Transcript

[00:00] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

Mario Chávez Peón (MC) [00:11]: ... For a lot of centuries, the so-called modern societies have led us to the homogenization and capitalization of everything.

But these minority cultures, through their languages, through their knowledge, can teach us to go a few steps back and try to make things better, with all the living things in the world.

So it’s a small part, the linguistic and anthropological side, but I think all this knowledge make us more tolerant and more open to a different point of view.

[00:45] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

Carolyn O’Meara [CO] [00:49]: And … it’s true, I think, especially for languages that are becoming in more contact with Spanish or other majority languages. It’s a struggle when you may produce material because you want there to be more accessibility for everybody to understand, but at the same time, you want to say, well, this language should be able to be published without translation, just like Spanish.

I don’t, when I publish things in Spanish, I don’t have to put an English translation, right? So shouldn’t this apply to all languages?

Yichi Zhang [YZ] [01:33]: Hello, and welcome back to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. My name is Yichi, and I am introducing this two-part miniseries on dialogues with linguistic anthropologists who work with Indigenous communities in Mexico.

This series grew out of academic exchange I had in Mexico City, and reflects my ongoing interest in learning about anthropology and anthropologists based in the Global South.

In the first episode, I’m joined by Mario Chávez Peón and Caroline O’Meara, who you just heard from. They will introduce themselves in a moment, and then we’ll discuss local institutional programs and publications that aim to promote the rights, languages, and cultures of Indigenous communities.

MC [02:29]: Hello, my name is Mario Chávez. I’m a linguist. I’m from Mexico and I studied Indigenous languages in Mexico. It’s mainly from a linguistic and anthropological point of view.

I often go to do fieldwork in communities and my main research areas are the sounds, the sounds of this language. So, I work on phonetics or phonology and some morphology as well as applied linguistics, which workshops and developing orthographies for these languages.

YZ [03:04]: And which areas in Mexico are you mainly working with?

MC [03:08]: Yeah, that’s right. I mainly work in, with, Otomanguean languages. The Otomanguean macrofamily is the biggest and more complex family, linguistically speaking. We have eleven different linguistic families. So in Mexico, about sixty-eight different native peoples. But from there, we have about a hundred languages.

YZ [03:33]: Wow.

MC [03:33]: Yeah, because some of these groups are quite diverse. So, Mexico is a very rich country in terms of linguistic diversity. So Otomanguean languages and I especially work with those in Oaxaca, the Oaxaca state.

YZ [03:50]:  How did that come to be?

MC [03:52]: Well, that’s a good question. I started studying Spanish, actually, and then I became more interested in smaller towns and smaller communities. I found it extremely rich to have different languages and different behaviors, customs, et cetera, and I became interested in different things other than what I had before. That took me to be interested in being a teacher as well—being a rural teacher.

So teaching [in] the country different things. And from there, I discovered different towns, different ways of seeing the world, different ways of conceiving food, music, et cetera. And I became interested in all that through different idioms.

So, at some point, I went to Canada, to Vancouver, to the University of British Columbia. I made my PhD there, and it’s a university with a strong focus on First Nations languages, or Indigenous peoples, and a lot of fieldwork.

I liked that approach. And it’s funny because from Canada, I started to study Zapotec here.

There’s a professor in there, Joseph Stemberger, interested in how children acquire minority languages. There is a lot of study of Spanish, English, like, global languages, acquisition of global languages, but he was interested in smaller communities. So he knew another person working in Oaxaca, and then it just matched the year I came to Vancouver, to Canada, and he started this project.

And so every year I came to Oaxaca, to a little town, with Zapotec speakers, and I started my Indigenous research in there.

YZ [05:39]: So maybe tell us a bit more about your fieldwork. I know you mentioned it was about sound. So how do you collect those data?

MC [05:47]: That’s right, exactly. Well, I was a musician at some point. I played violin, so I guess I kind of like that part of the language. And also I love tone. You being from China know this very well.

YZ [06:02]: The tonalities.

MC [06:04]: Exactly. And so the Otomanguean languages are also tonal language. So just like Chinese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, that the higher you speak or the lower you pronounce a word or a symbol may change the meaning, right? Which doesn’t happen in English or Spanish. And that blowed my mind. I thought it was really interesting. It was like music and speaking at the same time in a way. And that’s what I’ve been studying in Zapotec, in Mazatec, Cuicatec, Chinantec. All these family have different systems, which two, three, four, five level tones, contour tones, you know, high-rising, lowering.

