34.1186, Tales from Tanzania: Part 4

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1186. Wed Apr 12 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1186, Tales from Tanzania: Part 4

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar, Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Lauren Perkins
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Everett Green, Joshua Sims, Daniel Swanson, Matthew Fort, Maria Lucero Guillen Puon, Zackary Leech, Lynzie Coburn
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon <luceroguillen at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: 12-Apr-2023
From: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon [luceroguillen at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Tales from Tanzania: Part 4


The fieldwork site (and the accident)
Jeremy Coburn, PhD candidate, Indiana University
Each language, and its speakers, present unique challenges to the
field linguist as locales in which we
work are as diverse as the languages we study. The Hadza people reside
in the area surrounding Lake
Eyasi, a seasonal soda lake in north-central Tanzania. Traditionally
semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers,
many Hadza reside in semi-permanent camps throughout the Eyasi valley
and surrounding hills,
including in the Yaeda valley southeast of Lake Eyasi and the hill
country to the southwest. I stationed
myself in Karatu, a tourist town near the internationally acclaimed
Ngorongoro Crater, so as to have
reliable access to electricity. The downside to this decision being
that I was an hour drive away from the
nearest Hadza camps. So, to traverse the distances between Hadza
communities across rough terrain, I
rented a motorcycle and put many kilometers on it each week.
Monday I would leave Karatu on my motorcycle and, at first, drive one
hour to Mang’ola village where I
would work with several Hadza speakers. Then on Friday, I would turn
around with a notebook and
recorder full of data and make the trip back to Karatu to spend the
weekend processing data and
spending time with my wife and two children (see next weeks digest of
“Tales from Tanzania” for more
on the family field experience). Finally, Monday would come again and
I would repeat the process.
On one such trip from Karatu to Mang’ola, early on, the last thing I
remember doing was driving along
on my motorcycle as usual. At some point, that memory fades and the
next memory that comes to me is
waking up in some hospital, with pain in my hands and knees, talking
to someone about putting
bandages on my hands. I immediately pulled my phone from my pocket and
called my wife to let her
know I had not yet made it to my field site, followed by sending her
photos of my road-rashed hands.
Much of what happened next are blurry memories and sounds but somehow
I gathered the information
that I had been in a motorcycle accident (involving no one else,
thankfully). No one knew for certain how
it happened—including myself who, to this day, has no memory of the
accident occurring—but
fortunately, I was found by two good Samaritans who scooped me off the
dirt, put me on my
motorcycle, and drove me to the nearest hospital. Thanks to their kind
efforts, I, my motorcycle, and my
research equipment, were largely unharmed, aside from relatively
minimal road rash on my knuckles.
Upon leaving the hospital, the good Samaritans drove me back to the
site of the crash, whereupon I
continued my trip onto Mang’ola and proceeded with research as usual
(much to my wife’s chagrin). A
little motorcycle accident was not enough to slow me down. I mean, we
all have one of those stories,
right?
With the motorcycle mishap behind me, my family and I were set to have
the experience of a lifetime.

Jeremy Coburn
Ph.D. candidate
Indiana University



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

American Dialect Society/Duke University Press http://dukeupress.edu

Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group) http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Brill http://www.brill.com

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Dictionary Society of North America http://dictionarysociety.com/

Edinburgh University Press www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

Equinox Publishing Ltd http://www.equinoxpub.com/

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

Georgetown University Press http://www.press.georgetown.edu

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Linguistic Association of Finland http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

Springer Nature http://www.springer.com

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1186
----------------------------------------------------------