Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks: Language Politics, Digital Media and the Making of an International Community

However, as Ghassan Hage (2005) warns us when talking about the limits of multi-sited ethnography, eventually such a journey had to come to an end. After all, 'the body of the anthropologist, even a post-modern one, simply cannot cope with such fast and intensive travelling for a very lengthy period of time' (Hage 2005: 465). Issues such as phys- ical exhaustion and restrictions in time and financial resources play a role in the process of interrupting movements and cutting networks— not only for ethnographers, but also for Esperantists. Andrei was acutely aware of it: during our preparation of the cardboard boxes, he stated that some people do not attend Universal Congresses due to their diffi- culties in dealing with foreign food habits, the time spent travelling, as well as problems to obtain visas, as recurrently happens particularly to African Esperantists who are refused visas to attend Esperanto meetings in Europe. In this regard, the same actors, mediators and connections that enable movement also set its pace and offer resistance to it, both facilitating and impeding mobility (Cresswell 2014). Travel documents and means of transportation may make travelling possible, but not always and not for everyone, as lack of visas, lack of money, long waits in airports and high taxes to export CDs and DVDs restrain flows.

Despite the frequent emphasis they place on travelling, Esperantists are also rooted somewhere. Being for most of the time during field- work stuck with them in Paris, partially sharing their sense of entrapment (Hage 2003; Jansen 2009), enabled me to better understand their local Esperanto activities, as well as the lack thereof in moments when they could not attend meetings outside the city—on occasions in which their mobility was expressed as motility, as a potential for movement that was not effectively materialised (Kaufmann et al. 2004; Salazar and Smart 2011).

Engaging with a heavily internationally-driven speech community also brings about another challenge—one that Esperantists refer to as la lingva problemo (the language problem). This emic expression alludes to how the world's linguistic diversity limits communication, as well as produces miscommunication. Linguistic diversity is not conveyed as an issue in itself: the problem emerges when one uses a hege- monic language—a national language turned global through imperialism (Phillipson 1992)—to mediate between people from different linguistic backgrounds, given the uneven playing field it produces for non-native speakers of the hegemonic language at stake. In this scenario, Esperanto was to offer a solution for the language problem as a non-imposed, shared second language, easier to learn and more regular than most natural languages. Thus, since Esperanto is no one's first language and Esperantists are at least bilingual, code-switching becomes a constitutive part of one's experience as an Esperantist. Once Esperantujo is in place, from international congresses to local meetings, the use of Esperanto aims to abolish the constant need for translation, since everyone would communicate in this language. However, to reach this, everything must first be translated into Esperanto.

While my French-based interlocutors were used to code-switching between Esperanto and French, this issue assumed a rather more radical form to me. I had to switch daily between Portuguese (my mother tongue), English (the language in which my research outcomes were supposed to be published), French (the first language of most of my interlocutors and of the country where I lived) and Esperanto (the mediator that brought my interlocutors together). I conducted my field research in both Esperanto and French, and even though I could already speak the languages I needed for this study, my foreignness—my being a(n) (South) American in Paris—played a role in these encounters. My fluent, although far from standard, French, together with my fluent, 'international' Esperanto, made the very process of code-switching a rele- vant component of my ethnography. Between French and Esperanto, only one of these seeming equally available languages is chosen by partic- ular individuals on particular occasions to talk about particular issues

(Fishman 1965).

Along these lines, during my thirteen-month-long stay in Paris, I was hosted—paying cheap rent by Parisian standards—by two Esperantists and their families, and these accommodation arrangements implicitly required me to use Esperanto with them regularly as a home language. Likewise, as per Patrice's assertion quoted before, my foreignness (read as my being a non-native speaker of French) rendered some Esperanto meetings in Paris 'less artificial', which encouraged a great number of Esperantists to want to talk to me. On the other hand, on occasions in which I deliberately chose to speak in French, those who were begin- ners in Esperanto felt more comfortable talking to me, and constantly switching from one code to another enabled me to participate in a wider range of meetings and activities. On distinct occasions and for different purposes, I used both Esperanto and French in my participant observa- tion and interviews. Code-switching was also part of the archival research I conducted at the archives of the associations Esperanto-France, SAT, SAT-Amikaro and AFCE, as well as at UEA's Hector Hodler Library and at the Department of Planned Languages of the Austrian National Library.