And that appeals [to] me a lot as a research topic, as well as the different sounds they have. These languages may have sounds that are aspirated, that are glottalized, that may be palatalized. So it’s their language, very complex systems, phonologically speaking, with a lot of secondary articulations. So record and document that is very interesting for me. For these people, it’s very useful as well, because they’ve been trying to write their language. But of course, there are many differences with Spanish, which is the dominant language and the orthographic knowledge which they had.

But Spanish, for example, have five vowels. And then you approach these languages and then they may have six, seven, up to ten or eleven different vowels, right? So how do I write a sound that is not in Spanish? So we have to think about it, think it through the same as tone.

Like same word, like “she,” “she” [tonal change]. How do I make that difference with a low tone and a high tone? Well, would I put a bar under the vowel? Would I use a grave accent, an acute accent? All that discussion is what I’ve been working on with these communities for almost ten years.

YZ [08:09]: So what is the experience to work with local people about putting this onto paper, right?

MC [08:15]:  Well, in general, I think it’s worth it and it’s a great experience. In general, you are contributing to create more ways for the language to be maintained.

All of these languages are endangered, as we all know, because of the dominance of Spanish and also because of dominance of English.

Many of these people migrate to other towns, to other cities, to the U.S. Some of the next generations start to lose their languages. And we don’t want that. We want to maintain these identities, these different ways of looking at life. And I think to be able to write and to create material in a written form helps them a lot.

And their reactions are very encouraging, working and developing these orthographies. And they, local people, get involved. I ended up learning more than they do, of course. I mean, it’s always a two-way knowledge, right?

YZ [09:14]: And I’m wondering, do they have some poetry or...?

MC [09:18]: Absolutely. Yes. Yes, that’s a very nice topic from the linguistic anthropological view. It is called different names, arte verbal in Spanish or verbal arts or different genres. So there’s the colloquial communication, there’s the communication that people use with children, like “motherese” or baby talk. There is a different jargon, a different way of speaking within the authorities, for example, or within ritual practices.

And they might be very sophisticated. Not all people manage all these different ways of talking. It’s definitely a research, an object of study.

YZ [10:07]: It’s great.

MC [10:07]: Yeah, it’s very nice.

YZ [10:09]: And how do you see your research contributing to a wider, like, people doing anthropology in Mexico.

MC [10:16]: Okay, well, in different ways. One would be this part of applied linguistics in where we develop orthographies. And from there, people improve the materials they have. They apply that into educational aspects, into justice, into health issues. Like making vocabularies, translating, and laws, for example, that has been very useful.

MC [10:43]: And also the teaching, for local people to become professionals in their areas makes a huge difference as well.

Because in teaching all these aspects, the native speakers become linguists. And now they have a double advantage. They have the language, that is the research object as their native idiom language, and also the tools of linguistics and anthropology.

And so they become very powerful in the sense of producing research, getting into areas that are much more hidden or difficult to get as not natives.

And they become activists of their own culture, which is, for me, is one of the biggest achievements that we have here in CIESAS.

We have a master’s and PhD Indo-American linguistics. And so all our students speak one of these languages, either as native speakers or as a second language. But they have a very good domain of the language, a very good competence.

They ended up producing a lot of material, some of them in politics, language politics, which are very important nowadays, preparing educational programs, teaching as well, teaching how to write their language.

And they keep growing. I mean, it’s very nice to see that.

YZ [12:10]: How many students do you have at the moment?

MC [12:14]: Normally, our cohorts are from ten to fifteen students. After the [pandemic], it lowers a bit, but that’s more or less the number that we manage. We open, one year, we open our master’s program, the next, the PhD program, and so on.

We are celebrating our thirty-fifth anniversary. On August, we will have a commemoration, party, and some other events. And so yeah, it’s been a long journey.

I’ve been here for close to fifteen years. So I actually started fifteen years [ago], actually. My first course was in the PhD program that was just started in 2010. But of course, the program has more history than my trajectory, which is great. And there are many alumni that are now colleagues and our professors or researchers in other universities, which is wonderful.

YZ [13:16]: You also mentioned a bit about their work in activism and politics. Could you tell us a bit more?

