecostals. The two groups have different houses of worship and appear to have only limited social contact with each other. The religious leaders in Vualtik are called ancianos²

There are no women ancianos, and the explanation I was given for this (by a male anciano) is that women ‘don't know reason’

. Women in traditional Tzotzil communities frequently hold positions of power as shamans and occasionally as political leaders.

Another consequence of conversion is that there are no longer any female deities, as are represented for example in the traditional ancestral figures, the

(father-mother). Even the Tzotzil term for ‘moon’,

‘our holy mother’, has been replaced by the Spanish loan luna. Rosenbaum 1993 writes that a close relationship with transcendental beings gives women a “claim to power in societies where the cosmic and social orders are bound to each other.” What effects might this lack of culturally validated models and sources of feminine spiritual power have on women? Perhaps it motivates them to seek alternative sources of validation. I show how a close relationship to the Protestant God can be emphasized as a way to claim power.

K'OPANTIK KAJVALTIK: LET'S TALK TO GOD

In traditional Tzotzil communities, typically the only people who are adept at praying (‘pray’ is expressed as a phrase, k'opon + dios ‘talk to God’ in Tzotzil) are shamans (frequently women) and ritual leaders. These authorities mediate the ordinary person's access to God, the saints, and the ancestors. Laughlin (1996:110) records the dream of a nonspecialist Zinacantec woman in which she is scolded by its supernatural residents for presuming to pray at a roadside shrine. She is told that “only the elders, only the shamans can cross themselves here … how would you know how to pray?”

The removal of traditional constraints on legitimate settings, themes, and speakers for prayer has led to a virtual explosion of the genre's domains in the evangelical Tzotzil world. Praying is a nearly constant activity for Protestants, and it pervades my field study data to an extent that was impossible to anticipate. In Vualtik, I was surrounded by prayer in a way that I had never before experienced. One thing that was stressed to me more than anything else during my time in Vualtik was that talking to God is the responsibility of each one of us. Praying is a “cultural focus,” a “domain in which meanings, forms, and values are especially heavily elaborated” (Bauman 1983:10). For the Miguelero Protestants, the prominence of prayer as a spiritual practice for each mature individual is demonstrated by its frequency and centrality in daily life. Its meanings branch out exponentially into all facets of evangelicals' lives. Not only do people pray several times a day, but they talk about praying almost as often. For example, it is common to hear evangelicals telling each other k'opono Dios ‘talk to God’ when they are taking leave of each other. Members of the community emphasize to one another the importance of praying, for all needs, all the time. A typical sermon might include an injunction by a preacher to ‘Talk to God, every minute,’ k'opono dios, jujulikel. It is probably true to say that one can never pray enough as a Tzotzil Protestant. Prayer has gone from being a rhetorical practice with a restricted domain to one with a highly elaborated domain.

As a minimum, everyone is expected to pray every day at certain agreed-upon times, like waking up, eating a meal, going out to the fields to work, and going to sleep. In case of sickness and on days when religious services are held, prayers are generally much longer and the number of actual prayers said in the day doubles or triples. One can use prayer for something as modest as protection from stepping on a thorn while working as readily as in the most critical circumstances of life and death. Similar to Robbins's description of the Urapmin practice of Protestant prayer, there is a “constant resort to prayer in all situations … and people are constantly innovating prayers in situations that make them feel the least bit anxious” (2001:903–4).

Praying gives people a form of agency when they are confronting physical or other types of problems. In case of sickness, one no longer has to hire an expensive shaman to supplicate on behalf of the sick person. Anyone can pray for healing, and in fact, praying is the only way to manifest healing in the Tzotzil Protestant worldview. Protestant missionaries believe that faith healing is the single most powerful catalyst for the majority of conversions in Chiapas, because of a longstanding indigenous belief that illness has supernatural causes which require supernatural rather than physio-medical cures (Sterk 1992a). God alone is believed to heal people, and the ways that he⁴

Praying is linked to power and strength, and hence it is not surprising that words uttered in prayer are believed to possess an active power of their own. One of the things people typically pray for is that the power of God should enter their minds and bodies to strengthen and protect them. One missionary believes that the elaboration of prayer for evangelicals stems from the traditional Tzotzil worldview, in which prayer is the principal resource for power. Protestant discourse holds that God's power can be accessed through prayer in order to transform situations. Frequently, requests for God's assistance in prayer are accompanied by the phrases

‘you can do everything / everything is possible through you’ and ech'em tamuk'ul tatzatzale ‘your greatness, your strength are unsurpassed’. Praying, in turn, carries a special force to reorder circumstances and interactions; for example, praying will bring God to one's immediate and total defense in case of danger. Words in prayer are granted the power to shape reality.

History would seem to play a role in this intense focus on and faith in prayer's unfailing powers. Converts in a neighboring village with which the first Miguelero converts had extensive contact tell a story of a time when the community leaders planned to kill all the Protestants. However, they were not able to open the “heavily barred” doors of the converts' houses, although these had been secured only with the customary piece of thin twine (Sterk 1992b:12). The converts took this as a sign that their prayers had been answered. Stories like this one undoubtedly contribute to the strong present-day belief in the power and effectiveness of prayer. Prayer could also be seen as responsible for the converts' finding the land on which to build their village. After three years of unsuccessful searching, a leader told the people to pray more fervently so that land would be found. Not long afterward, they not only found land but received it as a free gift from the government.

The process of learning to talk to God is never complete. The most sophisticated evangelicals are always open to new knowledge and guidance on how to do it. Presumably, this could also be knowledge of new contexts in which it is fitting to address God. This openness of prayer as a form of communication makes it an endless source of spiritual innovation and inspiration, a continual journey toward deeper connection and closeness to God.

