Introduction

Tales of fieldwork are often full of accounts of eating weird, outlandish things and suffering exotic illnesses. In reality, though, much fieldwork involves neither, and it is not an image of fieldwork that should be fanned. Rather, staying healthy in the field is important, and when health issues arise, very often they have to do with something the fieldworker ate or drank. In this chapter I report some personal experiences involving food and health, coupled with something of an ulterior motive of hoping to allow others to benefit from my mistakes and to take precautions.

Eating and drinking

Talk about fieldwork often involves macho-like accounts of eating various bizarre foods and also of suffering from weird and mysterious health complications. Some advice often given to fieldworkers goes along the lines that you should eat or drink anything offered to you, no matter how suspicious or disgusting it may seem, so that you don't offend the people offering it, so you’ll fit in and be accepted better. About that, let me say this as directly and forcefully as I can: Horseshit! This is horribly wrong and dangerous advice.

A great many things you might eat in fieldwork situations can make you extremely sick, and can even kill you. It is just foolish to eat or drink something in an unguarded or cavalier moment that can make you so ill that it forces you to abandon your fieldwork or causes serious delays, not to mention consequences for your health. It is beyond foolish if, for example, eating or drinking something unusual results in squandering thousands of dollars spent to get you there and equipped to do fieldwork that you have to abandon due to compromised health. If the funding is taxpayer money from federal agencies or from donations to non-profit benevolent organizations, the needless loss can raise the ire of some and bring forth tears of lament from others—funding is scarce. Even worse, it is just irresponsible if an illness due to unguarded eating or drinking causes abandonment of a fieldwork project with the last speakers of an endangered language, where that language may receive no documentation before it becomes too late.

Introduction

Linguistic fieldwork depends on work with speakers of the language being investigated. They are typically called “consultants,” sometimes “language teachers,” or “language helpers” or “assistants,” and now ever more increasingly “language experts.” Traditionally in linguistics and anthropology they were called “informants”; however, that term is avoided now. It sounded too much like “informer” or “police informant,” a snitch—something negative. So those who were formerly known as “informants” are called “language consultants” or just “consultants” in this book. This chapter is about finding language consultants and working with them.

A traditional view of fieldwork involved an academic researcher asking questions of a native speaker of the language that was the target of investigation, for the purpose of collecting data on that language, usually with the aim of describing at least some aspects of it, often with the larger goal of producing a grammar, dictionary, and collection of narrative texts. Today the investigators may still be regular academics, but can themselves also be native speakers of the language, or can be members of a team involving academic linguists and trained community members, often language activists, working together to document the language and to help communities with their language revitalization efforts or language education aspirations.

Obviously, fieldwork can have many other objectives beyond traditional language description, and a range of methods may be needed to achieve these differing aims. The object of fieldwork can be language acquisition (to find out about how children “acquire” [learn] their language), dialectology (determining the dialects and varieties of the language), historical linguistics (collection of data relevant to the history of the language and its relationship to other languages), sociolinguistics (investigation of socially conditioned variation in the language), language conservation and language reclamation (production of learning and teaching materials for community language projects and needs), phonetic and phonological documentation (investigation and analysis of the sounds and sound system of the language), documentation of endangered knowledge systems, TEK (documentation of traditional ecological knowledge) and ethnobotany, linguistic anthropology (understanding of language use in its cultural setting), ethnogeography, and many others.

Most of the fieldwork I have done was aimed at documenting the languages, though some cases had other objectives, including investigating the history of the languages involved.

Introduction

In this chapter I address in general the expectations and demands of language documentation with its need for fieldwork as we move into the future. My personal future work is, I think, easy to see—it will be, inshallah, much like a continuation of the present. I have the recordings and documentation of several languages and the results of quite a lot of fieldwork to get processed and archived. I have databases, including vocabularies and dictionaries, to get online and made accessible to scholars, communities of speakers of the languages involved, and the public. I need to analyze and publish more of the results of the fieldwork on several languages. I will do my best to get copies of all these things into the hands of those whose languages are involved, and will help them with programs to make the materials useful for language revitalization where possible. I also intend to examine the results for implications they have for linguistic typology and for what they can contribute to understanding of the history of the languages and of the people who speak them. But this chapter is not about my plans; rather, it's about the status of languages themselves and the need for future fieldwork.

Historical backdrop

Let's begin by putting some things into historical context. Understanding the past and how we got to where we are now will help clarify the current state of the field, the status of the world's languages, and will point in the direction of what needs to be done in the future.

Endangered languages and early American linguists

There has been concern for describing endangered languages from the beginning in American linguistics. Franz Boas (1858–1942), founder of American linguistics and of American anthropology, emphasized the urgency of describing American Indian languages and cultures before they disappeared. The theme of “the vanishing Redman” had already been around for a long time in Boas's day. Boas himself provided the last and in several cases the only significant data on a number of languages that no longer have speakers and have ceased to be spoken: Cathlamet, Chemakum, Lower Chinook, Pentlach, Pochuteco, and Tsetsaut. He instilled this sense of urgency for fieldwork into his students, the need to collect accurate information while it was still possible.

