Hello everyone! Welcome to the first episode of the Endangered Languages in India podcast. For this episode, we have with us Dr Gerald Roche, who is an anthropologist and Senior Research Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne (https://scholars.latrobe.edu.au/display/groche). He was previously a DECRA fellow at the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Uppsala University's Hugo Valentin Centre.
Dr. Roche's research focuses on the politics of language endangerment and revitalization, with a regional focus on Tibet. As an applied anthropologist, he has collaborated with people in Tibet on various educational and cultural initiatives, including in the creation of the world's largest online archive of oral traditions from the Tibetan Plateau, and the publication of the first nationally-distributed English language textbooks designed specifically for Tibetans. His current research project looks at ethnic politics and linguistic diversity in Tibet.
This interview was recorded on the 23rd of November, 2019, when Dr. Roche was in India, participating in the Indian launch of the La Trobe Asia Brief Issue 3, held in partnership with the Anthropology department of Sikkim University, and he also delivered a talk on his work in language revitalization on the invitation of Centre for Endangered Languages, Sikkim University. He is in conversation with our members Dr. Wichamdinbo Mataina, Dr. Meiraba Takhellambam, Dr. Hima S and Mr. Karthick Narayanan. We talk about issues in language revitalisation and linguistic ideologies.
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Karthik Narayanan (KN): Good evening guys, so my name is Karthik and today we have Dr. Gerald Roche as our guest.
Gerald Roche (GR): Hello
KN: Did I get your name right?
GR: Yes
KN: Thank you, Gerald. So this is our first sort of a podcast attempt. So we basically operate out of a Facebook page. So we are real amateurs in whatever we do.
GR: I'm a professional amateur so that’s fine [laughter]
KN: So before we start it we want to hear from you, how did you get into…
Hima S (HS): …how did you come into this language endangerment and revitalisation [field]
GR: Yeah sure so I guess like yourselves, it's something that I came into by accident, without planning. It's not something that I spent my life training and studying for. It was something that I had to figure out on the go, so to speak. So the way that I became involved with studying language revitalization and working with endangered languages was that I went to China to work in a university there for an Australian organisation called Australian Volunteers International. I went there basically as a teacher at a university—I was invited there to teach English and anthropology in a special program that was for students from across the Tibetan Plateau. And so I started working there, teaching anthropology. I quickly became involved with the concerns that students had about their language and about their culture. I worked with them to set up a small NGO where we were documenting oral traditions. We were training people to use recorders to use video cameras to go to their communities and document the practices that people were concerned about and which they felt that the communities were losing. And so, working with those students and learning from them, I fairly quickly started to realize the extent of linguistic diversity amongst Tibetans and the extent to which that diversity is threatened. And the way that that is something that people are very concerned about. So, really, it was from being in that context, being with those people, trying to learn about their concerns that I started working on this and so, you know, I wanted to try and help those people in the best way that I could. And so I started going through the literature, reading everything that I could about language endangerment and language revitalization work. And so it's very much from that—that practical work—that got me interested in it.
HS: So yesterday (ed.: the previous day’s workshop session) there was a question about your methodology and you talked about how you have worked in the Fishmanian [framework] and then moved on to…
GR: Yeah…
HS: …so what was the journey of moving towards language politics [like]?
GR: Yeah it's been a kind of complicated journey. There's no real point at which I could say that I suddenly became interested in language politics, right? And that's indicated by the fact that I'm still trying to put a name to the approach that I'm using. Is it necro politics of language, bio politics of language? Is it just the politics of language? Is that the international political economy of languages I was talking about—was suggested to me yesterday. So it's still something which is an evolving approach, something that I'm still trying to discover. But essentially, the realization that I had was that Fishmanian approaches—classical sociolinguistic approaches—are always going to be limited by the structures that are set up by the state and other powerful social institutions. If they don't create political space for those languages to thrive, then they're not going to thrive. And I've seen this from my practical experience of working with communities, working with languages, doing project after project after project and just saying that it's just the hamster wheel. It's a sociolinguistic hamster wheel—you don't get anywhere. The realization of the importance of not just politics but political activism or social mobilization—that really came about through a project that I did, a book that I published called Indigenous Efflorescence: Beyond Revitalisation in Sapmi and Ainu Mosir. So when I left China, I went to Sweden and started getting interested in indigenous language revitalisation. One of my colleagues there was from Japan and was working with Ainu communities and we decided to do a book which was a case study of communities talking about their experience of revitalization work. So it's just a series of short case studies, like two or three pages [each], where they talked about what they do in their communities. And the idea was to create something that would be accessible to other people in communities, that would be relatable and understandable: ‘This is what I do, this is how I do this work’. And we left the description very open to people—what they could write about. And most of them wrote about politics—it was like, ‘well what did we do? We went to the streets and we protested. We submitted letter after letter to the government, we stood outside and we blocked the building so no one could come into it’. And you know, having come from China this was just not something that had been on my radar before that. And so when I was working on the book and trying to theorize what that means, I looked into the history of indigenous protest in the West. Really, without the history of protest—in places like America and Australia, it comes out of the civil rights movement, the indigenous rights movement, in the sixties and seventies. And without that protest history you couldn't do language revitalisation, right? You would still have assimilation policies. And when we think about language revitalization, we just think about this technical exercise, like you can solve the problem with an app, a dictionary or something, and we often forget this history that precedes all of that, which is a history of protest, a history of radical political change.