Not only is prayer the outward sign of a constant inner striving to be always nearer to God, it is also the determining practice that defines one as a member of the community: Being a full-fledged participant in an evangelical community means being a person who prays. Since prayer is now an activity that everyone does together, it has become the fundamental communal event. The communal nature of prayer comes across in the phrase most commonly used to initiate prayer, k'opan-tik kajval-tik, ‘Let's talk to our Lord’; the construction here uses the inclusive ‘we’ suffix [-tik] twice, clearly inviting others to be a part of a group activity. For evangelicals, the practice of praying constructs a group identity: Evangelicals are people who talk to God. Because prayer is a path that leads them eternally toward greater divine life while reinforcing a sense of belonging within the group, one understands why this practice is so compelling to evangelicals.

PRAYING AS DIALOGIC

Traditional (non-Protestant) Tzotzil prayer follows a special format that is steadfastly prescribed. Composed entirely in parallel couplets, it “is the language of authority and expertise in ritual … it requires expertise to use” (Haviland 1992:58). Its effectiveness, in fact, derives from the external features that characterize it – setting, style, and cadence, features that allow it to generate cosmic heat (Gossen 1976:51). This “ritual language” is difficult to learn and use because of the strict syntactic frame it requires. Its strict syntactic order indicates its role in the maintenance of social order (Gossen 1976:45; Haviland 1996). Couplets have a long history as definitive of fine rhetoric throughout Mesoamerica. In addition to being entirely fixed in form, traditional prayer has a very fixed content. The prayermakers recycle couplets that are standardly used and rarely make up new ones. Thus, the themes that traditional prayer treats are expected and conventional. Traditional prayer is tied to ritual settings where it is offered by a specialist in its refined language.

Such restrictions, however, are irrelevant to Protestant Tzotzil, who have adopted an entirely different ideology of prayer. Access to God is readily, equally available to every person. Prayer can be in anyone's voice, not just a shaman's, and ideally should be in everyone's voice, as praying all together is the norm. Shamans, curing ceremonies, and drinking (ritual as well as social) are all forsworn by converts. The traditional altars that used to be the quintessential location for praying are never used. Not only has prayer been decoupled from ritual in Vualtik, but people also have the freedom to pray about practically anything. The couplet structure of prayer that makes it elegant and honorific has been maintained to some extent, but the different functions of prayer have led to a freer structure. Prayers no longer have to be composed entirely in couplets, but community members believe it is most appropriate if they include many paired constructions.

That couplets are no longer definitive of prayer for evangelicals demonstrates that the notion of prayer has shifted from being dependent on form to an emphasis on content. Now, what is said matters more than how it is said. According to the traditional ideology of ritual language, this language would lack cosmic heat owing to its lack of formal constraints, and hence it would be unthinkable as a medium for communicating with spiritual beings. The bodily aspect of praying has remained similar in that it is done out loud, either sitting or kneeling, but in Protestant prayer the eyes are closed and often covered with a hand or shawl. This contrasts with traditional Tzotzil prayer, in which the eyes are open (Gossen 1976:52). This shift is common in Protestant conversions. Keane (2002:77) writes that Sumbanese Protestants are distrustful of formulaic couplets passed down unchanged from the ancestors, instead believing that prayer should come from the heart and be spontaneous, and closing the eyes is symbolic of that. With the Protestant emphasis on a personal relationship to God, prayer should express personal sentiments found by looking inward rather than ritualized, formulaic ones. While traditional Tzotzil prayer conveys a group sentiment, Protestant prayer expresses an individual one.

In part because of uniquely Protestant elaboration of norms for prayer, prayer fulfills some interesting functions in social interaction. One of the factors that makes prayer more “conversational” for evangelicals is the fact that the traditional marked tempo and sing-song intonation are mostly gone from their style of praying. Whereas traditional ritual language is spoken rapidly and with stress and pitch patterns that differ markedly from everyday speech (Gossen 1976:44), sometimes making it difficult to understand even for native speakers, evangelical prayer sounds more like ordinary talk and is for the most part clearly enunciated, so that it is easily understood by anyone in the same room. In Protestant praying, it is the ideal that people all pray at the same time. This type of prayer exhibits a striking dialogism: Since everyone prays out loud, they can hear each other's prayers, and even seem to expect that others present will be listening. People sometimes respond to others' current prayers in their own simultaneous praying. Examples of this are the echoing of another's words or phrases with minor variation, and the tendency to list the names of everyone present in a request for their health and gain. Thus, a certain ethic of reciprocity seems to govern the content of the genre. The active participation of the hearer, an idea emphasized by Voloshinov (1973:2), acquires new meaning in a speech practice like Protestant prayer, where those who listen must at the same time be actively speaking/praying. Although the all-together-now frame on one level enacts a fundamental equality among praying believers, I have also observed cases in which one person was able to claim power through prayer and exert influence over others. These cases are the subject of my analysis.

It was not unusual in situations that I observed for simultaneous prayer to be used to communicate messages to other people. Speech is nominally addressed to God, but virtually always heard and understood by a human audience. For example, prayer provides a way for family members to express tensions to each other. Robbins writes about a similar use of prayer to resolve conflicts when others present with whom one is in dispute “are expected to understand that what is said is in some respects addressed to them” (2001:908).

