“The Linguists” are assholes
I watched the documentary “The Linguists” yesterday in my Native American languages class. I didn’t like it.
I mean, I think it’s great that there’s a documentary attempting to make people more aware of language loss, but man, David Harrison and Greg Anderson (the two linguists profiled in the film) are assholes!
Maybe I’m just really sensitive to this sort of issue because I’m studying Native languages in the Southwest. Most of the speech communities in this area (including the Tohono O’odham, the Keresan pueblos, and the Mescalero Apache) either don’t let their languages leave the community, or have set up an Institutional Review Board which makes a researcher prove that their studies won’t contradict the community’s wishes. Tribes have implemented these policies because of scientists like Harrison and Anderson, who swoop into a community, collect data, and then leave, taking it with them. There’s been a tremendous amount of animosity created towards linguists and anthropologists among indigenous communities.
Especially considering the poverty which is typical of many indigenous communities, I am all for a more equal exchange between language researchers and language speakers. In “The Linguists,” Harrison and Anderson showed speakers the video they had recorded, and one of them commented that ‘we show them the video because it’s their intellectual property’ (or something like that), which I found offensive. If they actually believed that a language is the intellectual property of its speakers, they wouldn’t be taking away that data without permission.
I plan to become involved in linguistic field work in the next few years, and it bothers me to see linguists like Harrison and Anderson perpetuating the stereotype of the Western scientist exploiting an indigenous people, taking what they want and never giving anything in return. If you’re going to spend time studying an obsolescent language, create some learning materials for the speakers (I did like that they made a Chulym picture book), or teach an evening class at the tribal community college, or something.
Maybe I’m just overreacting. What do you think?
implodingmastodon 
I had the same types of feelings the first time I watched the documentary. The type of linguistic fieldwork it portrays (especially their work in Peru(?) and India) is portrayed like the swoop-data-leave method. Which pisses me off too.
I’ve watched the film in two of my classes, and in the second one we read something (can’t remember what) really interesting that said both Harrison and Anderson were very frustrated with the way the documentary portrayed their fieldwork. This really has to do with the constraints of film and getting people not interested in the topic to watch it: It’s much more interesting to watch a lot of small, interesting scenes that an elicitation of nominal plurals, for instance.
Both Harrison and Anderson are good, serious linguists concerned with language loss (which can’t be said for all good, serious linguists out there). They run Living Tongues (http://www.livingtongues.org/aboutus.html) for goodness sake. So they are concerned with language loss and the way it affects both linguistics and communities. And I’m frustrated with the documentary portraying them otherwise, and portraying linguistic fieldwork like it does.
I think that linguistic fieldwork should always be sensitive to the needs and desires of the community that the fieldwork is taking place in. I myself hope to do fieldwork somewhere in North America (I’m mostly interested in Salish, but i’m also interested in languages of California and somewhat the Southwest). But at the same time, not all fieldwork is in the North American context. Some communities with endangered languages aren’t interested in setting up revitalization programs…because they don’t see the point. So sometimes, being sensitive to the desires of a community might mean not doing shit with them and just getting your data. They might not care.
In hindsight, I do feel like I may have judged these guys too quickly. I poked around on http://www.thelinguists.com as well as http://www.pbs.org/thelinguists/David-And-Greg/How-They-Work.html , and I do agree with you that the documentary seems to portray them in a way that makes them appear less ‘researcher’ and more ‘adventurer’.
Still, and maybe this is again more the fault of the documentary crew than the linguists themselves, but I feel like they were poking fun of some of the speakers in a way that wasn’t appropriate. The Kallawaya shaman they met with in Bolivia showed up three hours late, and they got all upset. I would have thought that with all the field work these guys do, they’d expect that to happen, or at least not be surprised by it.
I don’t know guys, I thought “The Linguists” was funny as hell.
I think why I liked it so much was because everybody in it were real people. THe scientists can be assholes, true, but they’re also doing amazing work. The natives, who are in every Other movie seen as sacred knowledge-holders, here seemed like regular people.
Didn’t the Linguists get sports stuff for the Indian kids, a language book for the Russian kids, and showed that the Peruvian language really existed to a bunch of Peruvian academics who didn’t believe it did? I don’t know, that seems like leaving something behind to me. I’m also not sure they forced any speakers to sit with them without their permission./
I am also not sure the linguists hated the film. I saw it with one of them presenting it and he seemed pretty happy.
There was a point in the film where they showed the movie they made back on the computer, and talked about how many folks are amazed to see their indigenous cultures in movies and on computer screens, because they hadn’t considered their culture to legitimately be a part of the modern world. And in the case of Chulym, it seemed like they were doing things like encouraging speakers to develop an orthography for their language, write childrens’ stories in the language, and in general raise the prestige of Chulym simply by giving it attention.
In India, though, I thought it was a little distasteful where they were joking about “Birhor” as a terrible name.
Sadly once a community/culture goes on the defensive it’s probably doomed. If you value your language and culture then surely you ought to be overjoyed when someone from the outside takes an interest. Anyone who learns a language is almost bound to empathise to some extent with its speakers, otherwise learning it would scarcely be possible. I just don’t get this whole ‘intellectual property’ thing. If a language only exists in the minds of a small and fragile community, then with one ‘careless’ generation that fails to pass it on fully, it’s lost for eternity. You write as if these people are stealing something, as though it were a physical resource. How does sharing you language, or any other information, detract from your ability to continue to use it? The more people that speak a small language the more conversations you can have in it, and the more it’s used the better it survives and grows. Is this just another case of trying to pass off the blame on outsiders, where the fault is in the community itself for failing to raise its kids in its own language, surely the most natural thing in the world, at least in a healthy society. [OK I’m playing devil’s advocate, I do appreciate that this is a real and serious problem]