Meiraba Takhellambam (MT): That actually brings me to here (ed.: Sikkim). What is very interesting is that Sikkim as a nation-state which came out from a huge protest, it was actually a protest movement against the monarchy and that's [how] Sikkim came into being. From my reading [over] my last three years here, what actually happened was that there was a coming together of all these ethnic communities under this term Nepaliness, which is more like a cultural identity than being a linguistic identity. But what that might have done—though I also don't have a lot of history, as you said we need to actually go to the histories, and not a lot of things is available. So one of the things that I’ve been hypothesizing is that something happened during those times. Because when we go to the field, you find sixty-year-olds or [people in their] fifties—which is almost about the time of ’75 [ed.: when the monarchy was overthrown]—they are using those [the indigenous] languages but post that, you see that there's actually a gradual shift [towards Nepali]. If we actually talk about education as being the forebearer of doom for these languages, then [the shift] should have happened when they had gone into the school systems but this is one of the interesting points that you've been bringing out.
GR: I think that goes to an important point that when you look at the patterns of language shift, you can often tie that to particular historical moments. And so if you see that language shift takes place at this point you can trace that back to, “well okay, the children today are learning a majority language. That means that their parents were the transitional generation and their grandparents—something happened between the grandparents and the parents generation.” And you can often time that historically. So for example, where I work in Tibet, a lot of people think that the important historical transition was 1949 and the establishment of China and the incorporation of Tibet into China. And actually if you look at the patterns of language shift that does not register at all - 1949 doesn't mean anything. What you do see is two really important periods. One is 1958—so in North East Tibet 1958 is when the real cultural destruction, cultural assimilation began. And so in 1958 you start to see, simultaneously, the exclusion of some languages and the building of public institutions like schools and so on, right, and then you get these inequalities starting to emerge as state institutions are being built. But those state institutions were not really powerful for several decades. Schools existed but most people did not go to school. So really the critical shift starts to happen in the 1990s and early 2000s when that infrastructure that exists suddenly receives all of this financial investment, right, and essentially at that time you see economic development, state-led economic development starting. And so the structures that the state established in 1958 suddenly become oppressive and destructive when they are empowered by state-led development. And so you see those two critical periods of 1958 and the year 2000 and the patterns of language shift follow exactly that. So from 1958 you start to get the production of an elite of people who are shifting languages, but most people don't go to school, they don't have any contact with the government, it doesn't really matter. Late 1990s, early 2000s you start to see everyone going into school, everyone being engaged in wage employment, everyone being disembedded from their village communities and their agricultural lifestyle, and language shift at that point becomes universalized. And so that's why these kind of historical understandings are really important: when you look at, “okay, people in their 20s are the last generation to speak the language fluently” then you trace that back to when they were born and what was happening 20 years ago would tell you what's historically and politically important then.
Wichamdinbo Mataina (WM): We are also, over the years, working on the language documentation. So basically here what we do is, we write grammar, dictionary, and so on. Now, we also realized that to save the language, giving to the community members the beautiful grammar or dictionary is not enough. It's more about—related to do with their economic condition et cetera et cetera. As you work for the language equality, language and politics, you also know that language inequality or language politics is a continuality. So what do you think, in your opinion, is the ideal thing you are trying to achieve? It is a very continual thing, right, language and politics? Looks like beautiful grammar alone will not do. We have realized we have to really involve politics to bring roads, to bring electricity... What is the ideal thing you are looking for, when you are working in this area?