An example of how dialogic praying can be was provided when a baby got sick during one of my visits, eventuating what might be termed a “healing crisis.” The sickness was believed to be caused by bottled-up resentment or anger in the heart of the baby's mother, Marta,⁵

When Marta finally came to try and make peace with her mother-in-law for the baby's sake, prayer was a central activity. Both women prayed together several times throughout the night, each loudly so that the other (and other family members?) could hear, both letting their feelings and their apologies be heard in a mutually negotiated rhythm in which each could hear the other's utterances without appearing to stop speaking themselves. A joint prayer that serves this reconciliatory function is like hearing and talking at once: One must simultaneously listen to the other's words and construct something like appropriate responses to them, all with no noticeable time lag. The effect was as if the two were having a conversation with each other, even though all of their remarks about each other were phrased in the third person. Even though Marta was barely seventeen, with not half the experience of praying that her mother-in-law had, she was able to keep up and never fell silent. She maintained the outpouring of emotion – sprinkled with couplets – for the duration, her voice repeatedly breaking into (exaggerated?) tears and then regaining stamina with new, louder requests for forgiveness. While the mother-in-law was able to enact a position of authority by voicing her knowledge of the girl's waywardness in tones of moral disappointment, competently praying also gave the daughter-in-law the opportunity to make amends and earn recognition as a morally upright person again. As long as she repented and acted on the recognition that what was needed was her own praying to repair her relationship with God, the family's admiration for her could be restored. Praying within earshot of other family members was an apparently sincere step toward reconciliation.

In a similar instance, a woman and her daughter-in-law, Gloria, were not getting along. Thus, when Gloria's baby fell and hit her head, Gloria was blamed. In the mother-in-law's prayer for the baby, all her criticism came out as she implied that Gloria had been angry or sullen and thus neglectful in the care of her child. Both family members were praying at the same time; Gloria prayed much more softly and was all but silent during the lines that refer to her, given below:

The line about the daughter-in-law's voice refusing to ‘straighten out’ refers to her manner of talking and is a criticism of her social behavior – she isn't polite or respectful, she doesn't talk in a good way. (Saying that someone ‘talks well’, lek xk'opoj, is a high compliment and implies that they are a properly socialized, likable person.) It may also be a direct reference to Gloria's style of praying, which is “shy,” including many silences and using an extremely quiet voice. One cannot be a fully admired or competent member of the community without praying confidently.

By expressing her disapproval in the form of a prayer, the mother-in-law can inform Gloria that her etiquette is unacceptable while avoiding a direct confrontation. The daughter-in-law is not obligated to respond since the words were not technically addressed to her, although responses of a sort seem to be expected. There is considerable pressure on her to ask for forgiveness, because this is supposedly what God wants us to do. Although the ideal for prayer is that all participating voices are equal, in this case the mother-in-law rather harshly reasserts her position of greater power in the relationship by assuming the stance of moral judge and using prayer to convey biting criticism and disapproval. This example is more a threat than a prayer, a warning that if Gloria doesn't shape up, she will be sent straight to Hell. The weight of God's authority added to the mother-in-law's judgment serves to make the interaction doubly intimidating, and this daughter-in-law is just not up to the challenge.

The previous example of Marta and her mother-in-law's dramatic and tense praying, although stemming from a similar external situation, was more reconciliatory. Even though one person was blamed, that person claimed responsibility and asked forgiveness in a voice that was as loud, forceful, and rhythmic as her accuser's – Marta didn't miss a beat. A marathon of both parties airing grievances before God becomes somehow cathartic. In this type of responsive prayer, in which voices answer to each other within one prayer situation, response is nearly obligatory, and while both daughters-in-law were given the opportunity to respond, only Marta really used it to her advantage, making the first example much more noteworthy for its contribution toward mending the relationship. Thus, the success of prayer as a method for healing social breaches hinges on both parties' responsiveness. It is this particular kind of dialogism that I believe is exemplified by Protestant prayer as a social discourse.

LUCÍA'S STORY

The following text, interspersed with discussion, is Lucía's telling of how she arranged her son's marriage. The account was tape-recorded at her hearth. She arranged this marriage without the assistance of the typical bride-petitioning party, having been refused this assistance because her son wanted to marry the younger sister of a still-unmarried girl, a morally suspect choice. Going to petition alone for a bride as a single woman (Lucía is divorced) is an especially ambitious undertaking.

I am interested in the way this told event is imagined and constructed as an illustration of the kinds of possibilities for agency that exist in a community that is in the process of redefining itself, as this newly founded all-Protestant Tzotzil village is. Other levels of analysis, such as how Lucía chooses to narrate the events to me and structures the telling as narrative, may be dealt with in future work. Since this analysis is based on a retelling of social interaction, and not tape-recorded as it takes place live, what I attempt is somewhat complicated and faces disadvantages. It relies on Lucía's memory of what was said some months earlier, yet she prefers to frame the interactions as direct quotes (a convention of Tzotzil recountings), even where voices are embedded within voices. Lucía may have embellished or omitted some parts of the story so that she comes out sounding more heroic and more in control than she may actually have been. This is something I believe all people tend to do in order to portray themselves in a positive light and preserve their self-esteem.

Nonetheless, I choose to view this story as a fairly accurate version of what transpired. It also provides data about how an individual reflects on, interprets, feels about, and represents events, circumstances, and possibilities, which a tape-recording of events simply as they occur cannot always do. Lucía told this story to me very seriously and in great detail, taking pains to reconstruct what she and others had said with all of the stylistic nuances. I saw that she was proud of herself for coming up with such an elegant solution to her intimidating problem. When I played the tape of her story to transcribe it back at home, it was clear how much she had been able to accomplish with just the choice of a few words. The story first captured my attention because it reveals how Lucía uses prayer to solve a serious social dilemma. Upon further reflection, I became more interested in the uses of religious discourse outside of prayer that are reflected in the text: the way Lucía self-consciously points to her positioning as a woman, and juxtaposes that powerlessness with the powerfulness of God in a piece of extremely persuasive rhetoric (lines 54–63).

