1 - Introduction: What’s a linguist do, anyway?, What’s linguistic fieldwork?

Summary

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.