GR: So the first thing that I would say is that the work that linguists do to write grammars, to document a language, to archive it and so on—I think we can think about that as a form of politics. And I think that for that work to really be as fully effective as possible, we need to think about it as a form of politics. So I mentioned before, during the talk, this idea of redistribution and recognition as being a way to describe social justice and social inequalities. And if you think about what happens when someone sits down to write a grammar, it's not just a linguistic activity, it's not just a scientific research activity. It's a political activity because it creates new forms of redistribution and recognition. So it creates recognition for that community by asserting that that community is important, that that community exists, that that community is worth studying. So for example, some of the people that I know in China who speak languages that are widely thought to not exist, right—people will either say that it's just a dialect of something else, or they refuse to acknowledge that it even exists. And people from those communities have gone on to train and become linguists, they've produced grammars of their language, and when they go back to the community and show that grammar, even if people can't read that grammar it's a profound experience of being acknowledged publicly for the first time. And then they can go to people in the mainstream majority population and say, “here's the grammar of this language” and they will be told, “that can't have a grammar because it's not a language.” That's the kind of thing that you are intervening in when you write a grammar of a language that is oppressed. So it's—that deals with the recognition aspect of it, that you are bringing respect and esteem and acknowledgement that the language exists, when you write a grammar. Because then that brings it to equal status with other languages. And this is one of the great things about linguistics—it’s that the foundation of linguistic descriptive and theoretical work is radical equality: all languages are equal, they're all equally grammatical, they can all be described by the same techniques and vocabularies. And so I think, like an acknowledgement of the radical nature of linguistic fieldwork is an important way to bring these things into the political realm. Now the second part is redistribution, which is about who has access to what resources. And the fact is that when a linguist comes into a community, often they're bringing resources with them. They're paying research assistants, they're bringing access to technology and equipment, and things like this. And linguistics is increasingly developing in the direction where community members are more and more involved in research. And that involvement has material consequences. It means that they might get more funding. When funding comes it doesn't come just to the linguist it goes to community members as well. So this work that linguists do—this kind of documentation work, this descriptive work—it seems politically harmless, it seems very depoliticized or unpolitical, but if you think about it in terms of recognition and redistribution, you know, there are aspects to it which are really quite radical and egalitarian. And I think that considering ways to be clear about that, to improve the way that that functions politically, is something that would be good to see linguists doing, to be doing a little bit more of. In terms of what do I imagine is kind of my ideal world is... the way that I think about these is not as a utopian project. The idea is not to think of a destination that we want to reach and to get to that point. To me it's more constructive to think about what are the barriers to equality, what are the different forms of inequality and how can we abolish barriers to equality. And the idea for me is that it's a continually evolving project. There will always be new frontiers of inequality that will constantly have to be addressed. And if we set our mind on what the destination should be, then that can sort of take the energy out of a political project because it seems impossible, it seems distant, it seems like we're never going to get there. But if you focus only on concrete goals like “we need to abolish this kind of barrier, we need to remove this form of exclusion, we need to reconsider our vocabulary for talking about this,” then that enables the project to have momentum and to continue. And the other thing is that if you have that vision, that vision has to be decided upon collectively. And the way to build that collective decision is by building constantly more inclusive conversations. So yeah, I would say I don't have a vision of what an ideal world looks like but I don't have a vision deliberately. Because I don't think we should have one.
KN: This then leads to a very interesting question: the way we interact and the way we do our work—so, method—as a linguist... not as just a linguist but more of a language documentationist. So documentary linguistics and the methods of documentary linguistics then seems to take the forefront here. So let's say, for example, participatory research sort of a thing that we are partly following here in Sikkim and some of us have partly followed it during our own research for our PhDs and stuff like that... So what sort of methods have been adopted across the world—or can be adopted across the world—to make this let’s say, this barriers at least go—it's like, let's take one barrier at a time, not the whole thing. Just take one barrier down at a time—that sort of an approach.
GR: Yeah, the first barrier is the barrier of inclusion and exclusion. And this idea of the linguist as expert always recreates power hierarchies that will never help the community. And so thinking about participatory modes of research is really an important first barrier that always needs to be removed. And I think there's lots of interesting conversations about how that participatory inclusion is done. So there are questions about the ethics of the research and who gets to decide what is ethical and unethical in a particular context. There's questions of who sets the research agenda. Another really important question is the question of what in Australia we're starting to call ‘data sovereignty’--so who has control of the data that gets produced. Then there are questions of representation and participation. So when someone is writing about the community, who gets to decide what is said publicly. Who gets to sign off on that and approve that. So you can say inclusion and exclusion is an important barrier and then you can break that down into these issues of things like ethics, data sovereignty, representation and so on. And I think that these are all issues that the linguistic community is dealing with. How well they're dealing with them differs from case to case, but the fact that those conversations are happening in linguistics is very encouraging. And I think there are really good institutional frameworks for that to happen. I can't remember the name now, but there's in the U.S., like every two or three years they have these participatory summer schools where community linguists work with people. love work with linguists to train them, there's things like the Breath of Life workshops in the US and so on. And this idea that basically linguists are employed by communities... The power relationship should be in the hands of community and the linguist is there to... provide the expertise, to provide the technical skills--in the same way that a plumber or an electrician is. They’re there to fix a problem, like an electrician coming into your house and telling you that they're going to build up a floodlight in the lounge room and then the plumber is going to put a fountain in the kitchen [laughter], is where we're coming from.