MC [13:22]: Well, it’s quite a big area, right? But some ideas that come to mind have to do with territory and with Indigenous rights.

So some of these people become knowledgeable in their rights—human rights, Indigenous rights, more specific laws in Mexico, or the ecological aspect, which is huge and essential for me.

There is a lot of mining in Mexico from, for example, many Canadian companies, unfortunately, which are destroying the mountains, right? There is a big issue with drug cartels as well. So some of these students or colleagues become important leaders in their communities.

They can ask for grants, they can talk and have dialogues with politics or become politicians and defend their rights, which is very important.

Some of them, in writing and creating material, they introduce or they try to accommodate different types of topics, such as ecological issues. So for example, there is a holy place where the water flows, for example, that, it’s been contaminated now.

And so they know a song, they know a special ritual about the place, make people conscious about it. And start to generate campaigns to clean up the place, to, I don’t know, to talk with to the authorities in order to conserve or to take care of that place. Things or ideas like that are more and more common in this area.

YZ [15:23]: So to wrap up, I guess if you could say, I don’t know, are you optimistic about this linguistic anthropological work in Mexico?

MC [15:33]: Well, I am. It’s quite hard because we go against the general view in the world and in Mexico. I’m talking about a capitalist view or perspective where people or companies are looking for profit.

Anthropological perspective, cultural issues, do not compaginate or fix necessarily with that, but they secure, they treasure many, many important values for me, like their respect to nature, their respect to diversity.

So for a lot of centuries, the so-called modern societies have led us to the homogenization and capitalization of everything.

But these minority cultures, through their languages, through their knowledge, can teach us to go a few steps back and try to make things better with all the living beings in the world. So it’s a small part, the linguistic and anthropological side, but I think all this knowledge make us more tolerant and more open to a different point of view.

[16:43] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

CO [16:48]: I’m Carolyn O’Mara. I am a research professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, in the Department of Indigenous Languages in the Philology Institute. And I consider myself, I guess, mainly to be a descriptive linguist. And I think my main area of focus is working together with the speakers of the Seri language, which is a language isolate spoken in northwestern Mexico, in Sonora.

And that’s quite an interesting thing when we consider it because Seri speakers are a group maybe not very typical or prototypical of Mesoamerica or central Mexico and southern Mexico, given that they’re traditionally a hunter-gatherer, semi-nomadic group.

Whereas folks here in the central part or southern part of Mexico tend to be much more, have an agricultural, sedentary way of life, maybe some small movement, but not much. So that’s quite interesting.

And also it’s a language isolate that was at some point thought to be related to the languages of coastal California and also Baja California, and so on. So that’s really interesting, I think, linguistically and anthropologically, but also within Mexico, it makes, I think, work a bit challenging because a lot of people focus on cultural groups or linguistic groups of the center, the central part of Mexico or the southern part of Mexico. So Uto-Nahuan groups or Mayan, groups who speak Mayan languages, and so on.

[18:35] So I’m working together with the Seri folks, but I’m also very interested in how they conceive of and perceive the landscape and the geography that they inhabit because it’s part of the Sonoran Desert region. But it’s along the coast, so they also practice a lot of fishing. Turtle hunting was a very important aspect of their traditional livelihood. So I’m interested in how they perceive this really beautiful area of Mexico and how they talk about it and how they conceptualize it, looking at language as my lens to do that.

And I’m also interested in how they talk about and think about space and other conceptual domains like emotion and sensory perception. So those are the kind of areas that I work on as an academic, but I’ve also become a lot more committed to working together with speakers to try to promote language use and literacy in the language and also help training and working together with speakers to edit written material.

So we have a little editorial group that reviews texts that are written by other folks to try to make it more readable and more accessible to younger speakers, because that’s something that I think that we do in languages like English or Spanish, but it’s not something we necessarily think about in lesser-studied or minority languages, or languages which I think sometimes have been called “resource-poor” languages, for instance. Because the basics are just all that we can really cover.

But so thinking about things that actually can make more quality material is also really important. So that’s been a really fun activity as well that I’ve been working on more recently.

[20:21] I started doing fieldwork when I was a grad student, I guess like over twenty years ago now. And fieldwork for me was challenging in the beginning, but it’s been really important to be able to now as a more, I guess, somebody who has a job.

