2 - Fieldwork adventure

Summary

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.