KN: So this question of representation--since you already touched upon it--is something that linguists often overlook sometimes, or sometimes gloss it on topics like objectivity...
MT: ... and [for] some I would say, it's about awareness: some are not even aware of it…
KN: Yeah, some are completely not even aware of it--that's the first category; some overlook it for the sake of “objectivity”--what they believe is “objective” is right; and some utterly use the colonial power that they possess. So I'm not worried about those in the third category. But this objectivity, the question of objectivity and representation…
HS: … and the place of the researcher in the research...
KN: … or during the process of research itself--is something that most of us don't consider yet, even within existing issues on representation. What we get is sort of a[n] acknowledgement, or we get a sort of a[n] approval from what linguists would traditionally call ‘informants’ in the older models, and in the newer model, ‘participants’. But how can we look into this representational issue beyond objectivity?
GR: I don't think that I really have the expertise to give a completely satisfactory answer to that question, but I'm kind of aware of conversations that I think linguists should also be aware of. So there's this anthropological critique that we should do away completely with objectivity, and that everything is subjective and so we just should not try to be objective. I'm opposed to that perspective because it opens a Pandora's box where what is true can just be subject to power. And we've seen this nasty slippage of like America and Russia where truth becomes propaganda. Fake news... Real news is fake news, fake news is real news...
KN: The era of ‘post-truth’!
GR: You get this postmodern explosion where nothing is true, everything is fake, so everything could be audio unclear] and nothing could be trusted and so on. And so I think the more interesting conversations are had, for example, in some of the feminist technoscience conversations where they talk about this idea that I think is called ‘strong objectivity’. So there are debates around this idea that comes out of what I talked about yesterday as Standpoint Theory. The idea that a political problem is best analyzed from the people who are most affected by it, who are at the bottom of the hierarchy and so on. And so some Standpoint Theorists, some feminists write about this in relation to how do we do science, what does it mean to say that knowledge is socially situated and socially produced. And so their idea is basically that when you look at a social problem in particular, there are better ways of being more objective about it. And the better ways of being more objective about that is to locate the correct standpoint from which to analyze it. So for example, a man analyzing the patriarchy can be objective and still be wrong and provide an incomplete picture of it, whereas a woman who's adopting a feminist standpoint--which means it's a political project to advance women's rights and equality--will provide a more thorough analysis of it and it will be a more objective analysis of it as well. So I think what we need to do is not think about, we need to not think about acknowledging greater subjectivity but think about acknowledging greater objectivity that arises from different standpoints. And I think that this kind of argument is more likely to be convincing to linguists who consider linguistics as science, linguistics as founded on objectivity and so on, this is kind of the normative standpoint in linguistics. If you start saying that we need to throw objectivity out the door, strategically that's not going to convince most linguists. But I also think, just on the merits of the argument itself, that what we actually need to do is think about different forms of objectivity in the study of linguistics. And again, linguistics is already really interestingly positioned to have these conversations. Now if you think about the early work that Boas did around the concept of apperception--the idea that if you're not from that linguistic community, you're going to not be able to perceive certain linguistic contrasts, and that you have to consider the sound system from an internal standpoint or else you're not going to be able to be objective about it. So in this very basic foundational way linguists are already working with Standpoint Theory. You have to consider the language from the perspective of its own logic. You're already Standpoint Theorists. And so I think it's more about thinking through the consequences of that, thinking through the implications of that. That would be something that I would say is interesting, useful to do.
HS: We have talked about participants and about [the] linguist as an expert, mostly coming from an external [location], maybe not a member of community. And then there are community linguists who are members of the community. We also have, especially in a setting like ours, we also have people who are considered insider-outsiders, who are members of the community but, maybe they are not experts in linguistics but they work with us and as part of our team.
GR: Yeah
HS: So what do these people have to take out of efforts like this, especially institutionalized efforts, like for instance, a Centre for Endangered Languages like ours?
GR: Yeah yeah, so inside is in the outside so like, people from the community, what do they have to gain from this?
HS: Yeah
KN: Especially those who are working with us...
GR: as participants and colleagues...
