Comparative accounts of linguistic fieldwork as ethical exercises
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Erin Debenport
Abstract
This article is an account of a long-term linguistic fieldwork project at San Antonio Pueblo, New Mexico, an indigenous North American community that places great emphasis on controlling access to cultural and linguistic materials. Using two previous accounts of linguistic fieldwork to frame critical ethical issues (Matras, Language contact, language endangerment, and the role of the “salvation linguist”, Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, 2005; Wilkins, Australian Journal of Linguistics 12: 171–200, 1992), I present my experience of working collaboratively with a tribe who limits the circulation of indigenous language materials and shapes the scope of my research inquiries. As part of my account, I delineate the advantages and challenges of this partnership over time, present an account of my role as researcher, and analyze the ethics of gain and loss for both fieldworkers and indigenous communities. In doing this, I argue for the efficacy of reflexivity, continuously examining one's place in a community of study, and engaging with the experiences of other fieldworkers in order to craft ethical research projects.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
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Articles in the same Issue
- Sociolinguistics and some of its concepts: a historian's view
- A critical commentary on the discourse of language rights in the Naivasha language policy in Sudan using habitus as a method
- Mixed language usage in Belarus: the sociostructural background of language choice
- Expressing age salience: three generations' reported events, frequencies, and valences
- “We should keep what makes us different”: youth reflections on Turkish maintenance in Australia
- From trilingualism to monolingualism? Sicilian-Italians in Australia
- Hong Kong and modern diglossia
- Streetwise English and French advertising in multilingual DR Congo: symbolism, modernity, and cosmopolitan identity
- Local and global perspectives on overcoming literacy challenges in South Africa
- Comparative accounts of linguistic fieldwork as ethical exercises
- Instrumental music and Gaelic revitalization in Scotland and Nova Scotia
- Indigenous students in bilingual Spanish–English classrooms in New York: a teacher's mediation strategies
- Book reviews
