CoLang—June 2014
Arlington, TX
— Life in Communities —
Lise Dobrin (dobrin@virginia.edu)
Spike Gildea (spike@uoregon.edu)
Jorge Rosés Labrada (jrosesla@uwo.ca)
Workshop introduction
This workshop presupposes that you would like to do linguistic fieldwork, but that you could use some practical scaffolding onto which to graft both your concerns about what the experience will be like, and your intentions to have it be a good one for both you and the community you work with. We will assume that your choice of what language(s) to study is informed by your linguistic interests, perhaps taking into account such factors as degree of endangerment and documentation status, and that you have a pretty good sense (through both personal contacts and published sources) that (a) the community is in principle open to researchers, (b) you can get adequate funding to do the work, and (c) you feel confident you can handle the conditions both personally and intellectually (for example, by learning a contact language if you need to).
0. Who am I?
 Individual history and previous experience in other communities
 Resources I bring to the research that affect how it transpires
 Sense of responsibility to various entities—science, endangered languages, disempowered minorities, your friends and family
 Different conceptions of a researcher: linguist, spy, meddler
1. What am I getting myself into?
 One or more long periods away from home
 Relationships with distant others, oftentimes poor, who you will likely remain in touch with—and be obliged to/advocating for in various way—for years to come
 Difficult conditions (family, health, culture clash, other circumstances)
 Responsibilities to the language(s)
 Being hosted by people who also have designs for your relationship that may

differ from your own
 One of the most powerfully defining, humanity-expanding experiences of your life!
2. Who am I going to be working with?
 Home academic community o Program requirements o Scholarly orientation of advisers o Funding considerations
 Academic community in your research area o Conditions on your research, e.g., affiliation, o Expectations of benefits o Facilities that can help you
 Governments and other local organizations that regulate/facilitate access
 Local language community o Status of language and community in wider region o Colonial history, including history of research o Identifying community power structures: what are the relevant social groups? Who (if anyone) speaks for the community? o What are people’s goals in working with you?
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of ethnographic preparation for fieldwork. Read whatever you can on the culture area you will be in—especially recent work, even if it is not about your precise village, town, or province (or even language!). This bears not only on what kind of social environment you can expect to encounter in the field, but also (perhaps even more critically) on how you will be perceived and what will be expected of you by local people. Because not only will you be in the category of "researcher" and "foreigner", you will be in the category of "person", and that carries very different meanings from culture to culture!
You will likely have contact with some of the others who have worked in the area as you head into the field and settle in there. These people need not be linguists—or even researchers—to be able to offer you extremely useful advice and information. It could be NGO workers, missionaries, merchants, expatriates, or whoever. They will tell you their stories, share their gems of wisdom, and if you are lucky, maybe even bring you into their social networks.
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You should be prepared to think critically about what they tell you, however, as you may not always share their perspective. And you should definitely be prepared to reciprocate their generosity.
3. Getting ready: Make your research plan
 Set realistic goals, develop a well-justified budget, get funded
 Follow up on previous research, get in touch with other researchers with experience in the area
 Begin making contact with the community—this may even be required by your funding source. Consider making a pilot trip.
 Find out what you can about facilities/infrastructure/seasonal changes in conditions
 Equipment: decide on what you'll need (including backups), purchase it, practice using the stuff before you go, prepare to store and maintain it in field conditions
 Start accumulating research stimuli and reference materials to take along.
If there is a local source you may not need much
 Arrange for visa and research permits—this can take a while so get a head start
 Get IRB/REB approval from your home institution; there may be ethics review with other bodies. Understand the importance of informed consent
 Organize travel—travel in-country may have to wait until you are there
 Get all your immunizations, prep for health, make emergency plans (e.g. buy evacuation insurance)
 There's a great generic packing list that you can adapt at http://web.stanford.edu/~popolvuh/field-checklist.htm
. Be sure to check out the references for health manuals (Where there is no doctor, etc.).
 You may wish to avail yourself of some of the elicitation stimulus materials available at http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/ .
 Be sure to bring along some photos from home! People will want to see your family and where you come from
4. Establishing relationships with the community
 Introductions—Do not be surprised if it takes people time to understand where you have come from and what you are there to do. People also have different conventions for disclosing important information. It doesn't
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always come right up front like it does for us.
 Individuals in mediator role—these can be complicated!