KN: ...more as colleagues.
GR: Yeah. So let me kind of put that in a broader frame and relate it back to something I was talking about yesterday, related to identity politics... So there [is] this increasing emphasis on participation, collaboration, and co-design and so on. A lot of linguists are threatened by this idea because they see that as someone saying you can't do research on my community because you're an outsider, and it's only meaningful for insiders to do research on this project... And that's not what I think the implications of bringing identity politics into linguistics are. I do think that in a lot of ways we should privilege people from communities to do research because I think that that intervenes in political circumstances that help address the needs of the language and the community. But that doesn't mean that we should exclude outsiders from doing research within the community. What I think we need to do is consider what we might call different people’s epistemic resources -- the knowledge that they have access to given their social experience and so on -- and to think about how outsiders and insiders have access to different epistemic resources when they approach these research communities. So I think if you have colleagues who are from communities that work with these communities or if you have colleagues and you work with them on their language, what that means is just trying to develop a kind of appreciation for each other's epistemic insights and epistemic deficits. There's always going to be things that you won't be able to know that you don't know, that your colleagues will just see immediately. But at the same time, from being within the community, there will be things that will be hard for them to perceive as well. And that's why I think this idea of collaboration, cooperation, co-design is really good, because it's actually a mutually empowering relationship. And the more that we recognize that, the more effective, more meaningful, more transformative those kinds of collaborations will be.
WM: So, related to that, I have another [question], I mean I just want to hear your experience, basic thing. I want to know why in the first place you did go to China and do that work, and so we have just talked about the field practicalities and the challenges in working with the communities. So as you work for what you work, did you have to learn their local language or do they speak English or something? Here in Sikkim we also have to learn Nepali or Hindi or something like that, because English is not the common language here. So that is very very important, I mean, very big barrier for [us] to access inside the community, even emotionally or [something] like that. So for you, [coming] from Australia and you went straight to China, so what about those situations about the language barriers and the medium of the language between you and the subjects you are studying?
GR: Yeah, the kind of “origin story” -- we talked about origin stories -- the origin story of how I ended up in China was basically that I did my undergraduate, I studied science, so I studied Ecology and Evolutionary theory. I also studied an Arts degree in Anthropology, so I was doing both of those things together. My dream was to become Dian Fossey who lived with gorillas [laughter], or maybe Jane Goodall [laughter] if I couldn't become Dian Fossey. And so when I graduated I went on to do Honours and I was starting to get very much into postmodern philosophy and anthropology. [It] was very much of that moment in the mid to late 1990s where everyone was deconstructing everything and anthropology was having a crisis, and I wrote a very theoretically complicated dissertation which … I received top marks for, and then in conversation with someone who actually understood the theories that I was using I realized that I made a very basic mistake and had not understood the materials that I was reading and neither had any of the people who were assessing my thesis [laughter]. So I had this profound moment of disappointment with academia [laughter] and decided to give it a rest for a while. But at the same time I realized that the education that I had was a profoundly powerful resource, that it was extremely meaningful and could make a difference in the world. And so then through sort of a few years of wandering around and going to various countries and talking to lots of people and thinking about what I could do, I knew that I wanted to do something practical with my work, I wanted to make use of my knowledge rather than just form beautiful sentences that were of questionable accuracy. And so I then ended up in China working as a volunteer teacher at this University, then like I said that led to these encounters which led to new interests. In terms of the languages and how I engaged with people there, so coming there I didn't have any background in Asian Studies, I didn't have any background in Chinese studies, I didn't have any background in Tibetology... you know, during the time there I met lots of people who were professional Tibetologists and professional Sinologists. And again [it] comes back to this idea of epistemic positioning and epidemic resources, a lot of those people were very empowered by their knowledge and the training that they had. But it also produced profound blind spots and it really produced an incapacity to see what was happening right in front of their noses, alright. And so I had the advantage of being there and being able to learn on the ground from the people around me. So just to give an example of the kind of blind spots that people had: My PhD supervisor from Australia, Colin Mackerras, has been working with and in China for decades. He went there to learn Chinese before the Cultural Revolution. [He had] profound knowledge of Chinese language, culture and history and so on and he came to where I was living on the north-east Tibetan plateau, and the first day he arrived we were having noodles in the restaurant. The staff were speaking to each other in the local variety of Chinese, Qinghai Hua, which is... it's a highly... it's a Sinitic language, it's a variety of Mandarin which is highly influenced by its contact with languages like Tibetan and Salar and Mongolian and so on. And so, people in the restaurant were chatting away in this language and so I asked my supervisor, “I'm just curious if you can understand what they're saying,” and he said, “no, I can't understand, but why would I, when they're speaking Tibetan?” [laughter] Right, and they weren't speaking Tibetan, they were speaking a variety of Chinese. But his understanding of what Chinese language was, was of such a type that it was impossible that this language...