By way of background, Lucía is an unusual woman in the community. At age fifteen, she had the courage to run away from a bad marriage and go to Mexico City, where she learned Spanish (knowledge of Spanish is rare among older Tzotzil women) and worked for three years. Upon her return to Mitontic, her sister's husband offered to marry her and she accepted. (It was not uncommon for a man to have more than one wife in Mitontic, but it was uncommon for the two wives to be sisters.) Later, the family was one of the first to convert to Protestantism in their homeland, making them natural religious leaders as the movement grew. Others came to their house to find out how they were managing to avoid curing ceremonies, learned that prayer could cure them, and asked Lucía and her sister to pray for them, too. The sisters were skilled in many valued activities and were thus widely admired.

Eventually, Lucía decided that if they were to follow evangelical doctrine devoutly, the polygamous arrangement would have to end. Since Lucía was the second wife, she would be the one to leave. Her divorced state is very difficult for her because men are the primary providers of the staple corn and money in a Tzotzil family. She has had more than her share of worries about where resources for herself and her children will come from. Lucía's disadvantaged social position forces her to be resourceful in solving the problems of life, and she believes her primary resource is God.

Lucía is also unusual in that she is recognized as a very eloquent and sought-after prayer leader; others still come to her and ask her to pray for them when they are sick. Such expertise in praying is not something that everyone has. Although Lucía is a person to whom praying seems to come naturally, we might wonder whether her lack of other sources of status helped lead to the development of this admired identity. That Lucía is better at praying than some other people gives her a certain status, which she can draw upon to overcome the weakness inherent in her gender identity in situations where she requires a more powerful persona, as her story will illustrate.

A current technique in discourse analysis has been to locate the presence of several different “voices” even within the speech of a single narrating speaker. For example, in “The voices of Don Gabriel,” Hill (1995:115) follows Bakhtin's proposal that a speaker constantly comes upon “languages” and not a single “language” as she orients herself in a heteroglossic universe: “consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language” (Bakhtin (1981:295). Like Don Gabriel in Hill's article, Lucía represents many voices in the text, and she also assumes different voices herself, each one a conscious “active choice” (Hill 1995:139). The most actively chosen one is the voice that calls God into the conversation each time she wants to exert extraordinary influence. Another way to view different “voices” in a text is as resources a speaker uses to construct different identities in response to her interactional needs.

Starting the story, which I asked to hear because of my interest in speech genres and how Protestantism may be changing them, Lucía tells me that she went to ask the ancianos if they would like to go “visiting” with her. Custom dictates that when a family goes to ask for a bride, they should be accompanied by a respectable additional person who will do all of the fancy talking that the occasion requires, and the people who play this role in Vualtik are the ancianos. They agree, and then ask where she is planning to go. I begin the transcript after distractions that keep her from launching into the flow of her story subside, and she picks up the thread again after a short pause, beginning the telling in earnest.

The desired girl was a daughter of the neighboring family. The problem was that the girl had an older sister who had not yet married. In Tzotzil communities, there is a strong moral ideal that an older sister marry before a younger one. Choosing the younger girl when her more mature sister still has no husband is insulting to the older sister and her family. In addition, being too choosy about a wife is thought improper. Lucía expresses with a couplet (lines 3 and 4) her understanding of the ancianos' desire not to get in trouble. She also prefaces her speech with ‘I have something to tell you’, a variation of which tends to occur as a preamble to conversations in which something is being requested of a superior by someone with lower status. In each episode of the narrative (the first being her conversation with the ancianos, and the second with the parents), Lucía begins her exchange formally and hesitantly, careful to attend to hearers' negative face: She is aware that what she is about to say may be unwelcome and is apologetic for the imposition. We will see later that in each instance there comes a point when she invokes God by referring to him directly (lines 61 and 70). Immediately prior to this point, there is an abrupt shift in tone, and Lucía suddenly sounds strikingly self-confident and assured rather than humble and imploring, as if even her private decision to bring in God already gives her strength and lends her words decisiveness (lines 54–61, 69). I argue that it is her public alignment of self with God that produces this shift in identity, in which Lucía goes from being a single woman with very few resources to a competent prayer person who can claim a special relationship with God. Following is the ancianos' response to her self-conscious request:

Since Sevastian is the brother of the mother of the desired girl (Margarita), which he makes clear to everyone in line 26 by using the kinship term jvix ‘my older sister’ to refer to her, he is obviously motivated to protect his kin and himself from the embarrassment of going to them with an indecorous petition:

Notice how Sevastian invokes the voice of the parents, comparing the daughters to farm animals, as a way to criticize Lucía (lines 23–24). This resonates with Hill's observation that “reported speech is a particularly appropriate site for the embedding of evaluation” (1995:118), although here it is even reported imagined speech. Lucía represents Sevastian representing the parents as speaking in couplets, a style that is also “appropriate to righteous denunciation … parallel structure in Zinacanteco speech is a frequent feature of scolding and denunciation” (Haviland 1989:30–1). Lucía draws on couplets even for this retelling because couplets are definitive of angry speech. Anger is also conventionally expressed in narrative through reported angry speech: “A skilled narrator imports the evocative power of a speaking style, investing his characters with emotional states and tones by demonstration rather than by description” (Haviland 1996:191–2). The possibility of imminent and biting criticism is made real and made to loom large with Sevastian's invented, projected speech. The anticipated denunciatory speech is not totally effective, however, because the others still contest Sevastian's decision:

Soda is exchanged as a replacement for the alcohol that traditionally seals all serious transactions. Lucía gave them the soda when they agreed to do something for her, but says in a self-pitying tone in response to one of my queries,

‘But you see, I came alone to petition’; i.e., “even though I gave them the soda, I didn't get much out of it.” The ancianos refuse Lucía's formal request that they accompany her. Although it is not traditional for someone like Lucía to go alone to petition, here they endorse it because they feel that in this case, their authority is at risk of being undermined through the criticism of other community members or, worse, of senior pastors from outside the community should word get back to them.