So I have more stable income and I have the, I think, the luxury, which I think as a student, you don’t necessarily have because you don’t have, you have very little structure or very little idea if you’re going to get the scholarship the next year or something.

So now that I have a job and I have experience in the field and all of these important relationships that are developed over the years with people, the speakers, I can now, I feel I do work, like, more activist work or more community-based work.

And it’s, I think, a really nice time to have been able to spend a lot of summers in the field, living with families who so warmly received me, surprisingly, because the history hasn’t, I think, been great with anthropologists in the region.

So that has been a very positive experience for me. And I can only say really great things.

Of course, we all have different, you know, funny stories about being in the field, but I think fieldwork’s been really important for being able to practice the language, learn the language, practice it, meet different people, live with different families, meet different family groups, because some of them don’t talk. So, you know, you can’t always, if you’re living with one, it’s hard to interact with other family groups.

[22:14] So then, you know, getting to know people, building relationships, showing that I’m going to come back and not be a parachute researcher has been really great.

And like I said, I think now I have the privilege and the luxury to be able to do work that I think maybe on your CV doesn’t look as sexy or important, or maybe doesn’t count as much, but is really the important work that I think a lot of us have been wanting to do from the beginning.

But it was something that wasn’t always possible to do. And I think that’s something nowadays that’s quite challenging because there’s so much pressure to do work with a lot of, like, impact in the community, but you don’t necessarily have all of the connections, the social ability, the social connections and the social, I guess that, but also you don’t really have academically probably what you might need to be able to risk that, to do that type of work, which is really time consuming and doesn’t necessarily get you a ton of high-profile publications.

YZ [23:24]: So what kind of specific work in terms of, I guess, your methodology, maybe, in the field?

CO [23:30]: It’s really mixed because a lot of it is social interaction and just trying to talk to people. So that then, if we sit down and we want to record something like, oh, please tell me that story or the thing you were telling me before and I could record it and so I can transcribe and translate it. And maybe document something, maybe traditional information or just a life story or whatever. So part of it is just recording and transcribing and translating different types of texts in the language.

But I also do a lot of experimental work in the field. Especially, like, work on emotion. So it’s like a mix of doing observation-type work and participating in activities, but then, working with some nonverbal stimuli, same for sensory perception, providing people with different types of stimuli and then asking them, you know, what does the smell like? What do you see? Showing them videos to have them describe it, pictures, and so on.

But complementing that, always, with naturally occurring speech or information that I’ve observed while doing field work. So I think also doing mapping and doing mapping with individuals, going out, doing mapping with Google Earth, doing a lot of different things like that, trying to mix all sorts of methods to try to target a specific question that I might have or that speakers actually might have, but then trying to also have that always be backed up by naturally occurring behavior or speech.

YZ [25:11]: So would you say your work has become more collaborative over the years, as you mentioned, since you also mentioned the transcription of the text?

CO [25:20]: Yeah, definitely. I think in the beginning I was working with different people, but maybe just to go and say, let’s go and interview so-and-so today and we’ll record their life story, we’ll record them talking about, going on a fishing trip or whatever.

But now I think it’s become much more working in groups. We have a collective of mainly women who are becoming, or some of them are quite experts in writing the language, transcribing the language and translating and now editing, as well, texts.

So I think that has really been something, and it’s not something I did alone at all. There’s really great linguists that have also been doing a lot of this work that have made it possible to have these groups of experts.

So yeah, I think working together and finding folks that are passionate about certain things, because at the end of the day, I think when we come together collectively, it’s because we have a shared passion about language or about landscape or about plants or about birds, or whatever it might be.

And it’s just kind of tapping into that and working together so that folks can, I think, move forward, get new skills put together, because we all do.

YZ [26:44]: So what are these texts? Are there stories, folklores, poetries?

CO [26:50]: Well, I collected a lot of different types of texts. Texts of—like, I couldn’t go out fishing with the men since I was a woman. So one method I was using in my PhD was I would go and interview fishermen after they went fishing and say, tell me where you went.

So I get the route, try to get a route description of their fishing trip. I didn’t want to go steal their secret fishing trip location, but I just wanted to know how they describe trips on the sea as opposed to like walking on the land. So I have texts like that, you know, life stories, what stuff did people used to eat in the past. I even started collecting encyclopedic-type entries of the different types of winds that exist. So all sorts of different types of texts.

