Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon interviewing unidentified Yanomami people

Editor’s note: How do researchers in anthropology and sociology deal with linguistic diversity? Do they learn the language(s) of the people they work with or do they hire interpreters? Turns out that they are quite naive about language and do neither systematically, as new research by Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky shows. How to make good decisions about language choice and language mediation in fieldwork needs to become part of research training.

***

Katarzyna Sepielak, Dawid Wladyka, and William Yaworsky

***

We have surveyed field researchers in sociology and anthropology programs in the United States and found only limited proficiency in field languages, accompanied by a widespread reliance on translators and interpreters. The scholars, therefore, did not dispense with translators as early-twentieth century anthropologists called for (Mead, 1939); instead, they dispensed with the myth of linguistic fluency. At the same time, results indicate disparities in the use of vernacular and translation services in the post-colonial societies and haphazard ‘hiring’ patterns of interpreters that cause ethical and methodological concerns.

The imaginary anthropologist is a fluent polyglot; the real anthropologist is too time-poor to learn another language

When you think about an anthropologist, what stereotypes do you imagine?  Maybe a gaunt Englishman wearing a pith helmet with a copy of African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1940) stuffed in his back pocket? Our imaginary anthropologist is, of course, fluent in a language at risk of extinction, learned during years of field research while living with an endangered community.

Perhaps your image of a sociologist is quite different. You might conjure a scholar working in an urban setting in their home country, which of course is in one of the complex industrial societies. They are studying social problems using their native language with locals who also speak the same tongue.

The shape of today’s societies however, as well as forms of field research challenge those effigies. Anthropologists cannot permit themselves the ‘luxury’ of spending years within a single community, being involved in many projects and teaching duties at home institutions. Sociologists, on the other hand, now work in culturally diverse settings and face the same issues as anthropologists a century ago.

Experience with Fieldwork Translation by Discipline

Yet, the scholarly associations and method textbooks are virtually mum on the problem of language, translation and interpreting in field research. To the contrary, a blatant disregard for translation services is noticeable in some discussions, that – righteously – attempt to reclaim the status of research assistants: “Research assistants play a vital role in the research process, often acting as more than just [! – exclamation and bold added] translators or interpreters.” (Dean & Stevano 2016)

We surveyed US-based scholars about their language practices

That is why we surveyed US-based scholars from anthropology and sociology programs. We analyzed 913 answers that provided insights into our respondents’ linguistic capabilities and their experiences conducting research in over 180 countries and interacting with over 400 languages. A more extensive presentation of the results may be found in our article published by Multilingua (Sepielak, Wladyka & Yaworsky 2022).

We discovered that in only 24% of the field sites with languages other than English present did scholars assess that they had professional (or higher) fluency. In almost 60% of cases, our respondents interacted with languages in which they reported a proficiency at or below a limited working level.

It would seem it’s not all bad news with 75% of respondents reporting fluency in at least one fieldwork language. However, they were typically fluent in languages derived from the colonizers, such as French and Spanish, but rarely in languages from the colonized.

Social science researchers are “getting by”

It is then worth noting that most anthropologists and sociologists were getting by at times like everybody else, using interpreters and translators, or conducting research using the English language. ‘Only’ 54.1% of the sociologists in our sample ever collaborated with a translator compared to 68.9% of anthropologists.

Translation and interpreting are often rendered invisible

Example: #interpreter was literally erased from this photo of meeting between Iran's Rouhani and Malaysia' Mahathir in media coverage #xl8 https://t.co/RIcNpy38t2 pic.twitter.com/aNCCivzY0F

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) April 30, 2020

It would, however, be spurious to claim that American sociologists had less need for translators due to their linguistic proficiency. It is rather due to the traditional research interests exposing anthropologists to an increased number of languages and geographies. In comparison, sociologists frequently work in the US and regions like Western Europe where one could claim to “get by” with English.