KN: ...can be Chinese
GR: ...can be Chinese, right. And so that's just one example of the kind of thing which I saw repeated over and over again, so I, you know, my training didn't lead me to make those kind of mistakes, but it led me to make other kinds of mistakes. So in terms of the language, the language stuff--and again, I didn't go there to study in that sense. So it wasn't something that I ever really devoted myself to in the way that I now feel that I should have and that I wish I had. So the way that I learned Chinese was just in the street, at the shops, in a restaurant, driving around in taxis…
KN, HS: That’s the best way
GR: Yeah. My Chinese was like a very thin pocket knife. It had a very limited number of things that I could do with it right, when I…
KN: You could still stab with it [laughter]
GR: Yeah. It was a very blunt knife as well. [laughter] So for example when I got a call in class one day, there was this urgent thing that I had to take and I got on the phone and had to speak to someone using my Chinese, and then when I got off one of my students came up to me laughing and he said, “Teacher, it's amazing, your Chinese is exactly like my grandfather's. You sound like an old Tibetan nomad trying to speak Chinese.” [laughter] And so that was the level of my Chinese. My Tibetan, so the Tibetan -- I did put more effort into learning Tibetan. I don't feel that I was ever successful at it. The first thing that I had to decide is what type of Tibetan you're going to learn. Because the people who learn Tibetan in the West invariably learn Lhasa Tibetan or something that they call standard Tibetan, which is not the most commonly spoken Tibetan language in China. So I had the good fortune to know people who knew that that was the case, so from the beginning I didn't start trying to learn a language that was totally useless. So I started to learn Amdo Tibetan. I … figured out from people around me what varieties were considered most sort of standard and prestigious and tried to learn that. So I tried to learn the Amdo Tibetan variety that is spoken by the high altitude pastors living in particular areas. And so I did that, but where I was living was a Chinese city. And so my capacity to use the language was limited. The time that I had to study it was limited because I was working full time and so I learnt it to an extent that it did give me insights into the way things work there but I would not go so far as to say that I was fluent in the language. But, you know, learning, that process of going through and learning the language to the extent that I was able to, gave me all sorts of insights into things like, for example, the nature of linguistic diversity and the fact that, Tibetans from different places simply don't understand each other. But ... on the other hand, there are different levels of understandability, right. So if I'm using my Amdo Tibetan and I'm speaking with someone from Kham we can figure things out and it's okay but because the Tibetan is related and we can make ourselves understood. If I tried to do that with someone from Lhasa it's impossible for me, and then if I try to speak with someone … who’s from the Minyag area, Minyag speaking communities, or speaks one of the Gyalrong languages or speaks Manegacha which is another language that I've worked with, there's just nothing -- there's no foundation to build commonalities on. And so that's one thing that it gave me insight into -- it’s just that slippery slope of variation that exists between ways of speaking. And the second thing that was really important for me in going through that process was to understand the way in which language is taught and thought about. Because essentially, I was asking people to teach me the way the language -- the way that people speak it, and people wanted to teach me the way that it was written. And so I had to go through these processes of learning the alphabet, the syllabary, the way that words are constructed to spell things out loud, you don't read the text you recite it... And so the language that I learned to speak in the end was this weird mixture of the way that people speak the language in the home and the way that it's written in sort of contemporary text. So it's actually this weird creole language that no one actually speaks, and that would always be amusing for people. Because I would put a very vernacular word together with a very literary construct and things like this. But you know, the people who were teaching me didn't make that separation. The way to learn the language was to learn the written language, and then you would just speak through the spoken language somehow because of that.
KN: I can very much relate to it. I learned Hindi on the street, from the auto drivers, from the shopkeepers, from classmates from all over the region which speaks “a” language called Hindi so I sort of can use a Bombaiya Hindi and embed it into a Bihari [laughter] variety of Hindi so that's a very ... I completely learned it outside any formal educational setup.
GR: Yeah. One of the consequences of that for me is that like when you're taught to read you're not taught to read, you're taught to recite a text, and so when I try to read silently it's very difficult. [laughter] My first impulse is to just start reading things out loud. And I have to sort of put my hand over my mouth and try and internalize the text, because it creates this false sense of competence, it's like, “Oh, if I can read the text out loud then I understand it.” But I often don't. I have to go back, “okay, what does this actually say?” [laughter]
KN: Okay. Gerald, it's been a long day for us also, but I would want to ask you one more thing.
