33.3125, Field Linguist Spotlight: Samuel Obeng

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3125. Fri Oct 14 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3125, Field Linguist Spotlight: Samuel Obeng

Moderators:

Editor for this issue: Joshua Sims <joshua at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2022 01:28:55
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Field Linguist Spotlight: Samuel Obeng

 
MY EXPERIENCES IN FIELDWORK AND FIELD LINGUISTICS
Samuel Obeng, DPhil
Distinguished Professor, Linguistics
I was introduced to Field Linguistics at age 23 when Prof Dolphyne, University
of Ghana, in 1983, sent me to the field to collect data on ‘Language Use in
Ghanaian Primary and Secondary Schools.’ I had the opportunity to travel to 5
(Greater Accra, Western, Eastern, Volta, and Central regions) of Ghana’s then
10 regions. I felt very proud of myself doing canoe trips, long walks
(especially in the Western Region), and Wooden/Mummy truck/lorry drives, the
most memorable one named “No Condition is Permanent.” No condition was indeed
permanent because one could tell the lorry had ‘seen’ it all and was no longer
‘young.’ Given how scarce transportation was, I learned right away that the
easiest way to be allowed on a lorry or bus was to hold a stick of cigarette
and pretend you were a smoker. The Bookmen (station attendants) and drivers’
mates flocked to you to ask for a stick of cigarette after which you were
escorted to a front seat.  You were moved to the back of the lorry if someone
offered more than you did.
With the training I received from Professor Dolphyne before leaving Legon,
Accra, I spoke with the teachers that I interviewed at length before beginning
to record them. This took away any nervousness on their part and made the
interviews ‘natural.’ Those days, one did not need human subjects permission
from any institutional review board. All one needed was interviewees agreeing
to be interviewed and recorded. 
Everywhere I went I fitted in because I very quickly immersed myself in
whatever sub-culture I was thrown into. I drank whatever they drank and ate
whichever food was available. I learned how to eat rats, snakes and even bats.
Ebola and other bat-causing viral diseases were unknown then so there was no
fear of getting this or that disease.
Some of the teachers were in awe that at that young age I was brave to travel
everywhere without fear of something bad happening to me. Nothing of that
nature ever crossed my mind. I slept in the homes of those teachers I could
easily bond with and sometimes in the headmasters’ homes. I felt and looked
very normal to all of them. Maybe it was luck or due to my nature of person. I
had never seen myself as a stranger in any new environment so mixing with new
people was easy for me. My own background prepared me for it because in my
father’s house were people from all walks of life and from all over the world;
neither race, ethnicity, religion, etc. was a problem for me. I could just fit
into any situation and that was a big help.
One thing I did religiously was that at the end of each day’s work, I sat and
transcribed orthographically, the data I had collected and I incorporated my
field notes into the transcripts as needed. I wanted to ensure that my boss
got exactly what she wanted. On few occasions I did a renewal of connection
the following day or two after collecting data from people to ensure that what
I had recorded and my field notes were correct representations of what the
interviewees said and/or meant. Upon returning to Legon, I presented my field
notes to my boss and she was full of praise for the amount of work done and
how detailed and authentic the data were.
My second trip to the field was in mid to late 1983 when I assisted a
professor of mine, Kwesi Yankah, an IU alumni, who was collecting data on Akan
proverbs for his doctoral dissertation. This data collection took me to the
palaces of some Chiefs and Female Chiefs (Queen Mothers) in my hometown and
neighboring towns and villages. I also recorded cases where people solved
problems via arbitration, advised their children, and preached at churches. In
all these social and institutional domains, I had to first inquire what was
happening in what discourse ecology and whether I would be allowed to sit in
and record the proceedings. Luckily, not a single person said “no” to me. In
fact, they were impressed that someone, one of their own, will be interested
in their culture, come and learn from them, record their proceedings and then
take it to the university to study them. They referred to me as “The Boy
Studying our Culture.” They had a lot of respect for me and I also
reciprocated by respecting them and sometimes carrying a drink which I handed
to the elders as a token of respect and appreciation. In as much as possible,
I tried to avoid and/or prevent this cultural thing that made people give the
stranger/researcher what they believe the researcher wanted and not what
members of the society actually did. I would always ask “In real life why do
we do this when no one is there/here,” What does this or that really mean? If
you were dealing with this or that Nana (elder) what would that mean and how
would you have done/said this?” Even at the Native Courts, I wanted to ensure
that what was on ‘display’ was not a performance for the ‘visitor.’  This is a
problem faced by researchers, especially those working on anthropological
linguistics, linguistic anthropology and ethnopragmatics. Issues such as
