Between Indiana Jones and a Doctor Without Borders: a Problematization of the “Field” in Contemporary Linguistics

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the problematization of field linguistics, a discipline, as defined by A.E. Kibrik, which develops and practices methods of obtaining information about a language unknown to the researcher on the basis of working with the language’s speakers. We examine the discipline’s colonial genealogy (XVI-XIX centuries), the marginalization of field methods and the subdiscipline in linguistics of the 1960s and 1980s, due to the flowering ofstructural and generative linguistics, and the rediscovery of the field, already on a new level, due to the understanding of the need to record and preserve thousands of dying languages. In contrast to social and cultural anthropology, where the collapse of colonial empires forced a rethinking of the field as an obligatory departure to exotic territories, in linguistics the emphasis on dying languages ties fieldwork to places that survived colonialism, i.e. affirms the opposition of dying “primitive” cultures and the modernity that destroysthem. Since the defense of languages under the threat of extinction is proclaimed asthe main foundation of the discipline, the scholars may perform their work insofar as the local communities help them, and they are obliged to repay this debt indefinitely. In other words, the ethos of field linguistics is constructed primarily in relation to informants (the host community) - purely scientific goals are understood as self-evident and do not require separate motivational texts. Particular attention is paid to the ambivalence of the new legitimation of field linguistics (isit possible to preserve languages?), the empirical opposition of “empiricists” versus “arm-chair” linguists, and the critical analysis of field mythologiesin linguistics and the implicit conflict between ethical and aesthetic self-justifications of the discipline - despite all distancing from Victorian science, with its gentlemen scholars, the latter is still present as a reference point, as the foundation of the discipline. This article was written on the basis of analysis of books, articles, and textbooks by linguists, as well as a series of in-depth interviews (N=6) with Russian linguists, experts in the languages of India (conducted in 2021).