Introduction: identity

In my mind I have always been a country boy; I grew up mostly in the woods in Oregon. However, my business card—rarely used though provided by my university—says I’m a Professor of Linguistics. I’m the kind of linguist who has done a lot of fieldwork, on a fair number of languages. In connection with this fieldwork I’ve been called a “witch” (shaman) and a “swashbuckler”; it was said both that I “bring ‘em back alive” and conversely that I “step over dead bodies to save endangered languages.” This book is about linguistic fieldwork experiences. These things said about my fieldwork get explained along the way, but they are not central to the book. Though the experiences lying behind those things convey some of the excitement of linguistic fieldwork, the real goal of this book is to relate some of what I have learned from the fieldwork that I have done. I believe that some of the insights gained from that fieldwork may be useful for others who do or are contemplating doing linguistic fieldwork. A second goal is to make clear the need for language documentation and the fieldwork that goes with it and to increase understanding for the plight of endangered languages. I hope, too, that what I relate here will be interesting and motivating to readers interested in linguistics, languages, Indigenous peoples and their cultures, travel and geography, and especially fieldwork, and, also, that it might prove entertaining in a general way.

Some context

Something to make clear here at the beginning is that there is nothing in this book for anyone who would wish to appeal to imagined higher, purer spirituality or mystic wisdom presumed to be possessed by Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples with whom I have worked and lived. I loathe the behavior of those few anthropologists and linguists who feign some special mystical or spiritual connection or knowledge or ability acquired in their fieldwork with some Indigenous group.

I once lost a girlfriend over this. She assumed that the speakers of Mayan languages with whom I worked must have some deep spiritual comprehension beyond the grasp of us spiritually bankrupt modern mainstream Americans.

Fieldwork with little-known languages has been one of my life's greatest passions. It has taken me far and wide and involved me with numerous fascinating peoples and their intriguing languages and cultures. From unusual encounters both delightful and dreadful I learned a great deal. With some considerable reluctance I finally decided to write about things I had learned from doing fieldwork, the sorts of things that are never talked about in other writings about linguistic fieldwork. My motivation was the hope that these things will be useful for others who do or want to do or just want to know about fieldwork. By recounting true-life linguistic fieldwork adventures, discoveries, adversities, and perils, I hoped to bring readers face to face with heartbreaks involved in working up close and personal with endangered languages, with the great satisfaction and excitement that language documentation and revitalization can afford, and with its importance.

About that reluctance, a writer friend once told me that I make high adventure sound like a postcard. I think that and my reluctance here has to do with growing up with the Code of the West as the prime directive, with its proscription against showing off or talking big about yourself, right up there with the mightiest of the “thou-shalt- nots.” Because of that, nothing reported in this book is embellished or exaggerated. That postcard style of reporting—I’d prefer to think of it as objective scientific expository prose tempered by the Code of the West—is far more natural and comfortable to me than the fish-story approach so often deployed by some who like to try to make their fieldwork experiences sound more colorful, glamorous, and self-laudatory than warranted by reality.

And having mentioned the Code of the West, perhaps I should clarify that it has nothing to do with the bad history of the Old West with hideous treatment of American Indians, just the opposite; it requires respect and fair treatment for all. The Code of the West is just an informal set of notions about expected conduct shared by many Westerners. My father was a cowboy; he worked on cattle ranches and horse ranches when I was a child, and he and my other relatives inculcated these attitudes about proper behavior in me.

Introduction

One of the reasons linguists do fieldwork is to discover new things. To discover new knowledge is a big reason why most academics do the research that we do. The general public, however, might associate the word “discovery” with big, monumental new findings, thought of more as “breakthroughs.” At the same time it seems that anything of more than passing significance is often said by journalists and reporters to have “astounded” scientists and experts—sensationalizing the news seems sometimes to be their main mission in life. While to linguists some of our findings do seem sensational for linguistic reasons, rarely would any of us think of them as so sensational as to astound all fellow linguists. Some discoveries in my own fieldwork have excited me—intellectually stimulating and rewarding, though not hugely sensational, not even to sensationalizing journalists. Some things that I consider to be discoveries involve just small points of analysis in languages whose names hardly anyone has ever heard of, though some other discoveries do feel somewhat grander. This chapter is about some of them. The purpose of presenting them here is to help demonstrate the value and excitement of linguistic fieldwork, of language documentation.

Several things found in the structure of the languages that I have investigated in fieldwork have significant implications that require some theoretical claims made about language in general to be abandoned or significantly modified. These are in my estimation among the most substantial discoveries that I have made. However, some of them are hard to explain without relying on linguistic terminology that may not be familiar to all readers. I try to touch more lightly on such cases. To those readers for whom the discussion of some topic presented here may seem too opaque, feel free just to skip on to the cases that are easier to follow. The main points won't be missed.

A new language

Perhaps situated at the higher end of some hypothetical significance scale when it comes to the public's sense of sensation might be the discovery of a new language. I discovered a new language, Jumaytepeque Xinka, one of four Xinkan languages in southeastern Guatemala—and that is exciting.

