Escaping Eurocentrism: fieldwork as a process of unlearning

Abstract

Learning and unlearning In her adventures in wonderland, Alice fell into a deep pool of her own tears, and then met a mouse: “O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!” (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen, in her brother's Latin Grammar, “A mouse – of a mouse – to a mouse – a mouse – O mouse!”) (Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland ) Like other children of her time, Alice had been brought up to believe that not only Latin but also English has six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and vocative. How this came about is quite obvious. In those days, grammarians worked within traditions that were based on the classical languages of antiquity. So when they first began to examine English, they encountered a language without nominal case marking. Accordingly, they concluded that the Latin cases were there – only invisible. Today, the discipline of linguistics is more enlightened: we think we know better. But do we really? It is a conspicuous fact about contemporary linguistics that it was developed primarily by speakers of European languages, is practiced mostly in European languages, and even today exhibits a disproportionate concern with the study of European languages. Inevitably, the European history and sociology of the field results in a Eurocentric bias with regard to its content.

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