communicative silence, the speakable and the unspeakable and pragmatic acts
that can potentially impale on the sensibilities of others are performed
indirectly and care is needed to decipher the said and the unsaid. Getting the
trust of a member of the discourse ecology always helps in issues related to
understandability and its associated language ideologies. 
Furthermore, to gain deeper understanding what was going on at the palaces, I
often met with the orators who were the chiefs’ spokespersons and got a
briefing from them about the discourse locale, the participants, statuses and
how that impacted the discourse organization and discourse content. I thus got
to know and understand ‘the speakable’ and ‘the unspeakable’ and ways of
resisting assertions by the powerful. Transcribing this data was difficult
given the sheer quantity of the data that were collected. The interviews
involving the orators (also called akyeame) were the most educating. They
constituted the encyclopedic reference grammar, pragmatics and wisdom of the
communities they represented. It came as no surprise that Yankah did an entire
book on them besides his doctoral dissertation.
My third major fieldwork was that for my 1987 doctoral dissertation. When I
arrived in England in September 1984, I had planned to do phonetics and
phonology and to spend most of my time in the phonetics lab. Upon arrival, my
advisor and mentor, John Kelly, handed me a book written by Stephen Levinson,
titled, Pragmatics. The more I read Levinson’s book the more interested I
became in Conversational Phonetics. At the time John Local, John Kelly,
William Wells, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and a few other linguistics in Europe
were working on conversational phonetics in the English Language. I was drawn
into this kind of research and became the first linguist to investigate
individuals’ unique ‘voice’ (phonetic) details in conversational interactions
in an African language context. Principally, my work on prosody and pragmatics
was the first to investigate how Conversation Analytic Methodology inform and
reshape our understanding of the functioning of phonetic detail and phonetic
variation in an African language. Given the nature of work I was doing, I
needed natural conversations so I went home during the break to record as much
conversation as I could using the same method I employed in my earlier data
collection. This time, everyone in the community already knew me and I trained
two young men in the art of recording, briefed them every morning and had them
do the orthographic transcriptions with me. I did the impressionistic
transcriptions in phonetics lab back at York in the United Kingdom. All my
recordings were done with the three Panasonic tape recorders I purchased in
Accra, Ghana. I gave the two used by my assistants as gifts to them; those
days it was a big deal having a small tape recorder with which one could
record and listen to music!
Back in the lab, I subjected to rigorous inspection, the phonetic resources
used by the interactional participants in the various institutional settings
(e.g., courtrooms, political arenas, health institutions, etc.) and informal
discourse settings. I examined how the speakers employed phonetic features
like pitch, loudness, tempo, voice quality, rhythm, as well as vowel and
consonant quality to manage interactional categories like turn taking, repair,
overlapping talk, backchannel communications, requests, apologies, and various
forms of news delivery. I also paid close attention to how listeners oriented
to and were impacted by the above-mentioned phonetic features.
My trips to the field intensified after graduate school.  I became more
interested in language use in such institutional ecologies as law courts
(Native Courts), politics, churches, healthcare facilities, and in ordinary
conversational settings. I sat in several native courts, attended political
campaigns, attended church services and prayer groups, and visited traditional
and modern health facilities where I interviewed practitioners and
participants who patronized these institutions. I have been allowed to record
various proceedings, small group encounters and individuals. In all these, my
most important asset has been my ability (and sometimes luck) gaining
acceptance and not being viewed as an intruder. People not only allow you to
record them, they sometimes help you collect more data (with a little
training) and sometimes even help you with analysis if such analysis involved
issues of understandability, mishearing, misunderstanding, non-hearing, and
language ideologies unique to the specific discourse areas or events.
My interest in onomasiology, especially toponymy, took me into deep hidden
political issues that I never expected. The toponyms spoke about the
inhabitants’ histories, their politics regarding who is  a true royal and who
is not, who the land in the next village belongs to and who fought off enemies
and put whom in charge of the village. I learned that I had to thread
carefully without making any judgments or revealing the secrets that someone
in the other village told me about the inhabitants of this village. I learned
that there is indeed something in a name; history, morality, wisdom,
philosophy, geomorphology, climatology, contact with other people, among
others. I also learned that the field could make one an advocate for the
oppressed and sometimes turn one into something one had neither planned nor