Some of them for, more recently, for the literacy project, we were using archival, well, texts from the ’60s that, together with another linguist, Steve Marlett, we digitized. And then we were taking those recordings and adapting them to be able to be used in, like, storybook—illustrated books. So really cutting them down, making very simplified sentences based on these traditional stories, legends. Some of them involving animals and things like that. So sometimes that stuff.

And now I’m just starting to work on conversation as well. So a lot of stuff not restricting to whatever, also depends on what people are interested in because that’s so important. People have to be interested in the topic to, like, want to continue working on it and want to gain skills together. If they’re not interested, it’s never going to work.

So it’s like, what are you interested in? Do you want to work on basket weaving? Do you want to work on like, I don’t know, like we even working on a text, like, how to organize a puberty festivity that, you know, like writing a manual or like, what would you do if you had to have a manual, you know?

[28:51] So even coming up with new genres, but with the idea of, like, oh yeah, we need to teach the young people how to do this stuff. So we’re not limiting ourselves, just trying to even sometimes be quite creative. We also started working on a comic book with traditional characters, but in the comic book format.

So part of it was also just experimenting and thinking about what could get young folks also, like, super interested or passionate about, like, language and culture and asking the elders questions about stuff.

YZ [29:28]: That’s great. So do you think of your work as part of the, say, similar to what other people are doing here together for different Indigenous groups in Mexico?

CO [29:38]: In Mexico? I think there are a lot of folks doing this type of work, more engaged work, like participatory-type work. But I wouldn’t say that’s all the case.

I think that there’s really a boom right now, at least with students and certain advisors, of working with nonverbal stimuli as the main way of data elicitation or data collection, whatever you want to call it, because there’s so much pressure for students to graduate in a certain time period.

And if someone’s doing a master’s degree in two years, it’s not realistic that they’re really going to have the skills to be able to do probably more extensive descriptive work or even try to have more of a participatory action-based research question, especially if they’re not members of the community.

So I think that also depends. If they’re, if it’s the person who’s also from the community, the speech community, I think that they can, they have other challenges obviously, but they can present themselves, but outsiders I think have, you know, in these time constraints. And so collecting data in a way that’s more targeted can help them like get the thesis done. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s following best practices, I think. So there is a lot of variation. There are definitely groups that are interested more in the pedagogical or local impact of the work.

But I think there’s also groups that are more interested in what we call here the morpheme-type work, where it’s like, I’m going to describe this morpheme or I’m going to describe this type of this particular topic in the language of study. So I think there’s a lot of variation of what folks are doing here from my personal perspective, obviously.

YZ [31:26]: So how would you think about, I guess, the future for Mexico linguistic anthropology?

CO [31:33]: Oh, the future. I teach this linguistic anthropology class for the undergrads in anthropology here. They just opened an anthropology degree at the university not that long ago. And it’s hard because the students that go into that line, they actually do very traditional linguistics classes.

So they have to take, and they get taught, more, like, descriptive linguistic topics. Very traditional. And many of them end up doing sociolinguistics. Well, so far. There aren’t that many people who have graduated in linguistic anthropology. There are a few.

They have done very descriptive-type work, most of them, or they are choosing sociolinguistic topics. And so I think it’s hard to get the difference of, why is this more like sociolinguistics and not linguistic anthropology? Or why is this more like linguistics and not like linguistic anthropology? Or should we make this distinction, or, like, trying to get that through to them?

I don’t, and actually something that I really struggle with, is there are very few publications that are accessible to undergraduate students written in Spanish on linguistic anthropology.

So I think there’s, like, I end up having stuff from Peru, Argentina. I mean, of course, South America has production in that too, but from a Mexican perspective, it’s really challenging. So I think there’s actually not so much a tradition in doing linguistic anthropology work in Mexico.

There was at a time, especially from people who came from the, the National School of Anthropology and History from their undergraduate linguistic program, because they used to have a general education, like, they used to all start from the same classes and then they would separate into the fields, the four fields, which is how it’s structured here, this university.

[33:30] But that was when sort of things were, like, ethno-linguistics, and, you know, really doing sort of like ethnobiology, ethnobotany, and that style of work.

