The Symbolic Capital of Social Identities: The Genre of Bargaining in an Urban Guatemalan Market

This article examines bartering speech in a Guatemalan market as a particular type of discourse, the genre of bargaining. It also investigates marketers' uses of that discourse as facilitating a process of negotiating their identities as social actors. The article examines, first, how the invocation of the genre of bargaining orders marketers' speech into a stable and coherent discourse; second, how the genre's connections with social, ideological, and political‐economic relations invest marketers' speech with pre‐established associations; and third, how marketers may manipulate social and ideological associations established by past conventions in order to negotiate the social value of their identities at present.