One could ask how can this reality diverge so significantly from the ideal of language fluency and dismissal of interpreters pushed by generations of authoritative field scholars?

Is English proficiency really the superpower of today’s social scientists?

English is the language superpower of the world (Piller, 2022). And our thematic analysis indicates that researchers turn to this ‘superpower’ quite often. This is due to a variety of circumstances hampering the acquisition of fluency in another language, such as short-term studies, multi-sited fieldwork, international collaborative research, or studies of communities with multiple co-existing languages. While the global popularity of English appears as one of the deterrents to mastering field languages among scholars, one should also note that Indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Tlapanec and thousands of others are virtually extinct from academic curricula in the US.

Anthropologists, in particular, may be wary about revealing these linguistic deficiencies due to the fear it might undermine their ethnographic authority. They will be mindful of Margaret Mead’s fieldwork being criticized as ‘superficial’ in part due to her linguistics deficiencies (see Freeman 1983) or Napoleon Chagnon wasting months analyzing the fictitious and scatological “names” of Yanomamo villagers presented to him by amused tribesmen (see Chagnon 1992), mold current beliefs of scholars?

Paying lip-service to the importance of linguistic proficiency does make fluent researchers

Well, it would seem so, with 81% of our respondents perceiving knowledge of local language as important and 95% agreeing that knowing the vernacular enriches the understanding of “local knowledge”.  They also agreed that researchers who don’t speak the vernacular miss important data and have less control over the study. A clear example of detachment between the persisting ethos and contemporary practice reported in previous paragraphs.

The invisible translators and interpreters of social science

In this context, the question about what this heavy reliance on translators means for Western representations of post-colonial societies, persists as well. How do scholars perceive its effect on the research process? For one, most respondents agreed that translators help in gaining access to data and that scholars with foreign-language deficiencies should collaborate with them. Nevertheless, concerning was a trend of haphazardly “hiring” persons that interpret (including research assistants, spouses, colleagues, representatives of local institutions) driven by cost and convenience. This widespread practice carries a series of ethical, methodological, and even security risks rarely considered during methods training.

To that end, field researchers did not dispense with translators as early 20^th century anthropologists called for, instead, they dispensed with the sleight of hand of linguistic fluency. This state of affairs should at the very minimum deserve greater attention in current methodological and ethical discussions regarding fieldwork and collaboration with interpreters.

To read the full article

Sepielak, K., Wladyka, D. & Yaworsky, W. (2022). Language proficiency and use of interpreters/translators in fieldwork: a survey of US-based anthropologists and sociologists. Multilingua. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2022-0071

Related content

Laihonen, Petteri. (2020). Do concepts and methods have ethics? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/do-concepts-and-methods-have-ethics/
Piller, Ingrid. (2016). Herder – an explainer for linguists. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/herder-an-explainer-for-linguists/
Piller, Ingrid. (2021). The interpreting profession in ancient Egypt. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/the-interpreting-profession-in-ancient-egypt/
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). How to challenge Anglocentricity in academic publishing. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/how-to-challenge-anglocentricity-in-academic-publishing/

References

Chagnon, Napoleon. 1992. Yanomamo: The last days of Eden. New York: Harvest Books.
Deane, K. & Stevano, S. 2016. Towards a political economy of the use of research assistants: reflections from fieldwork in Tanzania and Mozambique. Qualitative Research, 16(2). 213-228.
Fortes, Meyer, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.). 1940. African Political Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freeman, Derek. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mead, Margaret. 1939. Native languages as fieldwork tools. American Anthropologist 41(2): 189–205.
Piller, Ingrid. (2022). “Women, life, freedom” – the slogan swimming against the global tide. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/women-life-freedom-the-slogan-swimming-against-the-global-tide/

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

Let me start with a brief warning: most of this rant is not about ethics but about legal compliance, and deals with the impact of the EU’s newly adopted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679. This may seem a bit odd at first, because law and ethics represent two fundamentally different orders of normativity, one a formal system of bureaucratically enforced rules, the other grounded in the self-regulation of conduct. Yet, engaging with this new bureaucratic-legal framework does require social scientists to take an ethical stance of some sort. This is particularly the case for those of us who do research in/on the public realm.