 Be aware of who isn’t participating as well as who is in a meeting setting
 Be prepared to adapt to very different conceptions of the role of talk in communication. Who speaks when, about what topics, pacing, expression of inner states, etc.
 Respect, attitude, gifts. People may tell you what is appropriate
 Schedule yourself some time for warming up—it can really take a while, and you have to be prepared to deal with some strong emotions in that time. It won't necessarily be obvious at first even what constitutes "the community" you have just entered (or created by entering!). Recognize that you have to learn the political as well as the linguistic landscape, and this simply takes time. Listen carefully to the stories people tell you about past visitors they have had. It will give you invaluable clues about what to do or not to do.
5. Working with consultants
 Balance between your needs and the community’s wishes
 Go through appropriate channels (except when you can't)
 Communicate your needs, remain in control as best you can, take opportunities as they arise
 Get advice from other researchers who are working or have worked in the area—though circumstances may change, as well as attitudes toward research in the community
 Number and diversity of consultants, cultural/gender/age considerations
 Availability for language work
 Working in the language vs. using a lingua franca
 Who your consultants think you ought to go see
 Be sensitive to variation, both intra-speaker and inter-speaker
There are real differences in consultants' talent, patience, and interest in linguistics. Some are great storytellers, some are great analysts/transcribers/translators/etc. You can work with someone for days to less net effect than a half-hour with that special someone. Personal compatibility (aka chemistry) is also a real factor in how satisfying and productive the work is. Keep open to unexpected possibilities. Teachers are often the obvious candidates for consultants, but they may have already full schedules and strongly inculcated language ideologies that can get in the way.
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Also, authority and ability to speak do not always reside in the same person, so you may need to be creative to get the information you seek.
Some may have an interest in words and morphology—they enjoy the task of narrow grammatical elicitation of paradigms, creative use of derivational morphology, or the challenge of coming up with contexts to explicate subtle differences. Some may have an interest in learning to write the language— taking the time to work with them on the transcription of recordings may be a huge reward down the road when they can do it on their own! Writing the language often boosts their status as "expert" in the community. Passive bilinguals can often provide the best idiomatic, on-the-spot translations of recordings into the contact language. Some may be willing to help with transcription, too. Through verbatim repetition of the text, some re-activation of their productive knowledge may even occur.
6. Compensating consultants
 To pay or not to pay: Paying consultants for their time is not culturally appropriate in all circumstances. But that does not mean that people work with you "for free". You may need to give gifts—or offer transportation, or housing in town, or buy people food, or whatever else people give each other as exchange items. The expectations are may be different for outsiders than for other local people. Discharging obligations vs expanding the basis for exchange
 Form of payment
 Rate/time/frequency of payment (e.g., hours/days/achievements)
 Cultural considerations in payment (e.g., explicit negotiation over pay, who should/could be compensated)
 Receipts and accounting
 Sensitivity to coercion
7. Community goals related to your project
 Community interests—be open to the possibility that they may have little to do with language!
 Long-term benefits—education, language maintenance, sense of value/strengthening identity
 Short-term benefits—employment, practical assistance, mobilization of
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knowledge/resources
 Balancing your professional goals (efficiency, reporting, publishing, archiving) with community interests and reality (consultant reliability, other community priorities, health delays, other distractions). Be prepared to stretch toward the community—it is almost always an opportunity for all to learn and grow. But also be prepared to say "no" sometimes
8. The basic challenges of everyday life
 Time management—the encompassment of your work in another's setting
 Household management—food and cooking, water, hygiene, laundry
 Seasons
 Rhythms of night and day
 Participating fully in daily life vs. focusing on your work
 Privacy, intimacy, loneliness, social stress, anger
 Health—your own and that of those around you! Carry a well-stocked emergency kit appropriate to your situation
 Safety—multiple networks and your ability to activate them (see also 10 below)
 What to do when problems arise—how do people in the community deal with their own problems?
 Working in the community vs. bringing consultants to you
 Journal and letter writing as therapeutic tool and analytical resource
 Expect the unexpected!
9. Getting beyond your inner circle in the community
 Be friendly—culturally sensitive communication, greetings, kinship terms
 Use the language whenever possible, but be careful about upstaging nonspeakers
 Ways of reacting to things that make you uncomfortable: Suspending judgment, keeping aloof, or intervening
 Involving yourself in community activities: This may be very much appreciated. When you attend church, participate in festivals, cry at funerals, travel with people, spend time in food gardens, etc. you not only learn a lot, but you demonstrate your commitment to the ways of the community.
