Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks: Language Politics, Digital Media and the Making of an International Community
- Автор: Fians Guilherme
- Год: 2022
- Язык: русский
- Жанр: Культурология
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3.3 How to Recast the Global, Between Boundedness and Multi-Sitedness
If this community is formulated on the basis of one-night-stand community-building practices, the same should apply to a long-term ethnographic study of it.
Establishing and stabilising Esperantujo in territorial terms is an issue for Esperantists and ethnographers alike, which places mapping as both a core analytical issue and a central methodological concern here. Over history, as presented in the previous chapter, Esperantists have attempted to encourage dynamic exchanges in the language and to account for the spread of the community through the accountability enabled by local, national and international Esperanto associations. Two key means of accountability also responsible for bringing Esperantists together, still in place today in ever-updated versions, are the Adresaro and the Jarlibro (respectively, Address Book and Yearbook). Zamenhof published the first address lists in 32 issues from 1890 to 1909, so that Esperantists could locate and contact each other, either in person or by post. Currently, UEA publishes the Jarlibro periodically, with contact information of associations and its delegates and details about how to find monuments related to Esperanto, streets and squares named after Esperanto and Zamenhof, as well as libraries and radio stations with materials to read and listen to in the language. Similarly, SAT regularly issues an Adresaro with the contact details of all its members.
A particularly successful undertaking that enhanced the international use of Esperanto while also mapping out this community was Pasporta Servo (Passport Service). Created in 1974, Pasporta Servo is a hospitality service carried out entirely in Esperanto. The forefather of institution- alised couchsurfing, it was launched as a book directory listing the addresses and telephone numbers of Esperantists willing to offer guided tours, free lodging and, above all, a warm welcome to Esperantists trav- elling abroad. Doing so through Esperanto was a way of establishing a more egalitarian communicative exchange through a language that is the first language of neither hosts nor guests, thus turning the unequal host—guest relationship into a more balanced relationship between fellow community members. Pasporta Servo currently makes its directory avail- able in book form and online, through a map constantly updated by its users (Fig. 3.1).
Beyond the framework of hospitality, the cartographic tools designed to help locate Esperanto speakers now include the website Esperan- tujo, La Esperantista Mondmapo (The Esperantist World Map), in which Esperanto-speaking users can create a profile, register their position on the globe and contact others based on their location. In a similar
fashion, but with a more institutional focus, the website of the associ- ation Esperanto-France displays a map of France with information on clubs and associations in each French department. Additionally, since April 2017, the mobile phone app Amikumu provides a platform where users create their profiles, register their language skills and use the mobile phone's GPS to locate fellow Esperanto speakers, as well as speakers of other languages, nearby.
Just as mapping practices and technologies help to territorialise Esper- antujo through showing where to find Esperantists and associations, maps also provide non-Esperanto speakers with a way to visualise this community. Commenting on visual depictions of the Basque nation, Jacqueline Urla (1993) shows how Basque language organisations sympa- thetic to Basque nationalism represent, in their publications, maps of the Basque country detached from its surrounding geographic context. In doing so, these cartographic representations emphasise the autonomy of the Basque country, in contrast to its image as a mere region engulfed in Spanish and French territories. Along similar lines, in presenting Esperantujo through world maps, the Esperanto movement resorts to cartography to exhibit this language's and community's global reach.
Yet the centrality of cartography for Esperantujo is not new. In his opening speech at the third Universal Congress of Esperanto, in Cambridge, in 1907, Zamenhof asserted that the Universal Congresses offered possibilities for Esperantists to meet every year in 7a cefurbo de Esperanttijo', 'the capital city of Esperantujo' (Zamenhof, reproduced in Privat 2001: 70—71, my translation). At least once a year, Esperantujo can form a temporary international territory, in pop-up capital cities materialised by the congress venues. In the same way that these terri- torial links are short-lived, the relationships between Esperantists who meet at these events also tend to be ephemeral. While some Esperantists exchange contact details, most of these contacts are restricted to the days these Esperantists spend at the international congresses—which config- ures 'real Esperantujo' as a pop-up community. Paradoxically, however, rather than hampering the Esperanto community, this ephemerality and weak territoriality are precisely what strengthen the making of the Esperanto community.
Esperantists may not be geographically concentrated, but the tech- nologies and mediators that enable them to be connected are, to a large extent, traceable. As indicated by the books and cardboard boxes trav- elling from Rotterdam to Seoul, being an Esperantist in practice means attending congresses, making friends with fellow speakers, exchanging contact details and communicating through digital media, as well as shipping Esperanto books and organising temporary bookshops on the opposite side of the world. In many ways, this community is estab- lished and evolves through a network-like organisation, in which the language itself is the major mediator that prompts Esperanto associa- tions, congresses, magazines, mobile phone apps and digital media to also play Esperanto-related roles. In this sense, mapping out the use of these mediators and technologies seems to offer a way of stabilising some of these connections and making sense of this community.
Studying networks of Fijian-based NGOs dedicated to women's issues, Annelise Riles (2000) makes a compelling methodological remark: thinking of networks as an analytical tool is not innovative when the reality of one's field site is already based on networks. In her words,
Where the people described in this book already understand themselves to create networks in order to generate realities by studying, analyzing or communicating about them, discovering a 'network' no longer can evoke the surprise of uncovering hidden analytical truth as it once did. (2000:
4)
Due to the network-like configuration of Esperantujo, following people, things, metaphors, stories, lives and conflicts (cf. Marcus 1995) seemed to be the right thing to do. A multi-sited approach along these lines defies the more traditional practice of bounding 'cultures' into places (Marcus 1995: 104) and enables ethnographers to understand issues and social groups that are not territorialised. Contrary to a single- sited ethnography whose findings would later be situated and explained by macrotheories and the broader context, multi-sited ethnographies give more centrality to the data coming from the field. Hence, multi-sitedness equips us to acknowledge that processes—such as the building and main- tenance of Esperantujo—may be carried out across great distances and even on the move (Burrell 2009: 183).