GDPR became operative on May 25, 2018. It sets a new standard for the technical and organizational measures that public authorities, business, and non-profit organizations must take to prevent data security breaches and to give individuals control over their own personal data. It states, for example, that personal data cannot be exported outside the EU, and that processing is only allowed if one can prove that the data were collected in accordance with one of the lawful grounds recognized by the regulation. When you are processing someone’s personal data, you should also let them know that you are doing so, by providing them a privacy notice.

GDPR caused quite a stir among anthropologists and social scientists, with certain voices bordering on the apocalyptic. A workshop at SOAS, for instance, had the title “Is anthropology still legal?” (Humphris 2018). Others were more optimistic and argued that the new regulation might help social science researchers to cast off the straitjacket of biomedicine (Sleeboom-Faulkner and McMurray 2018), or pointed out “regulatory provisos […] that accommodate for the specific requirements of ethnographic research” (Corsín Jiménez 2018: 1), creating room for ethnography’s exploratory character and recognizing the dialogical nature of its data-constitution practices.

This rant picks up one specific issue: the way GDPR engages with the ‘public sphere.’ Contrary to what many of us (including myself) initially naively assumed, the new directive does not provide a free ticket for processing personal data that are already publicly available. A crude lexicostatistic analysis of the regulation reveals that the adjective public systematically collocates with authorities, interest, and security. Public availability and public accessibility are occasionally mentioned, but as a basis for positing additional restrictions rather than as a license for processing. In short, GDPR is concerned with personal data, regardless of whether they were collected in a ‘public space’ or in the ‘public domain’. The GDPR’s restrictions on their use apply regardless. Yet, interpreting and applying GDPR does force us to critically interrogate what we precisely mean when we talk about public space. This is what this text purports to do. I will try to recover some of the polysemy hidden underneath the surface of this presumably monolithic category, and to this end, I will be tossing Goffman against Habermas (without claiming any credits as to the originality of such a move, see, for example, Sarangi 2011). Note that I am not interested, at least not initially, in distinguishing between ‘public place,’ ‘domain’, or ‘sphere.’ The underlying spatial metaphor that is present in all three of them refers “not [to] a thing but rather [to] a set of relations between things” (Lefebvre 1991: 83), and that is what matters at this point.

The intimacy of the public sphere

One anchoring point for theorizing the public sphere is Goffman’s well-known distinction, first advanced in The presentation of self in everyday life (1959), between front– and backstage. Frontstage is the arena where social actors act out the roles that are societally and institutionally expected from them, carefully controlling their performance in the knowledge that it will be evaluated by an audience of others. The backstage is the region where actors prepare for this role performance, where they can deviate from the script and engage in the performance of a more authentic self, unexposed to the public gaze. The notion of frontstage, then, is the one that is readily equated with the ‘public’ sphere (see, for example, Sarangi 2009). However, one should not forget that frontstage also inevitably refers to a constellation of people entangled with one another through co-presence (Goffman 1963). Co-presence occurs whenever social actors are aware that they are within each other’s perceptual range. It manifests itself in relentless mutual monitoring and in the reflexive self-regulation of one’s own conduct, in an attempt to regulate whatever information about ‘self’ and ‘other’ might be leaking through.

Do these pedestrians offer “publicly available data”?

