GARETH FISHER

I live in a city, Beijing, but my research is focused on a very small population in that city – Buddhist lay practitioners at the Temple of Universal Rescue, the headquarters of the Chinese Buddhist Association. In the south of China, particularly in the countryside, religion is flourishing under China’s policies of “reform and opening,” official Chinese government speak for the country’s awkward transition from relative isolation to full participation in the process of globalization, with all of its attendant hopes and disappointments. In the urban north, however, especially in the capital, a political center that developed a healthy fear of political groups long before the communist government came to power, many of my informants are mistrusted and shunned. I live like they do in one of many large, grey, Stalinist block apartment buildings. The old, traditional single-story neighborhoods next to my building have been slowly collapsed in the time that I’ve lived here. Migrant families still squat in their ruins, though, asking me each day as I leave on my bicycle whether I am interested in buying their pirated CDs or DVDs.

My neighbors if I speak to them do not know where I go. If they ask, I merely say I am an overseas student, my official status here. Where I go might be any number of places all throughout the city, perhaps the temple, but more often the homes of practitioners I have met there. There, I hope for a day of tea, fruit, a vegetarian lunch, and, hopefully conversation. Perhaps on this day, my interlocutor will permit me to tape our conversation, but mostly they are too reluctant.

Not every day is spent like this, however. My biggest surprise on coming to the field was how much time I would spend writing. Indeed, what with fieldnotes, coding, translation, planning questions, and writing grants for another year of funding, I spend more time in front of my laptop now than when I was in Charlottesville. But the mixed routine is not unwelcome: after a few days being preached to by my ideologically-minded Buddhist friends, a period of time by myself in front of the computer is not unwelcome; but after several days in my apartment, I become restless and long to learn something new at another home in a different part of the city.

I’ve been here almost two years now. I often miss sitting in front of Brooks Hall eating my lunch. But I also wonder how easily I will sacrifice the independence that I have become accustomed to here for a return to the scheduled and hurried pattern of academic life in the United States. If I can take one thing back home with me, apart from my notebooks, sacred texts, and the bytes of data in my laptop, it would be the art of a patient conversation and relief from the habit of always checking one’s watch.

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PATTI EPPS

5:30 am, Amazon rainforest, Brazil. “Säwä’äy am, Pattie?” a little voice calls me awake. I open one eye to see a child’s face peering through the stick wall of my hut a few feet from my hammock. “Yep, I’m awake, Di’dib,” I answer, and the little guy squeezes inside and comes over to climb into my hammock with me. I begin to drift back to sleep, but just then a radio comes on full blast in the hut next to mine and I give up. I roll out of the hammock with my little classificatory cousin under one arm and begin to build my morning cooking fire. Di’dib helps me blow the twigs into flame, and then he is running back to his own hut and I am headed down to the stream for my morning bath. The cool grey dawn is already starting to grow hot.

8:30 am, Leipzig, Germany. The trams rumble past me on the cobblestone streets. It is snowing, and I peddle my bicycle slowly along the icy pavement, trying to avoid touching the brakes. Before long I will be in front of my computer in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, armed with a hot cup of coffee, puzzling over the reciprocal construction in the Hup language. It is a long way from the Amazon jungle, but the focus of my day will be much the same: What does this morpheme do? How does Hup express future tense? Is it simply an accident that the verb ‘be inside’ has the same form as the inference-marking evidential particle, or is it the result of some historical relationship?

My dissertation research is a study of Hup, a language of the Guaviaré-Japurá or Maku family of the northwest Amazon. Even though Hup is the first language of nearly all of its approximately 1500 speakers, it is not clear what the future holds for it. Its fate could change abruptly in just a generation, as has happened to so many of the world’s languages that have died out or become critically endangered in the last fifty years—many before they could be recorded. The documentation of languages like Hup contributes step by step to the empirical database of linguistic information, through which we test our hypotheses and shape our conclusions about human language in general. Documentation also has benefits for the languages’ speakers; the study of Hup, for example, includes the development of a practical orthography and materials for native-language literacy.

From fieldwork in the steamy Amazon rainforest to write-up at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, the documentation of the Hup language is a fascinating and multi-faceted project. Living in Hup villages for over a year has given me the opportunity to study the language in its full cultural context—to speak it daily with my Hup neighbors and adopted family, and to be part of its everyday use in story-telling, songs, spells, and conversations. Out of the field, MPI provides an exciting environment for writing and data analysis, surrounded by scholars working on languages from all over the world. And whether it’s fried ants for dinner or liverwurst, there is always something new to think about.