I don’t really feel like there has been a big transition to what, for instance, like in the U.S. and Canada, folks are doing in linguistic anthropology. There really, there hasn’t been a transfer, I don’t think, in my mind, of that type of work.

Even things that are super relevant, like the raciolinguistics or mock Spanish. So there hasn’t been in here—that, there’s tons of phenomena, like, that I bring up in the class and students kind of get it, but we don’t really have publications or a useful, like, textbook, which is something [that] is on my list of things to do.

Write a textbook in Spanish with relevant examples to Mexico or even Latin America, because that’s the other thing.

The examples are extremely geared towards, you know, I love the textbooks that are available, especially Ahearn’s textbook, I use that book, but the examples are not culturally relevant. So I think that’s something for me, is like, I think the future is just starting, but there is a history.

It’s just I think that the history didn’t really continue the same path, because a lot of those folks that maybe were doing, like, ethno-linguistics either stayed doing ethno-linguistics, which I think is strange, like, looking at maybe the U.S. or Europe, what’s happening in linguistic anthropology. Or they just became descriptive linguists, doing more traditional descriptive work.

YZ [35:13]: So is that part of the reason you’re starting this journal?

CO [35:17]: This journal (is) called Tlalocan. Actually, we have over eighty years of existence. It’s a very old journal.

It was started by my compatriots, actually, foreigners as well. It was started in the U.S. over eighty years ago, which for me is just, in my mind, it was a pioneering work because the whole concept of this journal was to take material written in Indigenous languages that’s in archives and libraries outside Mexico and make it accessible to people, especially in Mexico.

So when you think about it, it’s like what a lot of people are talking about, like decolonizing linguistics or anthropology. It’s like, let’s take it out of the institutions and bring it to, actually, the people who it matters most to. And that's what the whole motivation behind this journal was.

So we dedicate ourselves [to] publishing primary data in Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico and the languages related to those languages spoken, like, in [the] U.S. or Guatemala, for instance, Central America, and so on.

So we’ll produce research articles. I mean, in the strict sense. We [also] publish texts, and texts in a very broad sense. So it can be traditional, it can be myths, it can be jokes, it could be life stories, it can be recipes, it can be poems.

There’s tons of things in here.

[36:42] We also publish colonial documents. So it’s geared towards philologists, anthropologists, linguists, speaker communities, language collectives, archaeologists, folks that want to actually see the texts in their original form. And the majority of the time, most of the time, is also glossed and translated to Spanish or English. And there’s a brief introduction as well of the text.

So this is the whole idea is making these primary materials available to people. And it’s, all of the eighty-plus years are available online for free, open access. And it’s a completely grassroots initiative because we just do it out of passion and love for the initiative.

And also, say, part of what I think in documentary linguistics that we’re, even in anthropological linguistics and anthropology in general, anthropologists and linguists have tons of recordings, and that’s the heart of their work, is the interviews or the stories or whatever, this information that is being so carefully shared, that ends up being sort of their database or their nucleus of what they might be working on.

And it’s oftentimes something that gets siloed away or stuck in the desk, and then nothing really happens to it. So I think now with this movement towards archiving materials properly, also providing access to materials, especially to the people that it matters most to… I’m not going to say “stakeholders” because I don’t like that word, but I think that’s, we’re really continuing to try to comply with that mission.

[38:22] Making material accessible, having an outlet that provides you also with something you can put on your CV. I’m saying, I have, this is something from, you know, my database. I analyzed it and I’m sharing it with folks. So that’s the journal that I edit here. And I am quite passionate about it and feel a lot of responsibility to continue the legacy.

Because it’s actually, I think, a pioneering venture that was started so long ago by folks in the U.S. who couldn’t believe that when they were coming here and started teaching here, doing research here, that then was this extractivism, extreme, actually, robbery.

I mean, people were stealing and looting things in museums and archives here and taking them to libraries in the U.S.

So there’s a lot of material that was stolen and is in other countries that then people here don’t have access to. And imagine back then how much now we could put things on, we can put this online, but back then it was even more challenging. That’s the long version.

It’s hard as a foreigner because we were not allowed to be involved in political activity. So it’s good that the government doesn’t necessarily see language work maybe as political, but I think as anthropologists or linguists, at least certain linguists, maybe we do see language work as inherently political. So there are things we can do, which maybe isn’t, like, protesting or something, but I ended up publishing a collection of texts here in UNAM without providing the translation in Spanish. And I thought it was quite political.

