Preface

Summary

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.