0166 | Learning How to Ask – Charles Briggs
REVIEW
Briggs focusses on lessons he learned while working over a period of years with a community of Mexicanos in New Mexico. He’s learned some valuable lessons, mostly through his methodological errors while conducting interviews.
He intended to get an idea of a community of carvers and so designed and set up some interviews with them to get detailed information. He was surprised to hear so many people responding to his ‘well-designed’ research questions with non-committal answers such as “Who knows?”
It was then he started realising that before he was going to learn about them, he needed to start learning about his own approach to life.
On observing the community more and taking his pot of frustration off the boil, he came to realise that, to this community, the idea of a younger outsider demanding knowledge about their community was breaking unspoken rules about who could speak, what they could speak about and to whom.
He discovered that you need to earn the right to ask questions or bring up topics of your own.
Through this process, he came to realise that his basic methodology for interviews was flawed. Thus he began to learn how to ask.
The book is a very valuable one people like myself who aim to work cross-culturally collecting data about language communities. It raises awareness of not just how blinded we can be in our approach to research but how ironic this really is. We are trying to understand communities and how they function but the very methods we choose will prevent just that.
While many of his recommendations are too detailed and time-consuming to be applicable to the brief length of time most surveyors are in their communities, reading through them gave me lots of ideas about how I could be more cautious about my approach to language survey. In particular, the understanding of the interview as a speech event in its own right and therefore something that will carry its own values in the communities I might work in.
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