By stating that she is willing to risk even ‘getting beaten up’ (although such an outcome is probably unlikely), Lucía uses what may be standard defiant rhetoric.⁹

Lucía invokes God (line 61) to give her somewhat unacceptable situation a stamp of moral authority. In using the Spanish word único ‘only’ for added impact, she emphasizes that there is only one true source of authority, and she has it (primero in line 60 is also somewhat emphatic by virtue of being Spanish). In this community, God is a transcendent authority to which all other authorities are subordinate. Because God is called into the picture – as a figure who will march right along with Lucía on the path and lead her when she goes to petition – all other considerations seem trivial, spineless, even impotent. Lucía makes it clear to the elders that her own authority, so long as it rests in God, is enough for doing what she wants done. She restores her jeopardized dignity by letting everyone know that no matter what they do or think, they can be sure that God is with her on this one. Notice how this shift in tone from self-effacing woman to confident believer will occur again in the next section of the transcript, as soon as Lucía draws God into the interaction.

Despite Lucía's performance of self-confidence, one wonders what other options are really available to her. She has no husband to go with her, a fact that places her in a doubly disempowered position. She can't possibly go alone to the neighbors and just blurt out that her son wants the younger daughter's hand. Because her right to perform this act of petitioning is in question, she must be extremely careful about how she phrases her request. Her lack of seniority means that she must choose some strategy that will add the required authority to her speech in order to license the act. After addressing the parents with stylized greetings and finding them free, she tells them she will be back in a minute and goes to bring her son and sister, who was her co-wife before they converted,¹⁰

Here Lucía structures her speech in couplets, a special way of talking associated with “formal” situations and with certain kinds of specialists, like shamans and village leaders, so that it carries an air of authority and seriousness (Haviland 1996); it is also deferent, as the quintessential way to address supernaturals. Like the similar pre-speech she makes to the ancianos, this is a way for Lucía to express regret or reluctance to impose. She does this by admitting that she is impinging (Brown & Levinson 1987:187–8), in effect saying “I know this will upset you,” showing that she understands their desire not to be deprived of their daughter (a concern in any conventional marriage arrangement), or to remain with the unmarried older daughter, and hence lose face by going against tradition, although they don't know this yet. Choosing intransitive constructions like ‘your hearts will get upset’ rather than transitive ones like “I will upset you” or “you will reprove me” is a way to avoid referring to herself as the agent of deleterious activity.¹¹

The ‘we’ throughout is inclusive, and implies that those present are of one mind and have a common, agreed-upon purpose in praying. With her use of the first person inclusive suffix,¹²

Another strategy discussed by Brown & Levinson “is to phrase the [face-threatening act] as if the agent were other than Speaker” (1987:190). Lucía does this when she says “God already knows what we are asking him for,” suggesting that it is God rather than Lucía who has a marriage arrangement in mind (she does the same thing when she tells the ancianos that God will go to petition with her). Claiming to know God's will and to be in alignment with it is a very powerful rhetorical strategy in a community where everyone is striving to live in such a way as to gain God's approval, and prays daily to “do what his heart wants.” But it is not powerful enough to get Lucía unquestioning, immediate compliance with her request. The others' resistance to praying here shows that it is a marked choice for Lucía to suggest prayer at the beginning of a visit with no explicit reason given. It is not typical for people in this community to visit each other and launch into praying immediately. The husband is portrayed as putting up more resistance, asking again to be told directly, as if struggling to maintain the upper hand in the interaction. It is his wife who finally nudges him into giving in to Lucía's request.

She takes pains to convince her audience to pray with her because praying is a group activity in which others present must agree to participate.¹³

McDermott & Tylbor's explanation provides clues as to why Lucía is so adamant that they must first pray, and why she feels capable of talking about the issue only in a prayer. By asking them to pray with her, Lucía pulls her listeners toward a particular view of the world. As soon as they agree to pray, they help her to posit the affairs she speaks about therein: Seemingly, by agreeing to pray with her they might also be tricked, as it were, into agreeing with what it is that she says in the prayer. Praying as genre operates under the assumption that the many different praying voices are attuned to one another and unified behind a singular overarching purpose (one striking feature of the use of prayer as an outlet for argument with daughters-in-law). It is this façade of harmony that functions to conceal or smooth over potential disagreements between those present. Collusion is a helpful way to look at the power of prayer, because for its use to be effective, everyone present must “constantly help each other” to posit simultaneous prayer as the current state of affairs. While collusion carries with it the idea that participants must intend to cooperate to produce certain effects, I think prayer as a set frame is less dependent on the intentions of participants. Robbins writes that Urapmin Protestants understand rituals “to commit those who participate in them to the goals at which they are aimed. This commitment is grounded in participation itself and is not a function of the intentions of participants. One cannot pray for something without committing to wanting it to happen” (2001:906). Thus, when the parents agree to pray, they agree to want what Lucía wants; hence it is little wonder this makes them nervous.

The quotation on achieving collusion alludes to dynamic maneuvering (“pushing and pulling”), which, I want to emphasize, is an important part of Lucía's use of prayer. Lucía is grasping for authority against rather serious odds, and one source of influence that is available to her is language or genre choice. The central part of this text is Lucía's decision to frame her petition for the desired bride in prayer, and this shows that prayer as a genre must carry some significant rhetorical force that warrants this decision. Much as collusion pulls people toward a sense of what is possible, genres embody particular “forms of thinking” (Bakhtin 1981:289); thus, the choice of this genre predisposes her audience to think about and receive what she is saying in a particular way.