If we look at it from this perspective, a large part of what we routinely gloss as ‘public’ suddenly acquires an unexpected intimate quality. Public conduct is not just a scripted role. It is a scripted role that we inhabit, and therefore it will always contains glitches, moments of uncertainty, and failures to meet expectations. These are highly intimate moments, and GDPR enforces respect for this intimacy. Nobody likes being caught on camera picking their nose, or arguing with their partner on the way to the supermarket. As a rule, GDPR prevents the processing of personal data collected during such ‘public’ performances of intimate conduct. The same rules apply as to other information which allows individual data subjects to be identified: You can only process personal data collected in a public place (for example, footage containing faces and/or voices) if you can demonstrate that processing is done based on one of the lawful grounds specified in Art. 6 (consent of the data subject, processing in the public interest, etc.). In a way, this makes perfect sense. The fact that someone engages in a certain kind of behavior in a publicly accessible space should not be taken to mean that it is up for grabs as data.

This new GDPR framework does not entirely prohibit Goffman-styled inquiries into how people navigate public spaces. Although it forbids processing personal data (photos, video footage, audio recordings) collected without permission from the data-subject, carefully anonymized field notes (which do not provide any clues as to the identity of the data subject) are still perfectly lawful. A good example is my earlier work on the various forms of practical geographical knowledge that Dar es Salaam commuters need for traveling from one part of the city to another (D’hondt 2009). As a rare instance of conversation-analytic research that does not use recordings of conduct, it combined a systematic interrogation of my own practical knowledge, as a user of informal minibus transport, with vignettes illustrating “noteworthy patterns of behaviour” (Iphofen 2015: 47) that I occasionally jotted down while on the move. As such, it represents a form of observational practice that, although not covert, elides the formal solicitation of consent (Iphofen 2015: ibid.). This practice can be questioned from an ethical angle, but under GDPR it does not pose a problem of legal compliance since no personal data are being collected. Dar es Salaam is a megalopolis of over four million inhabitants. Each day, literally hundreds of thousands of city residents rely on minibus transport for getting to work, school, etc. There is no way in which my fellow commuters whose conduct accidentally drew my attention could ever be identified from the short written notes that I entered in my notebook, let alone from the schematic descriptions of courses of action that ended up in the resulting publication.

Public, as in res publica

In The structural transformation of the public sphere (1962[1989]), Habermas describes how the aggregate of print media, coffee houses, lodges and reading clubs that spread through 18^th century Europe resulted in the formation of a new critical space, separate from the state, where individuals could interact and exchange ideas on public matters in a way that had never been possible before. Habermas’ account of this budding ‘public sphere,’ which mediates between the private life-world and the state apparatus, has subsequently been criticized from various angles. Later on, Habermas (1981) himself added that in modern mass-societies, the available space for rational-critical debate is gradually contracting, as clear-cut demarcations between the public and private, and between state and society, are eroded by bureaucratization and consumerism. Feminist scholars pointed out the policed nature of the public-private distinction and the pervasiveness of exclusionary mechanisms, while poststructuralists and postcolonialists called into question its monolithic character and insist on a plurality of public spaces (for a useful overview, see Koller and Wodak 2008). Still, the idea of a universally accessible common deliberative space has a strong normative presence in contemporary society. It is enshrined in Art. 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, on the freedom of expression and information. Social scientists are an integral part of this deliberative space, and instances of critical interventions that have transformed ongoing societal debates are manifold. Blommaert and Verschueren’s (1998) critical inquiry into the rhetoric of tolerance underpinning the 1990s debate on immigration in Belgium is a classic example of a study that fundamentally altered the structure of the debate it commented upon, by pointing out uncanny similarities between the discourse of far-right parties and of the self-declared tolerant majority. Arguing pro domo, I would say that my current ethnographic work on trial performance at the International Criminal Court (ICC; see, for example, D’hondt 2019) falls under the same category. Transnational legal orders, like the one epitomized by the ICC, exert a growing impact on national legal systems. However, the way in which the public exercise of authority by this transnational institution is negotiated in the court’s daily operation has never before been subject to critical scrutiny.

