L'anatomia del paesaggio fuor di metafora. L'uso dei termini anatomici negli enunciati locativi in ombeayiüts (Oaxaca, Messico)

In this article I will present some reflections on the anatomical codification of landscape forms and space relations in the Huave/ombeayiüts of San Mateo del Mar (Oaxaca, Mexico). Cardona in his ethnolinguistic research in the area of the 1970s / 1980s, had observed that in Huave, as in many other Mesoamerican and Amerindian languages, the use of anatomical terminology was extended far beyond the limits of the human body to codify forms and spatial relationships of inanimate entities, as artifacts as ‘natural’. Starting from the same field (San Mateo del Mar) and the same theme (the anatomical terminology), but on the basis of up-to-date ethnographic research, this essay intends to renew and at the same time overcome the ‘classic’ taxonomic and lexicographic approach of the so-called ‘Ethno-science’, engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue with some recent theoretical perspectives of anthropological linguistics (Levinson's cognitive linguistics, ethnography of speech, and the theory of enunciation) and cultural anthropology, with strong roots in American ethnographic literature (Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism, ontologism and the theory of embodiment). The ethnolinguistic analysis of the locative statements in Huave/ombeayiüts presented here, in the light of an up-to-date epistemological framework and of a method careful to both the ethnographic dimension (‘from the native speaker’s point of view’) and to the grammatical one (the inalienable possessive construction), proposes to look beyond the classic metaphorical reading usually advanced as standard explanation of the use of anatomical terms beyond the limits of the human and of the animated, so pervasive in many Amerindian languages-cultures.