Chapter 5 – The ethnography of language and language documentation
127
itself is assimilated to the prototype of the kiva, and the language is assimi-
lated to the language of the kiva. The words of the language become like
kiva objects, which should never be seen by non-initiates. Just as ritual
practice and ritual talk that occurs in the kiva is never shared with outsid-
ers, the language should not be shared with outsiders. Just as the kiva and
even public ritual is a site where nothing is bought and sold, and everything
is generously shared, no price can be put on the language, so it cannot ap-
pear in artifacts that bear a price. In this case we can see the dialectic of
indexicality: the language, which indexes Hopi identity, must be shaped so
that it refers perfectly to that identity: it must be ritually normalized, just as
the identity itself becomes the identity of a ritual participant. Thus a Hopi
word in an $ 80.00 dictionary published by a White institution, truly makes
no sense; it is, in the words of the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966),
“matter out of place,” a form of pollution, and incites profound reactions in
those who are offended.
Anyone who works in indigenous North America, where communities
are only a few generations removed from a true genocide and continue to
confront severe economic marginalization as well as racism, will be able to
recount many examples like the case of the Hopi dictionary. The logic of
language ideology outlined above predicts that documentary linguists will
encounter similar episodes in communities that thus far have been reasona-
bly receptive to documentary projects. The theory also predicts the general
shape that such ideological projects are likely to take: they will assimilate
the resources of language to some image of purity and essence, ritually vali-
dated, and will attempt to remove the language forever from history. Need-
less to say, such ideological projects happen everywhere. However, the com-
munity of speakers of Norwegian, or French, or German is robust enough to
support the occasional outburst of purism without catastrophic results. In-
deed, purism can be a positive asset if the community has the resources to
do something about it; the examples of Israeli Hebrew and Catalan come to
mind. But small minority-language and indigenous communities may not
have such resources, and the state of the language may not give such com-
munities time to work through such episodes and achieve positive and dura-
ble syntheses. So research specifically on such episodes, and how to handle
and understand them, should be a part of our work. Leanne Hinton’s work
on vernacular orthographies (Hinton 2003), a focus of ideological construc-
tion that has stymied language development in some American Indian com-
munities for decades, seems to me a perfect example of the combination of
theoretical penetration and practical recommendation that we require.
128
Jane H. Hill
4. Conclusion
Training in documentary linguistics is very demanding, requiring as it does
expertise in linguistics, in anthropology, in recording technologies and data
management, and in a myriad other ancillary sub-fields. What I hope to
have made clear, though, is that its anthropological component needs to
include training not only in the foundations of ethnographic practice – in
“making strange,” and in learning to notice and manage sites of miscom-
munication – but also in such arcana as the emergent formation of norms
within a community of practice, and in the semiotics of ideology formation.
The problem for us is to make these insights as straightforward for our stu-
dents as is their training in phonology, morphology, and syntax. I hope that
we will succeed in doing this. Just as recent advances in linguistic typology
have immensely facilitated the recognition of the linguistic structures that we
encounter in field work, advances in the study of cultural processes can help
us organize our work and function more successfully, both as linguists and
as friends, colleagues, and advocates for minority-language communities.
Note
1.
Boas’ (1911a) great programmatic statement in the
“Introduction” to the
Handbook of North American Indian Languages was followed by scattered
work by Boas, Sapir, Whorf, and a few others on cultural dimensions of lan-
guage use. But this work is barely integrated with their extensive work on the
description and documentation of grammar. In the 1960s Dell Hymes, John
Gumperz, and their colleagues tried to reopen the Boasian project, proposing
what Hymes called an “ethnography of speaking,” a “sociolinguistics” that
took grammar and phonology to be simply one dimension of a pragmatics, one
way that speakers actually use the material stuff of language. The diverse lines
of work that Hymes enumerated as the foundations of a unified discipline exist
today in over a dozen fragmented subspecialties with only occasional commu-
nication between them. Furthermore, very few people who emerged from the
ethnography of speaking tradition, even those who have worked on indigenous
and other minority linguistic communities, have made substantial contributions
to linguistic description and documentation. Although it is a bit early to tell,
the European “pragmatics” movement exhibits the same kinds of tendencies
toward subspecialization, and its adherents, as far as I can tell, do not seem to
be much involved in documentation of language organization at levels other
than that of rhetoric and discourse.