Dr. Patrick Thomsen’s seminar on knowledge genealogies demonstrated to me how much knowledge can be filtered through the worldviews of those who hold it. Sometimes this will be unavoidable — history can’t change, so the positionalities of historical holders of knowledge can’t either. We can take their knowledge and analyse it, but it cannot be divorced from their culture and experiences. Modern researchers will also fall into this category of a frozen-in-time knowledge holder, but we can try and make the filters that shape our research clear, and apply filters that can provide new insights into an area of research. Dr. Thomsen’s use of talanoa in his research allowed him to reach a deeper understanding of the lives of gay Korean men, and why some western models of accepting one’s sexuality did not apply to them. Using a non-western methodology allowed him to more thoroughly reject the dominant western analysis and create a new analysis, which syncretised the experiences of the Korean men he talked to and his Samoan itulagi.
The discussion of different research methodologies had me thinking about my own field, linguistics. The dominant method of research is one primarily built out of Christian missionary work, whose primary aim has always been to evangelise. This particular worldview has spawned many extremely useful tools that linguists often use — relying on a worldwide mission structure to find field sites, but also linguistic tools created by SIL International, a Christian non-profit linguistic organisation. These tools include software and fonts which are sometimes essential for writing down languages. Because SIL International’s immediate goal is translation of the Bible and literacy development, this reliance comes with a cost. Linguistic work relying on missionary frameworks can be halted if the goals of the linguist and of the mission diverge, like SIL retiring important software for linguistic analysis due to lesser focus on translation, or mission linguists focusing on language communities that will survive for longer periods of time so that literacy can be developed and the Bible translated. This is different to the mainstream academic linguistic goal of recording the languages of communities with less long-term survivability, so over-reliance on the mission structure might make recording those languages more difficult. Even this methodology seems at least somewhat flawed to me. The talanoa dialogue has the researcher and participants work together to build a common understanding of a topic. In linguistics research, the researcher talks to informants to build their own understanding of the language based on the input of their informants. The speakers of the language themselves provide a set of facts about the language, which are then analysed through a western lens that seems scientific and objective. Is there room for an emic approach to language research? As a monolingual English speaker who has already been educated in western linguistic traditions I definitely do not know the answer, but I would like to see other research methods for linguistics.
Reference
Dobrin, Lise. “SIL International and the Disciplinary Culture of Linguistics: Introduction.” Language, 2009.
