Introduction: Reflecting on language and culture fieldwork in the early 21st century (original) (raw)

2009, Language & Communication

Linguistic anthropologists have now been gathering data in the field for over a century. Many of the institutions, cultural practices, and assumptions that contextualize this fieldwork have changed over the course of this century, while others have not. However, at present only approximately 20% of anthropology departments provide formal training in fieldwork methods (Gupta and Ferguson, 1995, p. 6), while the field methods training found in linguistics departments is usually decontextualized, and has as a goal the accurate documentation of linguistic structure without reference to language in use. Even so, fieldwork is central to both linguistic and sociocultural anthropology, and although less visibly, to linguistics as well: all structural and theoretical linguistic analysis is predicated upon data that has been gathered in some way. 1 The ascendancy, in recent decades, of reflexive ethnography has led to the examination of various facets of fieldwork, ranging from the ''where" of anthropology and what it means to be ''in the field" (Gupta and Ferguson, 1995) to ethnography as a genre of writing (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) to the ''lies of ethnography" and moral dilemmas of field research (Fine, 1993). Far less, however, has been written on fieldwork by researchers of language and culture, and this special issue is meant to begin to make explicit and central what is so often implicit and marginal in the articles and books that result from fieldwork on language in use, and to consider and critically assess some of the practices, methodologies, and epistemologies of researchers engaged in ethnographically grounded studies of language use and linguistic form. As Duranti (2001, 2003) has noted, the different names for fields of inquiry that have language as culture at their center-e.g., linguistic anthropology, anthropological linguistics, ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguisticscorrespond to different theoretical and methodological orientations and different research paradigms as well. Early linguistic research by American anthropologists fell under the new rubric of Boasian four-field anthropology; their linguistic fieldwork was focused on the documentation of Native American languages, often as a central means of accessing and analyzing culture (Boas, 1911), as well as contributing to a better understanding of the genetic relationships among American languages. The emergence of American anthropology as a discrete field of inquiry coincided with the increasingly rapid decline of Native American languages and traditional cultural practices, particularly in the West, where contact with English-speaking settlers had historically been more limited. The urgent need to document as many linguistic forms as possible before they entirely disappeared was often part of what was later deemed ''salvage anthropology" or ''triage linguistics"; some practitioners of this sort of fieldwork were notoriously autocratic, and prioritized the collection of data above all else (for example, stories still circulate among Native Californians about the extremely prolific J.P. Harrington, whose fieldwork practices included grammatical elicitations at the deathbeds of elderly speakers (cf. Laird, 1977)). Students of Boas, most notably Sapir and Kroeber, contributed significantly not only to