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The Symbolic Capital of Social Identities: The Genre of Bargaining in an Urban Guatemalan Market
Author(s) -
French Brigittine M.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1525/jlin.2000.10.2.155
Subject(s) - negotiation , ideology , sociology , invocation , politics , value (mathematics) , the symbolic , social capital , order (exchange) , political economy , political science , economics , social science , law , psychology , anthropology , finance , machine learning , computer science , psychoanalysis
This article examines bartering speech in a Guatemalan market as a particular type 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.