The parents are informed about the coming wedding by participating in a conversation that is mostly between Lucía and God, where they hear her tell “God” about the marriage. It is noteworthy that the word for bride-petitioning in Tzotzil is jak'ol, literally ‘asking’, but here Lucía avoids the whole problem of having to ask and her own lack of legitimacy as a person who can ask by not asking, and instead telling. At first sight, this would seem to display flagrant disregard for the norm of politeness governing this type of interaction. We must remember, however, that she is not really telling the parents, but is purportedly telling God, which makes the speech act more complicated.

Prayer is, of course, addressed to God, and this matter of a transcendent addressee has been previously discussed in the philosophy of language. Bakhtin's notion of a superaddressee, a third party to all dialogue whose understanding is unfaltering and just, has often been compared to God. Morson & Emerson (1990:135) note that different groups have different and changing images of a superaddressee, but I think it is beyond doubt that Tzotzil evangelical society's image of the “ideally responsive listener” is in fact God. “The superaddressee embodies a principle of hope” (Morson & Emerson 1990:135), and by making a point of including God, Lucía not only expresses but attempts to manifest concretely her hope that her petition will be successful. She calls God to be a witness in the absence of other official witnesses and lets his presence provide the moral condonement. Lucía's request for prayer is a request for “a change in [the] frame for events” (Goffman 1981:128), and the act of praying shifts participants' “footing.” Changing the frame obliges everyone to assume a different stance toward the event and creates “significant shifts in alignment of speaker to hearers” (Goffman 1981:127). Lucía uses God to put herself in a different relationship to her listeners, speaking from a position of religious power and borrowing God's authority when no earthly authority is available to her.

Praying in this Tzotzil society carries a special meaning as a sign in itself. Praying is positively valued – it is a virtuous act of communication – and it is this evaluation of which Lucía takes advantage in her solution to her problem. Hence, choosing a language in this instance is a moral choice (Hill 1995:97): Any words that are (partly) God's must be good and must be true. Meaning is created in the protective shelter of God's presence. We can imagine that calling on God and directing speech to him creates a metaphorical space in which anything said automatically falls under his blessing, because it is said in prayer. Prayer is a conduit that passes subjects which it contains into the realm of divine acceptance.¹⁵

The actual prayer must have been longer, since part of the definition of a good Tzotzil prayer is that it be long (the Lord's prayer, while supposedly instructive, is considered useless as a teaching aid, having “only some seven or eight words in it”). Notice that Lucía has not yet mentioned which daughter is being asked for. This information comes right after they finish praying, and it is addressed to the parents directly, not to God:

I will end the transcript here and summarize the rest of the story. At this point, Lucía's son goes to bring in a case of Coca-Cola, which Lucía invites everyone to drink. (Coke is exchanged as a Protestant replacement for the alcoholic beverages that seal all serious transactions in non-evangelical communities.) Knowing the symbolic value of accepting this offer – in effect, assent to the engagement – the mother refuses. She wonders aloud how she can be expected to drink the soda alone, saying the ancianos will be angry that people are arranging marriages without them. Lucía tells them not to say that she has come alone, because she has spoken with the ancianos, who have sent her and instructed her in what to say; they did so because they were afraid of being reprimanded for asking for the younger sister. Lucía then brings the ancianos to “prove she is not lying,” and they ask the parents to receive the soda and think about whether they are willing to go along with Lucía's request. Sevastian explains why they were not able to come earlier, and as soon as the parents drink the soda, the marriage is arranged.

Although the petition was successful, the arranged union did not escape the stigma of its unconventionality. The bride's mother did not want the usual conjunto ‘Protestant musical group’ to play at the wedding. Perhaps this was out of sympathy for her older daughter, who was enraged by the engagement (although she happily married later). Or perhaps it was a show of humility to the rest of the community, in whose eyes it might not have been appropriate to host a full-blown celebration for a less than fully respectable engagement. In a society where social convention is constraining to the point that most people do not openly express their opinions on things, we may never know how others viewed the marriage. At least, it is apparent that Lucía and her son got what they wanted, largely through Lucía's rhetorical prowess.

The powerful sway held by evangelical discourse means that it can be drawn upon to make one's own intentions more legitimate. This rhetoric is put to work in “the ongoing negotiation of individual and community identity across different activities and contexts” (Maybin 2000:198). But actively directing and manipulating this discourse requires a certain degree of rhetorical skill; hence, access to God for these purposes may be less equal than it appears at first sight. Including God in her discourse allowed Lucía to maneuver in an unprecedented way: By highlighting the closeness of her relationship with God, she made the ancianos seem small and cowardly while she appeared brave and righteous. By foregrounding her identity as a competent prayer leader, she assumed a social role influential enough to ask for a bride for her son. Thus, this story illustrates the way in which a new discourse about God provides Protestants with a unique tool for fashioning their social lives.

THE STRATEGIC VALUE OF PRAYER

As a discursive tool, prayer can certainly function as a politeness strategy. It is indirect in that “the addressee [appears to be] other than the Hearer” (Brown & Levinson 1987:190): ‘you’ now refers to God and not any human audience. By making her own son the subject of the sentence ‘it's here my child is getting married,’ Lucía avoids referring to the parents at all (the only reference to them in the prayer is the third person possessive prefix x-, on xnich'on ‘their child’). Scholars often link indirectness with politeness and even conclude that “the major motivation for being indirect at all is politeness” (Brown & Levinson 1987:139). Prayer as Lucía uses it is an indirect form that Protestantism has made available for social uses. By addressing her speech to God, Lucía avoids having to face her future co-parents alone with a direct request; she does not even have to make eye contact with them. But is Lucía's use of prayer just politeness? Her use of this indirect form indexes her less than powerful position, but that indirectness turns out to be very powerful by having real effects in the world.