GR: Sure
KN: So, having one of the most largest archives of Tibetan oral literature, how did you build it? That's one question, the other thing is that we are also doing this sort of a language documentation project, here in the Centre and in the larger [region] -- as we pointed we are in this network of people who do documentation. But one thing that we recognize here is, we don't have archives within India which give access to language data. And those archives like, let's say, ELAR or the one at MPI, the DOBES one, I really find it virtually impossible ... to access even a slightest bit of data from it. Let's say I want to hear a specific song sung by a specific person, or of a specific genre or that contains a specific, let's say, word in the sentence… I literally find it even inaccessible and I'm not really [one of] those who are computationally illiterate. So I'm not also those. I can also go behind and search too, but I still find it very difficult to access it. So what was your experience of, one, building this archive, and one after having it out? What [do] people tell you, do they tell you that, “yeah, I find my voice there”?
GR: So basically, we did not set out to create an archive, in the beginning. That was never why we started to do what we were doing. Because, my approach, that was you know, I have a deep suspicion of archives as a technique of colonial rule. As a good anthropologist trained in the 1990s that's what we're taught to believe, and that's what I believed. And that's still what I believe to some extent. It’s that if archives are not managed extremely carefully and there are huge deliberative processes then they just -- whatever the intention -- they end up reinforcing patterns of domination. And I would say that that's even true of the archive that we created. So I want to talk a little bit about what we did set out to create first, and then how it came to that one and so on. So what we set out to do was basically to create what I used to think of at the time as a distributed archive. Which is that we would train the students, the project members to use these digital recorders, we would talk to them about like metadata protocols which was all the rage in the early 2000s and still all the rage, and we talk about metadata protocols, we talk about recording techniques, how to isolate the singer from the environment and what kind of microphones to use and all these kind of technical things, send them back to record all that, then they would come back to the city where the university was located, and what we would do is then we would process and repackage that and repatriate it immediately. So basically they would take the recorder and a digital camera, they would take pictures, sometimes make short videos, they would put the videos and pictures together into like a slideshow with the music and oral traditions under it, because that is a format that is very popular, it's extremely relatable, it's something that people want to consume, and the idea was to give these oral traditions a new social life. The idea for me was never to archive them. It was to give them a new social life by technologically reinventing them. And that's what we did and those things were very popular. People loved them, they played them, they brought people to their house to consume them together. And I think that that was really good and really successful. But after doing that for several years, [we] started to realize that the projects that we'd done before were ... that the VCDs that we were making were getting broken and they were getting scratched, they were getting lost and we didn't have backup records on it. And then I started to get anxious about this. And at the same time, through a couple of different opportunities, we were presented with the choice of whether we wanted to archive some of the stuff that we'd been recording. So it was all sitting on a hard drive somewhere in Xining, which is the city where I lived. And then through the World Oral Literature project which was run out of Cambridge University by Mark Turin, he basically presented us with the opportunity to say, like, if you want to place these somewhere centrally, we've got the infrastructure to do that. We can provide some funding for someone to do all that processing. So we talked about that and what we basically decided was to give the collectors the choice of whether they wanted to do that or not. So we archived, in the end, about a thousand different items, which probably represents maybe thirty percent of the total amount of material that was collected. People just didn't want to do it; they weren't sure why they should do it. I was fine with that. The way that we tried to make them available in the archive was that all the metadata protocols that we had were duplicated in English, written Tibetan, and written Chinese, with the idea that that would make them accessible to people. But the fact of the matter is that the interface is in English. And you have to be able to navigate the English interface to locate the documents in the language that you understand. And that presupposes that you even know that the archive exists in the first place, right? So you have this problem that the materials are technically available to people who don't have access to English but there are several layers separating the people in the villages from those things. There's the digital divide, there's the fact that they don't know that the website exists, that they can't navigate to where the documents are, and so on. And so to what extent those materials have been used and accessed and have been meaningful rather than just being kind of dead birds in a museum drawer, like there are definitely cases that I can point to, where I know that if the recorder is dedicated to making those things available to the community and developing things with them, then that happens. But if the recorder doesn't do anything to drive that process, if the person responsible for that collection doesn't drive that process then it doesn't go anywhere. So there are [situations], like I went to the UK to some of these workshops that were being held for the World Oral Literature project and there were people there who had made more use of the archives that we created than any Tibetan people, or any people in the communities where the materials were from. … The real problem is not that people can't access it, the problem is that it's more accessible to people outside the community than inside the community. And so I think what that suggests to me is that when we do this archiving there's a couple of different problems that you have to solve. One is making the interface of the archive as simple and as intuitive as possible -- to do it pictorially, graphically, or to do it in local languages from the top down as much as possible. And the second one is then just how do you let people know that the archive exists, and how do you make sure that they have the capacity to access that. What platform, how are they going to be accessing it? Are they going to be getting into it on the phone or a laptop? In most places I'm sure it's going to be a phone. So that has design implications as well. But then the other one is just the broader sort of consciousness of what is the archive for and why would you bother accessing it. The reason why oral traditions are lost from communities and the reason why languages are lost for communities is that really there are social pressures to abandon those things. I really have a problem with these victim-blaming discourses that oh, these people just need to speak their language and then it will be maintained. And it overlooks the fact that there are these enormous social pressures for them not to speak it. And so if the archive is there, people need a reason to access it and they need a reason to feel that it's meaningful and positive and possible and that it will have implications for them, in their life and their community right? So we focus on these technical and even the ethical issues of archives and access and so on. But again, like all of these things, if we don't take into consideration the political life of these archives, you can make the archive accessible, you can do it ethically but if people are pressured to distance themselves from whatever you have archived then it's not going to matter.
