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Linguistic ethnography within (non-tactile) sign language communities is almost inherently visual. Without images, how would one capture and convey how signers communicate?
Photography and video are not always acceptable for disseminating visual data and findings, let alone conducting fieldwork itself. Photos add expense to printing, and photocopied photos become undecipherable blurs. More problematically, cameras may be forbidden in ritual contexts, or participants and researchers may negatively associate them with witchcraft, exploitation, distraction, wealth, or past trauma. In rural Guatemala, where I work, many find electricity, phones, and Internet access costly and unreliable.
My solution for preserving data is to draw cartoon-style caricatures. For research on Mesoamerican sign languages, cartoon graphics are not just a means of documenting signed linguistic discourses; they can reiterate and embody some of the ancient techniques that Indigenous artisans used to represent ancestral signs or gestures.
Photographing fears
Many Guatemalan Mayas avoid cameras not operated by relatives. During the country’s genocidal 36-year civil war (1960‒1996), the government used photos to track and accuse people. Memories of violence, rumors, and fear of reprisals are still strong decades after the war’s formal end, often intensified by post-war conflicts. I’ve worked with several signers who refuse to be filmed. One deaf K’iche’ interlocutor does not want the military to learn he survived his own extrajudicial execution in the early 1980s. Another deaf Maya let me film him but forbade publication of his visage until after his death, because he feared being tracked down by men whom he’d seen murder someone decades before (Fox Tree 2021). Others shun cameras to avoid being recorded saying things that might anger a past or potential abuser.
I always honor such requests, despite complications for dissemination of data about signing. Hand-drawn illustrations, although time-consuming, can hide people’s identities. They can also help me with my research, by reiterating what is truly amazing about Indigenous Mesoamerican signing: its utility for interpreting ancient iconography.
Ancient sign languages?
For generations, scholars have proposed that gestures depicted in ancient Maya artwork might represent some extinct sign language. In his monumental 820-page study, Picture-Writing of the American Indians (1894), soldier-linguist Garrick Mallery even tried to decipher Mesoamerican iconography using North America’s Plains Sign Language. Yet Mallery and later scholars never mentioned local Mesoamerican sign languages or insights into ancient gestures they might offer.
Since the 1970s, Anthropologist have identified at least three generations-old Indigenous sign languages in the Maya Area, each used in multiple communities: one in Yucatan, one in Chiapas, and one in Guatemala (see Smith 1977; Fox Tree 2009). I argue these are pre-Hispanic and descend from an ancient proto-sign language. Yet even if that were not the case, they constitute a tremendous repository for comparisons with ancient iconography, because they draw on conventionalized gestures shared across Mesoamerica and developed in similar ecological, technological, and cultural-historical milieus.
Comic styling of ancient iconography
I’ve been analyzing potential correspondences between ancient Maya art and modern Mayas’ signing, not just to interpret the former, but to help revitalize the latter. I’ve worked most closely with a sign variant spoken in dozens of communities in Guatemala that some K’iche’-Mayas call Meemul Ch’aab’al (“mute language”) and which Tz’utujiil-Mayas term simply Meemuul, (“mute-thing”). I am currently compiling a video dictionary of the language, but I have also drawn cartoon-style graphics for publications.
Figure 2b (right): Author’s rendering of male figure on a Classic Period polychrome vase (K679 in Kerr 1998), long interpreted as conversing with a second figure, not depicted here. Image 2b suggests the antiquity of this gesture for denoting oral discourse, along with common—but not obligatory—conventions for representing movements: (1) foregrounding of the final hand position, (2) depicting the opposite hand in the background, in an earlier position, (3) extending the pinky to signal finger or hand motion, and (4) depicting excess limbs—in this case a finger—to signal motion
Scholars of iconography from the Classic Maya Period, ca. 200‒900 CE, have long sought to decipher the complex, regular gestures of human and anthropomorphic figures. They have even deciphered some human gestures or postures: a raised heel of a standing figure denotes dancing and a hand pointing away from someone’s mouth denotes speech (Figure 1). Depictions of individuals in action poses; sequential scenes showing passage of time; sequential juxtaposition of figures or limbs to represent movement; and speech scrolls attached to hieroglyphic texts, all give ancient Maya art a comic-like quality. By reconstructing ancient signs using modern languages, I can translate dozens of other ancient gestures, plus ancient rules for representing gestures, poses, or movements. Doing so is crucial to appreciating both gestural continuities and the profound linguistic achievement of preserving gestural messages.
So why reinvent the wheel, especially where cameras are problematic? Instead of using the sign-phonetic alphabets, dance-style notations, cute computer graphics, or impressionistic tracings to transcribe manual gestures and visuo-spatial languages, I choose to reinforce the original comic styling of ancient iconography by producing comic-style diagrams. I depict the final hand positions of signs, as artists did in ancient times, for example.
I cannot completely adopt ancient styling, however. That would be premature w