Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks: Language Politics, Digital Media and the Making of an International Community
- Автор: Fians Guilherme
- Год: 2022
- Язык: русский
- Жанр: Культурология
Электронная книга - «Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks: Language Politics, Digital Media and the Making of an International Community». Краткое содержание книги:
As Esperanto is the key working language of Esperantujo, anyone who wants to conduct ethnographic or archival research about it has to be at least an Esperanto speaker and, to a large extent, also an Esperan- tist. Most of the academic bibliography on interlinguistics and planned languages is in Esperanto (Barandovska-Frank 1995: 9), which creates barriers for scholars who conduct research on Esperanto without having a command of the language.4 In some cases, I was seen as a 'very active Esperantist': I attended countless Esperanto classes, debates, meetings and congresses, was given copies of the keys of some associations' head- quarters and even invited to play leading administrative roles in two of these associations (which I declined). My constant presence at Esperanto meetings was widely read as an active engagement, which only became clear to me during a conversation with Andra, a 25-year-old Esperan- tist who lived in Toulouse. After Andra and I had met at an Esperanto congress in Catalonia in late 2016, she contacted me when she was about to visit Paris, and I hosted her during her three-day stay in the city. Talking about the Esperanto activities I had been attending, she exclaimed: 'you are a real Esperantist, you're so involved and so participa- tive in Esperantujo!' Since she understood the purposes of my research, I replied: 'Yes, but it's mostly because of my participant observation, it's not something I always do'. Pensive, she paused for a while and then retorted:
But you're always meeting Esperantists, joining debates, attending these administrative meetings... You see tonight, for instance: we only met young Esperantists at a restaurant because you helped set up the meeting, and invited some people to come and welcome me to Paris. Without you, maybe Quentin [one of the participants at this meeting, a Parisian who had attended an Esperanto meeting for the first time] would never have spoken Esperanto to someone in person. You are the one who included him.
Andra was right. Although I tended to regard myself simply as an Esperanto speaker—since I never tried to convince people to learn the language—I was completely caught up in Esperantujo and even held responsible for performing the labour of establishing the networks that I was attempting to trace. If this is what being an Esperantist meant, then speaking the language, circulating and building connections in this network had made me into a full-time one.
3.5 Joining and Creating a Pop-Up Community
The mild Esperantist way of'dwelling-in-travelling' (Clifford 1992) bears no relation to practices of mobility oriented towards migration, but rather concerns recurrent practices of travelling to encounter Esperan- tists, which establish episodic enactments of Esperantujo. While any number of people gathered communicating in the language already constitutes the Esperanto community, the emic 'real Esperantujo' only effectively comes into being a limited number of times per year in ever- changing locations. Once international gatherings such as the Universal Congress are over, real Esperantujo vanishes and turns into traces on the maps of previous 'capital cities of Esperantujo', expanding the list of territories this community once occupied.
Curiously, as I attempted to demarcate an arbitrary location for my long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I was being pushed to join flows and to conduct multi-sited, short-term field visits. Hence, my initial interrogations about methodology turned out to be the same ones that Esperantists face: when getting to grips with my positionality, trav- elling and being partially trapped turned out to constitute the very process of becoming both an anthropologist studying Esperantists and an Esperantist.
Yet, my approach partially clashed with the practices I was mapping: while my interlocutors worked to expand their Esperanto-mediated networks, I attempted to abridge mine as I tried to stabilise the ever- unstable Esperantujo through cutting networks and writing up the outcomes of my study. Yet, as Idris, one of my Paris-based research interlocutors, said: 'Sometimes Esperanto offers us so many opportu- nities. Maybe in your case it couldn't be otherwise, because Esperanto led you to go to all these places and do all these things'. Locating and mapping Esperantujo meant being dislocated by it, which compelled me to become quite an active actor in this network-like community, both at Paris-based associations and at international congresses.
Even when Esperantists are not travelling, their ideas, letters, online messages and cardboard boxes are. Therefore, in trying to map out this community through making sense of circulation and travelling, ultimately the mediators, technologies and practices mobilised by Esper- antists continuously (re)produce this community. In this way, travelling through Esperanto, organising meetings and regularly attending enact- ments of this pop-up community, as well as making Esperanto-related things and messages circulate, illustrate the amount of labour required to materialise Esperantujo. Hence, the (particularly active) Esperantists not only speak the language and make contact with fellow speakers: they perform the labour that enables this community to be continuously and repeatedly brought into material existence. Thanks to the practical effort of constantly creating contexts in which the language can be spoken— supported by mediators and technologies that enable Esperantists to be mobile, while also preventing them from being mobile all the time— real Esperantujo finds itself in a feedback loop whereby any engagement with the community encompasses some of the labour that breathes life again and again into the community. Based on the premise that the more international, the better, the connections and friendships that establish Esperantujo tend to be brief, but are, for the very same reason, intense and exciting—like a communitarian form of one-night-stand.
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