International forums like the ICC (but also the UN’s Universal Periodic Review or the UN Human Rights Committee, see Cowan and Billaud 2017, Halme-Tuomisaari 2018) are undeniably ‘public’ in the sense of Goffman, as the actors involved will always tailor their frontstage conduct to that of the other participants who are co-present (one might also add virtual audiences here, as many of these events are live-streamed). Still, one can sensibly argue that many of the restrictions on data processing mentioned in the previous section do not apply here, precisely because what transpires on these international forums is intrinsically connected to the deliberative space Habermas identified. Importantly, GDPR offers us a good starting point for developing such an argument.

GDPR formulates a set of general principles for personal data processing that apply universally. However, in addition it also specifies a number of ‘specific processing situations’ in which the application of these rules is legitimately curtailed (‘derogations’). It is up to the respective EU member states to specify the precise scope and content of these exemptions. In the national data acts through which the different member states implement GDPR, they must itemize the articles of the original GDPR that do not apply in these specific processing situations. Hence, GDPR Art. 89(2) stipulates that national legislations may provide exemptions for data processing “for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes.” Significantly, this article does not contain any provisions as to where the research in question is supposed to take place, and Recital 159 explicitly includes “privately funded research.” In fact, the only place in GDPR that explicitly mentions academia is Art. 85, on the freedom of expression. This article gives EU member states the responsibility to specify exemptions in order to “reconcile the right to the protection of personal data pursuant to this Regulation with the right to freedom of expression and information, including processing for journalistic purposes and the purposes of academic, artistic or literary expression.” Of course, the nature of these exemptions will slightly vary form one member state to another, but the overall effect of Art. 85 is a “redefinition of the social sciences on a par with journalism, characterizing their activities as in the public interest and their pursuits as in themselves valuable as academic knowledge” (Sleeboom-Faulkner and McMurray 2018: 23). Not surprisingly, the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council in 2017 advised that British universities should maximally exploit the derogations this article provides. Similarly, the European Association of Social Anthropologists explicitly insists that “ethnographic research [should be placed] within the special clause on ‘academic expression’ included in Article 85(2) of the GDPR [, … which] has been designed to guarantee the critical social value of humanities and social sciences research” (EASA 2018: 1).

It seems, then, that there are at least two sets of derogations that social scientists can invoke to legitimize their data processing: the research exemption (Art. 89) and the one that guarantees the freedom of academic expression (Art. 85). For those of us working in critical research traditions, this second exemption is particularly relevant and liberating. Although GDPR makes no mention of the public sphere as such, it nevertheless provides the necessary exemption social scientists require for participating in the shared deliberative space outlined by Habermas, guaranteeing their right to critically engage with ongoing societal debates and allowing data processing on the condition that it is necessary to execute that right.

Ethics, after all

As I anticipated at the start, this excursion into legal compliance finally takes us back to ethics. For the time being, GDPR is still in the process of interpretation, and we are still waiting for case law in order to find out where lines will be draw and how GDPR will eventually be interpreted. This is a moment of uncertainty, and there is a tendency among universities and funders to err on the side of caution.

The chilling effect of these new regulations is real. It should be clear, however, that GDPR, in fact, offers quite some maneuvering space to those of us who are working with public data. At this stage, it would be perilous for applied linguists and ethnographers to assume a quietist stance.

The most dangerous kind of censorship is self-censorship.

In the current circumstances this aphorism is more relevant than ever. As scholars, we should be prepared to defend the available space for critical intervention. Universities should be prepared to back its scholars in this, as this debate revolves around basic democratic principles. In the end, even going to court should not necessarily frighten us. After all, it is an opportunity to stand up for the values we believe in.