Introduction

The accusation of “swashbuckler” mentioned in Chapter 1—always embarrassing to me—has to do with accounts of some of my fieldwork experiences that got out. In some cases they got told by colleagues or students who participated in research projects with me in the field; in others, in unguarded moments I mentioned some happening that got retold and probably embellished as it was passed along, usually to my embarrassment. I’ll recount a few instances here. I hope they show that linguistic fieldwork can indeed involve high adventure and great fun. However, it needs to be clear that not all fieldwork all the time is glamorous or glorious—and most of the instances related here involve also considerable discomfort and often danger.

What may seem like adventures in fieldwork as we tell about them should not be allowed to overshadow the bug bites, dangers, illnesses, lousy food, crumby shelter, thefts, threats, travel problems, and a litany of hardships and icky stuff also often encountered, though not often included in zealous talk about fieldwork experiences and the wonders of doing fieldwork—though they are talked about in subsequent chapters here. Much of the work involves just plodding on, sheer drudgery, in bad living conditions, where lots of things often go wrong. Even in such instances, however, there is some good news, I think. Even when things become really difficult and trying, or go wrong, we still learn from those experiences. Several examples of the kinds of hardships I encountered doing fieldwork and what I learned from them are related in later chapters.

The bush-plane flight to Apolo, Bolivia, and a mystery variety of Quechua

Much of my research has been on Indigenous languages of Latin America. Very often it involved searching for possible remaining speakers of endangered languages, where travel to research sites was often not only challenging but sometimes difficult in the extreme. On some occasions it involved flights in bush planes.

Early in my academic life, when I was a graduate student just about to go off to do my dissertation research, I was invited to participate in a survey of Quechua dialects in Peru and Bolivia.

Introduction

Fieldwork usually involves travel, sometimes quite a lot of travel, and often staying in accommodations that are far from ideal. Some might be lucky enough to stay in a pleasant motel or with a nice family, with modern comforts, in or near their field site, maybe even in the fieldworker's own hometown or village or reservation or reserve for those doing fieldwork on their own native or heritage language. For others, especially typical academics, fieldwork usually involves at least some long-distance travel to and from the location of the language that is the object of the fieldwork, and staying in often taxing accommodations. In this chapter the intention is to share some tips for travel and living in the field derived from repeated vexing experiences. I report some coping strategies that come from these personal experiences—many of them learned the hard way—that may be of use to others who do fieldwork, or even for anyone traveling or working in difficult or out-of-the-way places. Of course, not everything reported and suggested here may have any relevance for everyone and it definitely does not work in all situations or locations. Also, sadly, some of what is talked about here may seem just downright unpleasant.

Travel

Travel is often enjoyable and enlightening, but at the same time travel in less developed countries and in remote regions is usually difficult and can be perilous as well. Some of the fieldwork projects I worked on involved lots of local travel—for example, for surveying dialects or seeking possible speakers of languages where it was not known whether any speakers remained or where they might be found if there were any. I have done many kinds of travel for fieldwork, lots and lots of travel actually. I’ve traveled many times by bus, boat, bush plane, car, dugout canoe, horse, mule, and on foot. What follows reflects some of that travel.

Buses

Local buses in Central America and Mexico tend to be Bluebird buses, the same as the school buses seen all over North America. The gear ratio for these buses tends to be set very low in those countries, good for climbing mountains, which are everywhere in Guatemala and abundant in other places there.

Introduction

In this age of institutional review boards (IRBs) and research ethics committees (RECs), researchers hope to avoid the faintest suggestion of violence, conflict, risk, or political complications, not to mention potential harm to any participant associated with their research projects. Nevertheless, unanticipated things do come up and these kinds of problems often do confront fieldworkers. In this chapter I mention a few of my experiences that involve such difficulties, both by way of illustration and as cautionary tales. The most ubiquitous problems involved health and travel, but there were many others. Health issues related to food and drink are talked about in Chapter 6, and Chapter 7 deals with issues involving travel and living conditions.

Critters

Issues with animals blend into health issues, but let's begin with animals and then move on later to other kinds of troubles.

Fleas

Probably the most persistent problem in my fieldwork in Central America and Mexico was the fleas. You get them from dogs, household pets, domestic animals—it's wise not to pet or even touch any animal there. And you get them from people, in buses, riding in the back of trucks, in movie theaters, or almost anywhere where people are put in close proximity to one another. Fleas seem to be everywhere. Their bites swell and itch mercilessly. Often you end up scratching them so much that they bleed and can get infected, or at least can get blood on clothing and sheets and what not. My father, who went with me for one fieldwork season to El Salvador and Honduras, called them the “man-eating Central American flea.” They are tricky because they seem able to avoid detection; they climb—usually imperceptibly—up inside clothing as far as they can get, until blocked by something, for instance a belt around the waist or tight seams somewhere in the clothing. They hide and are difficult to find, and shaking clothing usually doesn't dislodge them. They can stay there for days, continuing to bite over and over; when the item of clothing that they are in is not being worn, they just move from it onto other people or animals. Even when you can find them, they are hard to catch, and if you manage to catch them, they are hard to kill.