Olivier Le Guen is a linguistic anthropologist and Research Professor (Titular B) at CIESAS in Mexico City. He is also a Level II member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers (SNII). His career lies at the intersection of anthropology, linguistics, cognition, multimodality, and Maya studies, with a longstanding specialization in Yucatec Maya language and culture.

Trained in anthropology and history in France, he earned his PhD in Anthropology from Paris Nanterre University with a dissertation on the organization and learning of spatial knowledge among the Yucatec Maya of Quintana Roo. He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at Northwestern University under the supervision of Douglas Medin and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, where he worked with the Language and Cognition Group led by Stephen C. Levinson.

For more than two decades, he has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Maya communities of the lowlands, grounded in participant observation, collaborative work, and the everyday use of Yucatec Maya, which he speaks, reads, and writes fluently. He also has a strong command of other Mayan languages, including Mopan and Itza’. This linguistic and ethnographic immersion has been central to his research on space, time, supernatural entities, ancestry, emotions, epistemicity, perception, environmental resources, and the transmission of knowledge among contemporary Maya peoples.

His ethnographic work has contributed to a deeper understanding of several aspects of contemporary Maya social and cosmological life. His major contributions include studies of how space is conceptualized and organized among the Yucatec Maya, the relationships between landscape, memory, and supernatural entities, and the perception and management of environmental resources in the Maya lowlands. His research has also offered new interpretations of ancestry and the existence of forms of ancestor worship among both colonial and contemporary Maya peoples.

In linguistics, his research has advanced our understanding of Yucatec Maya semantics and expressivity. He was the first scholar to provide a systematic description of ideophones in the language, revealing the complexity of their expressive mechanisms and their significance in everyday communication (Le Guen 2012, 2015). His studies have also examined sensory vocabulary, thermal metaphors, and the relationships among language, cognition, and cultural experience.

Another central dimension of his work is the study of multimodality and gesture among the Yucatec Maya. His research has demonstrated the importance of co-speech gestures in spatial cognition, deixis, and social interaction, contributing to the development of an anthropology of gesture and multimodal approaches to language. In this area, he has edited collective volumes and special issues devoted to co-expressivity, gesture, and multimodal communication in Indigenous languages.

Since 2009, he has also led an extensive project documenting and analyzing Yucatec Maya Sign Language (YMSL), an emerging sign language used in Maya communities across the Yucatán Peninsula. His research has provided linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cognitive descriptions of the language, exploring such topics as lexical variation, the use of space, the emergence of agreement, attention systems, and processes of linguistic creation. His work has contributed to the international recognition of Mesoamerica’s emerging sign languages and to the training of young researchers and members of the communities involved.

In parallel, he has conducted research on Yucatec Maya oral and written literature, including studies of the Books of Chilam Balam, letters written in Yucatec Maya in the early twentieth century, and ritual songs from Pomuch, Campeche. His work offers new philological and anthropological readings of colonial and modern texts, paying particular attention to Maya poetics, intertextuality, Christianization processes, and the discursive strategies of Maya intellectuals.

His career includes extensive teaching and mentoring in the Graduate Program in Indo-American Linguistics at CIESAS, as well as teaching appointments at institutions in Mexico, France, and Brazil. He has supervised undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral theses on Mayan languages, Yucatec Maya Sign Language, gesture, evidentiality, oral traditions, and language documentation. He has also held several editorial and academic leadership positions, including Associate Editor of the journal Gesture, Review Editor of Cognitive Science, and Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Indo-American Linguistics at CIESAS.

Overall, his research has made significant contributions to the study of Maya linguistic and cultural diversity, to our understanding of human communication beyond speech, and to the recognition of Indigenous and emerging sign languages as vital domains for exploring the relationships among language, culture, cognition, and the body.