References

Blommaert, Jan, and Jef Verschueren. 2002. Debating Diversity. London: Routledge.
British Academy & ESRC. 2017. A British Academy and Economic & Social Research Council submission to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) call for views on the General Data Protection Regulation derogations.
Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. 2018. A Data Governance Framework for Ethnography. Madrid, CSIC.
Cowan, Jane K. and Julie Billaud, 2017. The ‘public’ character of the Universal Periodic Review: Contested concept and methodological challenge. In: Niezen, R. and M. Sapignoli (Eds.), Palaces of Hope. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp.106-126.
D’hondt, Sigurd. 2009. Calling the stops in a Dar-es-Salaam minibus: Embodied understandings of place in a drop-off routine. Journal of Pragmatics 41, no. 10 (2009): 1962-1976.
D’hondt, Sigurd. 2019. Humanity and its beneficiaries: Footing and stance-taking in an international criminal trial. Signs and Society 7 (3), 427-453.
European Association of Social Anthropologists. 2018. EASA’s Statement on Data Governance in Ethnographic Projects.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY, Doubleday.
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public Places. New York: Free Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1962 (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Polity.
Halme-Tuomisaari, Miia, 2018. Methodologically blonde at the UN in a tactical quest for inclusion. Social Anthropology 26 (4), 456-470.
Humphris, Rachel. 2018. Is anthropology still legal? Notes on the impact of GDPR. Birmingham, IRiS.
Iphofen, Ron. 2015. Research Ethics in Ethnography/Anthropology. European Commission, DG Research and Innovation.
Koller, Veronika, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent publics. In: R. Wodak and V. Koller (Eds.), Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1-17.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sarangi, Srikant. 2011. Public discourse. In: Jan Zienkowski, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jef Verschueren (Eds.), Discursive Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 248-265.
Sleeboom-Faulkner, Margaret, and James McMurray. 2018. The impact of the new EU GDPR on ethics governance and social anthropology. Anthropology Today 34 (5), 22-23.

Editor’s note:

To view the other RECLAS ethics rants, click here.

***

Approaches, frameworks, methodologies, and research designs have consequences for research ethics. Here I will discuss some things I have learned in my career as a fieldworker and researcher mainly while meeting minority language speakers in remote places and while trying to formulate practical relevance of my research for the wider public. I will specifically address the perception of research by research participants,  and the ethics of interviewing and other methods. I will close by sharing my take on researcher activism.

What’s in it for research participants?

All research should ideally benefit the researched communities and individuals in some meaningful and sensible way.

In general, participants have been happy to discuss language issues with me, some have even considered the interviews as an opportunity to tell their life stories to somebody and to have it recorded. Others mentioned, that, as a linguistic minority, they  have been “forgotten”. Participating in research felt like a good way to them to place their lives or their village on the map.

Petteri with research participants during fieldwork (Photo by Karina Tímár)

To meet my participants’ expectations, I have found it especially important to publish and present results not only in dominant languages and academic forums but also in the local language(s) and in accessible forums: in my case that has meant Hungarian and open access journals. Research published in English is largely irrelevant to my participants as it is mastered only by few of them.

In short, I consider it an important part of research(er) ethics to practice multilingual research multilingually (see Piller 2016 on the critique of doing research on multilingualism monolingually).

Beyond the research interview

In my dissertation, I provided detailed analyses on the constraints of the research interview as an ‘objective’ research tool by pointing out that the views on language produced in an interview are co-constructed by the interviewee and the interviewer. This helped me to see the research participants and researchers as equal partners in the production of information and knowledge, and my dissertation work made me very critical also towards objectivizing stances to research interviews. For example, certain things are often mentioned (or not and in a certain way) by an ‘informant’ only because they were asked (or not) by the researcher (in a certain way).

Most importantly, however it turned my attention to research ethics of treating the people we study as equal research participants, not merely as ‘informants’.

During my post-doctoral project (2011—2013), I became interested in the study of linguistic landscapes. The study of linguistic landscapes, or visual semiotics represents a turn “from spoken, face-to-face discourses to the representations of that interaction order in images and signs” (Scollon & Wong Scollon 2003: 82). In my current project (2016–2021), my fieldwork and data generation has also been focused on visual methods.

Originally developed to minimize the impact that researchers have on shaping the data, these methods have the potential to address the basic challenge research interviews have: interviewing appears to put the researcher in a dominant position.

