In The Chicken and the Quetzal, Paul Kockelman integrates Piercian semiotic analysis with political economy to develop a framework for understanding the “entanglement” of types of value usually treated separately: use value (function), exchange value (price), semantic value (meaning), and deontic value (morality). He also highlights how the production of valued objects entails the simultaneous production of evaluating agents and demonstrates how these objects and agents are transformed as distinct systems of valuation intersect.
Ethnographically, the book focuses on interactions between Proyecto Eco-Quetzal (PEQ), an NGO founded by German ecologists in 1990 to protect rare bird species that inhabit Guatemala’s cloud forests, and the Q’eqchi’-speaking village of Chicacnab, located high in the department of Alta Verapaz. All Chicacnab households engaged in milpa (swidden) cultivation of corn to meet their subsistence needs. Identifying the Q’eqchi’ practice of milpa as the primary threat to endangered bird species such as the quetzal,...
