Converting Words ─ Maya in the Age of the Cross

"A true benchmark. This work will set a new standard for the conceptualization--let alone the study--of missionization and religious conversion, colonial language policy, and language-oriented social history. Hanks provides a framework for thinking about language history that integrates language ideology, linguistic form (from phonology to speech genres), social organization, and the phenomenology of experience that goes so far beyond traditional historical, linguistic, or philological perspectives as to constitute a new paradigm for the field. Converting Words will be a classic work that will stimulate others to emulate Hanks's powerful scholarly example. The field will never be the same after this book appears."--Richard Bauman, author of A World of Others' Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality

"Hanks's work is utterly original and unprecedented... I don't think historians of the Mesoamerican colonial regimes should write anything until they read this book; it's that important."--Jane H. Hill, author of A Grammar of Cupeno

William F. Hanks is Professor of Anthropology, Berkeley Distinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology, and Affiliated Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Language and Communicative Practice and Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya, among other books.