Practicing inclusive research

Taking the concerns of research participant’s positionality and agency vis-a-vis the researcher seriously is a cornerstone of inclusive research. In my current project, I employed a local research assistant, who has been a significant help in building shared interest with the participants and partner institutions.

Revitalization program teachers have come to see our research as beneficial, especially due to the use of digital visual methods, which have provided examples of pedagogical experiments. To take one example: we have carried out iMovie projects with children, where the children’s first video recorded their villages and self-selected topics at home with an iPad provided by the project. Then they edited iMovies with the iPads during a revitalization class and finally showed the final recordings to other children, researchers, parents, and teachers.

Fieldwork projects, such as the iMovie project have served my research aims to gain analysable data through visual methods and thus getting access to participant language views and language practices.

Teachers’ views of research may have been changed as well: some more experienced teachers mentioned that previous research has not been similarly rewarding and that it had been difficult to engage the children in activities such as filling out questionnaires and surveys. In our case, they could see an immediate benefit for the program in the heightened student motivation to use the revitalization language.

Should researchers be activists?

To address this question, I need to begin by reflecting on my analytical framework, the study of language ideologies. I define language ideologies broadly as common linkages between language and non-linguistic phenomena in a given community. In the study of language ideologies I follow, it is a basic assumption that no idea or view about language comes from nowhere. As Silverstein (1998:124) explains:

We might consider our descriptive analytic perspective […] as a species of social-constructionist realism or naturalism about language and its matrix in the sociocultural realm: it recognizes the reflexive entailments for its own praxis, that it will find no absolute Archimedian place to stand – not in absolute “Truth”, nor in absolute “Reality” nor even in absolute deterministic or computable mental or social “Functional Process”. Analysis of ideological factuality is, perforce, relativistic in the best scientific (not scientistic) sense.

From an ”activist” approach, we could investigate how inequality is constructed through language ideologies and then show how such language ideologies are untrue, or “bad” representations of reality or how ideology is produced by “false consciousness” (as argued by Marx, see Blommaert 2006). Such an interpretation of ideology as a distortion of reality performed in order to naturalize a questionable political ideology, has been embraced by certain strands of Critical Discourse Analysis, where the analyses thus examine different linguistic forms and processes of twisting the truth (e.g., the use of metaphors to mislead interpretation, see Reisigl & Wodak 2001).

However, the activist goal of “speaking truth to power” is not an aim shared by researchers in linguistic anthropology, since language ideologies are everywhere and due to the lack of the “Archimedian place” mentioned by Silverstein above, they are false or true according to the perspective we choose or premise we follow (see also Gal, 2002).

To conclude, our research participants and their communities should benefit from the research. To reach this goal, my approach has been to focus on inclusive ethnography and methods of data collection that provide meaningful activities, events and discussions for the research participants and participating institutions. I have focused on examples of best practices, and at the same time remained critical by not trying to pretend that I can speak truth to power.

Finally, a goal for every study should also be to help people understand why research in general is needed and beneficial for people outside of academia.

References

Blommaert, J. 2006. Language Ideology. In Brown, K. (ed). Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. Second edition, vol. 6. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 510-521.
Gal, S. 2002. Language Ideologies and Linguistic Diversity: Where Culture Meets Power. A magyar nyelv idegenben. Keresztes, L. & S. Maticsák (eds.). Debrecen: Debreceni Egyetem, 197-204.
Nind M. 2014. What is inclusive research? London: Bloomsbury.
Piller, I. 2016. Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 11(1), 25–33.
Reisigl, M. & R. Wodak 2001. Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetoric’s of Racism and Anti-Semitism. London: Routledge.
Scollon, R. & Wong Scollon, S. 2003. Discourses in place. Routledge: London.
Silverstein, M. 1998. The Uses and Utility of Ideology: A Commentary. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Schieffelin, B., K. Woolard & P. Kroskrity eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 123-148.