WM: Yeah, maybe a last question from me, a simple one. From your country or from your experience working around the world, talking about the archive thing, is there now anybody, any community, like, having the fruit of language documentation or something like, let's say, because somebody documented somebody's language in 1990s, now they are using that thing and they are reviving their language... Any such thing, from [your experience]?
GR: So one example of this is the Breath of Life workshops which happened in the USA where they're bringing indigenous communities into particular archives to access records that were made in the 19th century to revitalize languages. This is also being done in Australia, there's an effort to get a regular series of workshops along similar lines to help indigenous people access information about their languages that's recorded in the archives. But here we're really dealing with stuff that was penned on paper a hundred or hundred and fifty years ago. In terms of examples, ... language documentation as a field of practice--we've just been celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of the discipline right--and so what are the examples that have happened in the last 25 years where sort of digital language documentation has been directly connected to language revitalisation? I'm hard-pressed to really think of concrete case studies right now. I'm sure that they exist. But to me it points to an important issue which is that I think often the more effective thing to do is to skip the documentation stage and just go directly to language revitalisation. And I think that we often talk about doing language documentation that will support language revitalization. I think we should be thinking about how language revitalisation can also function as language documentation, and that we should give language documentation a second priority to language revitalization. Now I think that that's only the case in particular circumstances like where you have a community that still is speaking the language but you have intergenerational disruption. If you have a language which only has two or three speakers that it's really sort of very close to having no speakers, then language documentation is the appropriate response and you really have to do that and prioritize that. But often we prioritize language documentation because it's institutionally well-developed and resourced and fits with the modus operandi of Linguistics as a science based on technologies and so on. But often I think we should be looking at how language revitalisation can create language documentation. So one thing, just to give an example, one of the things that can often easily be done to help revitalize the language is create media in that language, right? Online content, podcasts, songs, videos, things like this. Shareable interesting content that puts the language in the new domain creates interest and gives respect and recognition to the language. Essentially when you do that you're also creating an archive of the language but it's just not being metadata-ed or annotated and centrally collated and things like this. So I think in many cases we need to think about it in that way. That the priority is really to help the community produce digital documents about the language and then at the same time think about how to use those records as a form of language documentation, but to put that priority of revitalization ahead of language documentation. Because if you think about the challenges of ... doing language documentation first, you're facing all of those challenges that I was talking about.
WM: Very much, I agree with that.
GR: And so I don't know any examples where that has happened, but that's something that I would love to see people thinking about and writing about and starting to do. So if I could just like, as a closing comment about it, … often I'm quite critical of what linguists do and things like language documentation, but basically the argument that I'm trying to make is, all that work is good and important, but linguistic research also needs what I think of as a radical political wing. You need anthropologists and political theorists and you need feminists and anarchists and intersectional theorists to help understand what's the relationship between what you're doing and what you're producing, and the oppression that is causing language endangerment. So I really think that language documentation, language pedagogy, language technology work, I think all of that stuff is really important and essential and communities very often welcome it and want it. But it needs to be thought about in collaboration with these political issues and that needs to be done collaboratively. I don't think linguists should expect me to understand foundational linguistic theory and I don't expect the linguists to understand the complexities of political anthropology. That's why I think that we need to work together and I think that that's very important.
KN: Yeah, that’s absolutely true.
GR: So I really appreciate this chance to talk to you and to go on record about this.
WM: Likewise, thank you very much.
KN: Thank you very much!
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