Doctoral Dissertation Research: Translating Hopi: Language Revitalization, Knowledge, and Property

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The research funded by this award will investigate the potential for language preservation efforts to serve the needs of both scientists, who may lead the language documentation and revitalization efforts, and native speakers, whose cultures may mandate that they have sole control over their linguistic patrimony. Language preservation is scientifically important because it provides the raw materials for learning about the full range of human capacities. Languages also provide important clues to the history of humanity on earth. But individual languages are the knowledge-property of particular peoples whose own needs and goals may be quite different. Therefore, findings from this research will be important to scientists, language speakers, and language revitalization specialists throughout the United States and beyond. The research will be undertaken by Hannah McElgunn, a doctoral student in the Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Chicago, who is supervised by Dr. Justin Richland. McElgunn will focus on an important indigenous American language, that of the Hopi people, as a case study through which to explore how different claims to know, own, and control a language may converge or conflict as scholars, tribal staff, and language teachers and learners are drawn together in language revitalization efforts. The Hopi language provides a particularly apt locus for this study because most tribal members think of their language as their exclusive knowledge-property. With this knowledge-property comes the privilege and responsibility to pass it down. Further, revitalization activities on the Hopi reservation include not only classroom teaching and learning of the language, but negotiations with archival institutions about how to manage the circulation and availability of past language documentation work. What kinds of knowledge, property, and ways of relating to language are produced through language revitalization initiatives as a result of this convergence? Can these be extended with concomitant modification into new environments, encompassing new people and textual objects, rather than closing off access? These crucial questions will be explored through twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and participant observation on the Hopi reservation and at off-reservation archives.