In fact, I would argue that Lucía's speech in prayer is performative: It accomplishes something in that it establishes a contract. A key theoretical notion is that language is action and power rather than an object of contemplation or communication (Bourdieu 1991:36). In speech act theory, a performative utterance is one that is neither true nor false, because by its being uttered, it brings about the condition that it states (Austin 1961). While speaking the story ‘it's here my child is getting married,’ Lucía simultaneously asks for the girl's hand and creates an engagement, which will be in place unless the parents disagree with it. Even though there is no performative verb in Austin's sense, it is somehow still possible to substitute “My child will hereby be getting married” or “I hereby set up an engagement,” and the intention is preserved. (The ability to insert hereby before the verb is one diagnostic of performative verbs; Austin 1961:230.)

Searle 1976 has attempted to classify all the fundamental types of illocutionary acts (i.e., speech acts). One of the ways he does so is by discerning whether what he calls the “direction of fit” of the utterance is either “word-to-world” or “world-to-word” (1976:3–4). That is, is the speaker trying to get the propositional content of the words to match the world, or the world to match the words? I think it is clear in Lucía's case that she is attempting to get the world to match the words, to create an engagement through the act of stating its existence: ‘It's here my child is getting married.’ Her speech act is a declarative in that its performance “brings about a fit by the very fact of its successful performance” (1976:14). However, declaratives almost always require an extralinguistic institution (such as the church) in which the speaker occupies a special place (1976:14). Searle allows few exceptions to this principle, but one that he does concede (in a footnote) is God: “Another class of exceptions are supernatural. When God says ‘Let there be light’ that is a declaration” (1976:15). Presumably God didn't need an institution to lend his speech act the proper authority. This exemption for God allows for some interesting possibilities in Tzotzil Protestant speech acts, in that Lucía apparently substitutes God as the institution that allows her speech act to be felicitous. Declaratives not requiring institutional support are probably common in many other kinds of prayer. Traditional Tzotzil prayer has joybij talel tanichim bae, joybij talel tanichim sate ‘Your flowery face is turned this way, your flowery countenance is turned this way’ (Gossen 1974:198), which directs the deity's beneficent gaze rather than simply describes it, much as an English Christian prayer might say “We are filled with your blessing and your radiance” as a performative.

Bourdieu writes, “Illocutionary acts as described by Austin are acts of institution that cannot be sanctioned unless they have, in some way, the whole social order behind them” (1991:74). The social order in Lucía's case is ambiguous: Is it institutional authority, or social order as defined by ongoing interaction with God? That Lucía's illocutionary act is effective provides evidence that an alignment with God can productively define social order.

The “springs” are not released without a hitch – the extralinguistic institution that would warrant the success of her petition is not available to Lucía. One of the rules for a speech act to be successful is that “the convention invoked must exist and be accepted” (Austin 1961:224). There is no convention for creating an engagement without an intermediary, even if God is brought in as a sort of intermediary, and so the parents still insist that the ancianos come (which they do).

It is not just Lucía's prayer that led to the success of the engagement, but what is fascinating is that she chose to use prayer, successful or not. In her view, it was her inclusion of God through prayer that gave her a fighting chance at petitioning alone. Clearly, she believed she knew the “dispositions” of her audience to be such that invoking God would be a propitious approach. And it was: She was received seriously by the parents, she was not ridiculed or criticized. Perhaps she chose prayer because it would not be permissible to question or criticize what someone says in a prayer, a communicative act in which the speaker speaks sincerely from the heart (Keane 2002).

By framing her discourse in language addressed to God, Lucía elevates the speech act to a spiritual level where it acquires a mysterious force, almost like “the divine word, the word of divine right, which, like the intuitus originarius which Kant ascribed to God, creates what it states” (Bourdieu 1991:42). Lucía's prayer with her prospective co-parents “borrows” that power to shape the world from God. An evangelical Tzotzil prayer can house a unique kind of performative utterance that has exceptional effects in the world because of the supreme efficacy that resides in God. The overarching ideology from which Lucía's act draws its effectiveness is the communal ideology that praying is effective, an effectual way to ask for what one wants. But it is not just mentioning God that has rhetorical force; it is the ability to weave him skillfully into the conversation that exerts such subtle influence. Having seen that Lucía can gain status in the community and power in specific interactions through her rhetorical ingenuity, we can imagine that there are many more social situations in which referring or deferring to God could be pivotal.

DOUBLE-VOICING IN CONSTRUCTING AUTHORITY

Hill & Irvine write that “one of the principal ways in which utterances come to be seen as authoritative concerns speakers' ability to create ‘double-voiced’ utterances (to use Bakhtin's term) that manage to add the moral weight of other voices to their own” (1992:6). When Lucía invokes God's voice to construct a more powerful persona for herself, she is using the technique of “double-voicing”: She adds the weight of God's voice to her own, so that her speech acquires convincing authority. There is clearly some way in which a voice invoking God or addressed to him in prayer creates the illusion that God is in fact present; he becomes an addressee or an invisible companion whose spoken presence has the ability to transform circumstances absolutely. The passage in which Lucía invokes God in front of the elders (line 60) points to the subtle ways in which God's posited presence has the potential to restructure social interaction. The unique type of dialogism or emergent meaning in God's presence can turn events upside down, causing an immediate switch in social relationships. Voices shift and are realigned when a transcendent voice is added: One cannot deny the power of God's voice – present in the Bible, interpreted by people, or claimed to be known by people – to shape interaction. Bakhtin imagines a “ray-word” that, on its way to its object, passes through all prior evaluations of that word and gets refracted by them. “The social atmosphere of the word, the atmosphere that surrounds the object, makes the facets of the image sparkle” (Bakhtin 1981:277). If that word is “God,” we can imagine that all of the evaluations glinting off of it could be mesmerizing. Lucía's voice becomes nearer to God's voice as it unfolds spectral layers on the path to its divine object. The significance of God and praying is woven by “thousands of living dialogic threads” (Bakhtin 1981:276), so that drawing God into an exchange or cleverly placing sensitive information within a prayer in an otherwise emotional or tense social environment has the potential to transfix listeners.

