ICCI Home: Pointing among the Yucatec Maya. A reply to Emmanuel Dupoux

(This was originally posted as a comment but it seem to us so interesting and relevant that we have asked Olivier Le Guen to revise it into a blog post) In a recent post, Emmanuel Dupoux asked: “- Is human pointing avoidance uniform across cultures? Could anyone point to cross-cultural studies, or  ask their informants about what are the pointing taboos in their cultures? - Could it be that pointing avoidance is linked to the fact that in a communicative situation, the target of pointing is reduced to the status of an object, and it may be considered inappropriate or rude to reduce, even implicitly, humans to mere objects? Or is pointing avoidance linked to embarrassment or fear to being brought into the focus of attention?” I work with Yucatec Maya speakers in Quintana Roo (Mexico) among whom here is a term for pointing, túuch’ub from the verb tuch’ ‘raise over (one’s hand).’ There pointing to people is unproblematic. I don’t think the considerations Emmanuel Dupoux mentioned are involved. Two factors are relevant here, as far as I can tell: (1) conception of space and place/person reference and (2) linguistic features of the pronominal system in Yucatec Maya.