[40:04] I think it’s not, it’s misunderstood, but the community actually requested that because they said, no, if you put the translation, people are just going to read the translation in Spanish and they’re not going to read what the person really said. And it’s true, I think, especially for languages that are becoming in more contact with Spanish or other majority languages, it’s a struggle when you make, produce material because you want there to be more accessibility for everybody to understand. But at the same time, you want to say, well, this language should have the same, should be able to be published without a translation, just like Spanish.

You know, I don’t, when I publish things in Spanish, I don’t have to put an English translation, right? So shouldn’t this, apply to all languages?

Shouldn’t it be the case that they get the same rights or attention and so on? So that, to some extent, I mean, we’ve also been really fighting for more presence of the language in the schools, trying to also fight for recognition of people who have acquired skills at writing and reading and translating a language, but without necessarily having a degree that they should also be recognized for that experience and that knowledge.

It’s very challenging for the government to recognize that, but that’s something that we’ve been working on in some past projects, too. That should be compensated equally as somebody who has a degree, for instance, because it’s expert knowledge.

So maybe some things like that. Also just promoting them, the local experts, for their expertise and making sure that they get the recognition.

[41:57] Something that I have been trying to also push all the people who submit to, for instance, our journal. So one thing, at least in the texts of, like, synchronic texts, so like the texts that are more traditional, like a story or something.

We really push the authors to include co-authorship to the narrators, to the people who actually told the text, who spoke it. So they’re listed together with the co-authors. I think that’s sort of political in a way because it’s all about representation. We need to also give credit. There are, surprisingly, people who push back and don’t do that.

So it’s also very revealing how people think about these types of things. But here, in these cases, we see that their list, the speakers who participated are listed. Sometimes, too, that there’s multiple folks.

And what we do is we specify in the footnote together with, like, on the first page, what each person did. Sort of like in certain, you know, if you publish in Science or Nature or some things, or different journals, they say, who did what and what percentage of that, when you’re submitting a journal article. And the idea here is to do that, but in the sense of really providing credit for everybody who participated.

We don’t say what percentage, you know, in the footnote, but it says, this person participated in the transcription and the translation and this person, this and that and so on. So I think that’s also sort of political in a way, because most journals, you write about your favorite morpheme, but the people who were kind of behind that work, don’t necessarily show up all the time.

Maybe they do in a footnote but trying to provide more visibility and credits and recognition, I think is something we're trying to do.

YZ [43:48]: Final question, I guess, one or two lines summarizing your experience working with Indigenous groups in Mexico for over the years.

CO [43:57]: I guess my experience working with Indigenous groups in Mexico, which includes people in Sonora, includes people in Hidalgo and also in Oaxaca, has just been very welcoming. I don’t want to say “hospitality” is sort of the word there, but just extremely welcoming, accommodating, generous, especially to somebody from a foreign country and at some point was struggling even with the contact language of Spanish.

Other linguists made fun of me because they thought I was doing like, monolingual field work of just trying to only work on the language.

And in contexts where it’s not necessarily been historically positive, the experience with anthropologists or linguists, I’m just really shocked by how kind and open folks have been and just how great a lot of just the people are, really wonderful people. And the diversity is also just mindblowing. Just makes you want to do a million things, have a million questions, continue to go back, which you don’t always, you can’t always go back to places all the time, but continue going back or continue hearing how things are going in different communities.

And so I would just say nothing but positivity and yeah, good, impressions.

YZ [45:29]: Thank you very much.

CO [45:31]: You're welcome.

[45:32] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

YZ [45:38]: This conversation has been both very informative and deeply moving. The ongoing efforts of anthropologists, activists, Indigenous community members fighting for educational rights and reforms deserve our attention and support. I want to thank again and deeply all the colleagues and Maddie Mesko for your help and generosity.

I give special thanks to my reviewers and our sound engineer for their thoughtful comments and assistance throughout the post-production process. I also want to thank our fellow podcasters and friends for their continuous interest and support.

To learn more about the communities, people, stories, and ideas shared in this series, please visit our website at culturalans.org. That’s C-U-L-A-N-T-H.org.

My name is Yichi, and thank you for joining us today for this episode of AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. We look forward to connecting with you again soon.

[46:40] [All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]