 It is impossible to distribute your attention and resources evenly over an
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entire community. You will have close friends, but you will also have distant acquaintances who you only know by sight. You do not want your presence to be divisive. Be alert to the possibility of suspicion or jealousy. Learn all you can about community politics.
10. Getting involved beyond the community
 Get to know local scholars/leaders/agencies and work to gain their trust
 Get involved as appropriate with indigenous political organizations, but recognize that there are risks
 Pay proper respect to government and other organizations that control access (visa, research permissions, entry to controlled areas)
 Seek opportunities to participate in national and regional academic communities
11. Thinking about the long term
 Going and coming from the field can be intellectually productive
 Keeping the door open for future work—both for you and for other researchers
 Sensitivity about saying goodbye o There may be regret at not having worked with you o Some may have been waiting for their turn to have you assist on a project o Make sure to leave copies of recordings for family members
 Giving back from home, staying in touch o Establish a routine of correspondence o Send copies of materials, updates on progress and archiving
 Dealing with grief
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Learn as much as you can about other people's experiences!
Some good sources on the human aspects of linguistic fieldwork:
Becquelin, Aurore Monad, Emmanuel de Vienne, and Raquel Guirardello-Damian.
2008. Working Together: The Interface Between Researchers and the
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Native People: The Trumai Case. In K. David Harrison, David S. Rood, and
Arienne Dwyer (eds.), Lessons from Documented Endangered Languages, pp. 43-66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bowern, Claire. 2008. Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide. Houndsmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dobrin, Lise M. and Josh Berson. 2011. Speakers and Language Documentation.
In Peter K. Austin and Julia Sallabank (eds.), Handbook of Endangered
Languages, pp. 187-211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hill, Jane. 2006. The Ethnography of Language and Language Documentation. In
Jost Gippert, Niklaus P. Hilmmelmann, and Ulrike Mosel (eds.), Essentials of
Language Documentation, pp. 113-128.
Newman, Paul and Martha Ratliff (eds.). 2001. Linguistic Fieldwork. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Thieberger, Nicholas. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thieberger, Nicholas and Simon Musgrave. 2006. Documentary Linguistics and
Ethical Issues. Peter Austin (ed). Language Documentation and Description,
Volume 4. London: Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, SOAS.
The following works were written by anthropologists and other qualitative social researchers, but they contain much insight for fieldworkers of all kinds:
Borneman, John, and Abdellah Hammoudi. 2009. Being There: The Fieldwork
Encounter and the Making of Truth. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Briggs, Charles L. 1986. Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the
Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Diamond, Jared M. 1991. Interview Techniques in Ethnobiology. In Man and a
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Half: Essays in Pacific Anthropology and Ethnobiology in Honour of Ralph
Bullmer, ed. by Andrew M. Pawley, 83-86. Auckland: The Polynesian Society.
Howell, Nancy. 1990. Surviving Fieldwork: A Report of the Advisory Panel on
Health and Safety in Fieldwork. Washington, D.C.: American
Anthropological Association.
Lawless, Robert, Vinson H. Sutlive, Jr., and Mario D. Zamora (eds.). 1983.
Fieldwork: The human experience. New York: Gordon and Breach.
McLean, Athena, and Annette Leibing (eds). 2007. The Shadow Side of
Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred Borders Between Ethnography and Life.
Blackwell.
Shaffir, William B. and Robert A. Stebbins (eds). 1991. Experiencing fieldwork:
An Inside View of Qualitative Research. Newbury Park: Sage.
Shaffir, William B., Robert A. Stebbins, and Allan Turowetz (eds). 1973.
Fieldwork Experience: Qualitative Approaches to Social Research. New
York: St Martin’s Press.
A hilarious memoire of a British anthropologist’s fieldwork in Africa (great downtime reading in the field!):
Barley, Nigel. 2000 [1983]. The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a
Mud Hut. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Keren Rice’s 2006 web resource for linguistic fieldwork: http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/lingfieldwork/
A linguist’s novelized account of her adventures while conducting fieldwork
in the Philippines:
Robinson, Laura C. (with Gary Robinson). 2013. Microphone in the Mud. Language
Documentation and Conservation Special Publication No. 6. Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press. Also available online at http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4578
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