LANGUAGE, GENDER, AND PROTESTANTISM

Sociolinguists have suggested that we cannot assume gender as a stable, unchanging identity but must rather attend to multiple identities (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992), noting that speakers use the resources of their language to express a significant complex of different identities, or different facets of a fluid social identity (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985; Milroy 1987:115). Different identities can even surface at various moments within a single speaker's discourse, and “we need to identify key points in discourse at which different identities seem to be more salient for a speaker” (Meyerhoff 1996:218). Looking at the transcript of Lucía's story, I see a cyclical flux of at least two identities, which we can call “unassuming woman” and “prayer person,” and both turn up in instances of reported speech of self; I will also refer to these identities as “tones.”¹⁶

Sociolinguists interested in the multiple identities of speakers theorize that these identities will co-occur with certain linguistic “markers,” or socially emblematic forms. Meyerhoff (1996:218) has suggested that linguistic markers that index a particular identity will increase in frequency when that identity is salient. The first identity I find in the text is that of Lucía as a solitary woman, encountered in the beginning of each interaction. This identity co-occurs with negatives and polite phrasing, which is evident in the couplet frames (‘I don't know if you'll get in trouble//if you will be scolded’, lines 3–4; ‘I don't know if your hearts will go bad//if your hearts will turn contrary’, line 67). In particular, the marker of this identity is a negative of the verb ‘to know’, which conveys a sense of uncertainty on the part of the speaker:

‘I don't know if …’. It is also characterized in the text by a preamble, which adds more deference – ‘I have something to tell you’ (line 1) or ‘I'm talking to you’ (line 66). Overall, this tone (tone 1) is deferent: It is the appropriate way to speak to authority, to humble oneself, to show respect.

The second identity is that of Lucía as a prayer person accompanied by God, and it surfaces when Lucía invokes God as a participant who is leading her in this endeavor. In this persona, Lucía states the way things are (God will accompany her when she goes to petition, lines 60–61; her child is getting married to their daughter, line 78). This identity is marked by positive statements of knowing:

‘[About this] I already know’(in line 59 and again in 60, and

‘God already knows [what we are asking him for]’() in line 72. Tone 2 is confident and independent; it is this tone that Lucía uses when she wants to act with influence. In both sections of the text, the cycle is repeated, in that Lucía uses tone 1 in introducing her topic, and then switches to tone 2 as she moves toward and then suggests the inclusion of God as participant.

One interesting point about these identity shifts is the way they may be functioning as a shield or buffer “as needed protection against communicative assault” (Meyerhoff 1996:220). Lucía is in an extremely vulnerable position, which becomes evident when the ancianos begin to criticize her. It is easy to see her self-righteous response to them, which uses her identity as a believer centered in God's will, as her only available defense. Going alone to petition, Lucía is again in a precarious position, and she is fully aware of the possibility that she will be harshly scolded. We must notice her “ability to shift the focus of an interaction from one identity to another … because it provides the best psychological protection” (Meyerhoff 1996:220). Lucía is a woman, as she both painfully and proudly announces (line 60), and she is also a woman with no husband, which may make the powerlessness of her gender position even more bitter. The event discussed in this article suggests that conscious self-identification as a believer and individual expertise in talking to God are ways that Tzotzil Protestant women can overcome that position.

Women in traditional Tzotzil societies who are aware of their lack of a public, authoritative voice sometimes comment metapragmatically on this fact, although it does not keep them from speaking their minds, in a tone similar to Lucía's ‘I am [only] a woman but…’ (Haviland 1996:181). Returning, however, to the research that “suggests that evangelicism provides women with a kind of moral autonomy that supports women's increasing independence in the domestic sphere” and points to the potential of conversion to transform gender relations and accord women greater power (Steigenga & Smilde 1999:173), perhaps now we can see ways that evangelicism, when examined at the discourse level, provides a more public space in which women can speak. It is hard to imagine that a lone woman in a pre-conversion environment could ever speak up successfully as a bride-petitioner. But for evangelicals, the role of speaking to God – Lucía's strategy – is agendered. The present study highlights the possibility that women in an evangelical Tzotzil community also enjoy a new kind of “moral autonomy” which may even extend beyond the domestic sphere when necessary. The use of Protestant discourse to validate speakers' schemes and the fleshing out of prayer as a new rhetorical practice both offer new possibilities for seizing power and enacting agency through speech.

Brusco 1995 has previously suggested that the reordering of gender roles through Protestant conversion in Colombia occurs when men give up their masculine (or machista) ethos and enter the more feminine ethos of evangelicism (feminine in that it is characterized by moral virtue, asceticism, and domesticity). Although Brusco emphasizes a transformation in men's roles that affects women's roles positively, she does not stress a woman's active participation in this reinterpretation of men and women's roles. Women are not directly empowered nor are their roles transformed, since evangelicism teaches them to be what they are already expected to be – moral and virtuous beyond reproach and invested in domestic life. The shift in women's status depends completely on how men shift relative to them: Their roles are changed only indirectly, via their changed men.

The kind of empowerment of women that I am proposing Protestant discourse offers in Vualtik is somewhat different. The shift that I describe is due to the agendered status offered by the social role of a devout believer. In this essay I have described a single woman's active role in crafting a God-focused identity that lends her more legitimacy in the public sphere. I emphasize the transformation of her role independent of men and the household, a transformation that results from her own agency. I want to argue from Lucía's example that gender cannot be presumed to be an irreducible, overarching identity. We must understand gender in perspective as one facet in the complex range of ways in which speakers negotiate their multiple identities in daily life (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992).