obtained any training in. The Akan proverb, Ɔhɔhoɔ ani apɔtwepɔtwee enhu kurom
‘The guest/stranger may have big eyes but s/he does not see what is in a
town.’ To wit, no matter how big or learned a stranger might be, s/he may be
ignorant about matters of state of the town s/he is visiting. Care must
therefore be taken, not to overly engage in the politics of a town or place
one visits as a field linguist. A small mistake could cause a lot of trouble!
Two years into my faculty position at the University of Ghana, I became
interested in endangered languages, especially endangered Ghanaian languages
with the view to documenting them by writing peer-reviewed papers about their
morphophonology as well as  doing grammatical sketches and dictionaries for
such languages.  Given how unique these communities are, and in view of lack
of trust for those of us (Ghanaians) in the majority, penetrating these
communities was at times difficult. I often gained entry by making friends
with teachers and, yes, drivers, in the communities. The drivers took me to
the communities and introduced me to the chiefs and elders whereas the
teachers, who at the time were the most respected community members besides
the chiefs,  introduced me to whomever I needed to interview. In fact the
teachers were the most helpful as far as language use was concerned and they
were always willing to help. Issues of ethnopragmatics were mostly gotten from
the chiefs and elders. The teachers also assisted me in the data collection
for a small fee and always helped with the orthographic transcriptions. Some
of the under-described languages I have worked on are Bissa (Ghana & Burkina
Faso), Ncham (Ghana), Gwa (Ghana), Efutu-Awutu-Senya (Ghana), Dompo (Ghana),
Siwu (Ghana), Nzema (Ghana and Cote d’ Ivoire), Mina (Togo and Benin), Zarma
(Niger, Mali and Nigeria), Susu (Guinea & Sierra Leone), and Daju (Sudan).
Sometimes I discovered that the field was right here in the United States and
one does not have to travel to Africa or Asia to collect authentic data. In my
work on Address and Reference Forms among Akan Immigrants in the United
States, I found Akan enclaves in New Jersey and New York. Quite recently I
have discovered a large community of Akans in Columbus (Ohio)! Working with
these communities is as good as working with people back home. Given that
these people work all week (Monday to Friday), weekends tend to be the best
time for conducting interviews or administering any questionnaires. The
interviewees tend to be educated, willing to participate and speak with me/my
assistants freely.
Note that the “Field Methods in Linguistics” and “Advanced Field Methods in
Linguistics” classes tend to be a training ground for graduate students and
senior undergraduates about how to do fieldwork and also about ways of
collecting and analyzing data from a single informant, usually a graduate
student who is a native speaker of a language of interest to the faculty
member. Students meet with the consultant one-on-one for about an hour each
week, then meet with her/him for 2 one-hour-fifteen minutes class (2 hours and
30 minutes per week) with a faculty member often leading the class. Students
write a term paper that describes an aspect of the language they found
interesting. Some have gone on to publish their term papers in refereed
journals. I always emphasize that “Field Methods in Linguistics” and “Advanced
Field Methods in Linguistics” are NOT the same as doing real fieldwork and
have always encouraged the graduate students to go to the field and gain
experience as “Field Linguists!”
The main reason I like Fieldwork and Field Linguistics is my belief in the use
of sensible authentic data for linguistic(s) work instead of using invented
examples. I am aware of the danger of overstating this and of parsimony but I
am more comfortable using naturalistic data knowing that the data are
depictions of people performing naturally in natural settings instead of
inventing contexts and imagining how people would behave in such contexts. 
I have gained a lot from fieldwork including friendships, ‘family’, wisdom,
patience, and open-mindedness. Publication-wise, I have gained more than I
deserve! My forthcoming English-Efutu dictionary (co-authored with a
consultant) is one such benefit. I see this dictionary as a ‘first edition,’
for it is different from other dictionaries. I do neither tone marking nor
phonemic transcription. Rather, I do impressionistic phonetic transcription
and provide cultural mores, proverbs and stories at the end of the book. I am
aware of criticisms that might come with this kind of work but decided that I
will not change my mind about it. Phoneticians and those looking for
information about sound change, deletion, and various assimilatory processes
will find this dictionary most useful. The next edition, which I have already
started working on, will, beside the phonetic transcriptions, have phonemic
transcription with tone marks and much more grammatical information. 
I will not trade anything for fieldwork because I feel normal and satisfied
when I have the opportunity to work with people in their normal habitat and at
a place of their choosing.







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

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2022 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
                   https://crowdfunding.iu.edu/the-linguist-list

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3125	
----------------------------------------------------------