Mark Turin, Claire Wheeler and Eleanor Wilkinson

“ Against this backdrop of historical, political and social factors that influence literacy in indigenous languages, it is self-evident that orality is not a drawback in bilingual education, i.e. something that formal schooling must eradicate once and for all. On the contrary, orality should be the point of departure for literacy in indigenous languages, and the best way to show and perform orality is through ears and eyes and always in contexts of cultural significance. ”

“ Significantly, to attract such a crowd, the troupe took considerable artistic license in dramatizing the events leading to the exodus. Agokoli was portrayed not as the insensitive tyrant of the well-known Notsie narrative, but in slapstick form as a drunken, lecherous, bumbling ruler who was presented as more an object of amusement than abhorrence. The fact that only a more light-hearted account [...] could draw such an engaged crowd illustrates the extent to which older meanings and memories have undergone yet another set of transformations. ”

“ Firstly, when archiving and publishing language materials from communities without a tradition of literacy, it is important to be aware that making any materials public may affect language revitalisation efforts in that community. If there is no standard dialect, or orthography, published research may potentially affect what might be a delicate political balance between factions of the speech community, or may have an impact on language maintenance. ”

“ A day prior to the eve of Teja-Dashmi, the Bhopa moves in a procession sitting on a mare holding the snake round his neck. The next day he allows the snake to bite him on his tongue. For a moment after the snake bites he appears to lose consciousness but is brought back to life by the crowd singing Tejaji songs. At the end of the festival, in the evening, the snake is released into its hole. The Bhopa who performs this is quite old and his successors may not be able to follow it in future. This performance is a unique enactment in the whole of Rajasthan. ”

“ There is extreme poverty in some of the most traditional Mongghul communities, evident through lack of access to basic health care and resources that would pay for such care, clothing that is plain and simple, and an education system that is dramatically inferior to that available in such urban centres as Xining and Lanzhou. Knowledge of oral history and Mongghul songs, wearing Mongghul clothing, and a profound knowledge of local Mongghul history do not give most Mongghul youth a sense of belonging to a glittery attractive global pop culture. ”

“ The interview: collaborative authorship vs. researchers as griots In the case of the interview presented in the Verba Africana series, from a simply collaborative authorship (“collaborative” as in the cases when the interviewee is author together with the interviewers) we have to shift to a more complicated form of authorship, in which interview credits are obviously not a problem, but we as researchers play a decisive, if open, role in the way the discourse is presented. ”

“ The instrumentality of intangible cultural heritage has been seriously considered by governmental agencies and is being evaluated by indigenous peoples as a mechanism to enforce their collective rights before the state. This is made possible because intangible cultural heritage is linked to other fields of public policy such as health care and education, and because the concept of cultural heritage includes a network of multifarious expressions and prescribes the understanding of cultures in their own specificities. ”

“ Intellectual property concerns are always an important consideration for American Indian communities. Even though a recorded story may already be published, the language or dialect in which it is told may not be, and the language itself may be considered intellectual property by the speech community. ”

“ The interaction of local and globalising forms of knowledge is an increasing phenomenon in Africa, such as in the present example where all the persons involved in the oral performance and its video documentation belong to the academic/educative field, although with different positions and roles. In such a case, the forms, strategies and aims of the “glocal” (local and globalised) knowledge of the storyteller need to be explained to the audience in a form more mediated and critical than the video documentation of oral genres usually does. ”

“ As snakebites are completely unpredictable it was difficult to be there when a genuine performance was happening, to try to capture and understand the difference in intensity of performance between one called when a life was at stake, and one called for archiving purposes. ”

“ Because indigenous peoples do not have monuments or sites of the same sort as those found in cities and archeological complexes, their material cultures, let alone other less “tangible” expressions, were never considered a form of cultural heritage. The acceptance and ratification of the Convention by Ecuador in 2008 represented a dramatic turn in cultural politics, with great influence on the public management of cultures, those of the urban Spanish-speaking population and those of the indigenous peoples all over the country. ”

“ For many indigenous communities, the dialect in which a story is told is just as valuable to the community as the content of the story, and both require the careful attention of the researcher. This is especially true in indigenous communities where local dialects are important emblems of cultural and group identity. For example, in the Tiipay-speaking Kumeyaay community of Mexico, there are distinct local dialects across six communities, all located within a fifty-mile radius of each other (Field 2012) . ”

“ In contrast, the oral history documentation project of the Mongghul Ha Clan [2] prioritised the value of local oral history as told by community elders with the goal of making it available worldwide to anyone with an interest, including future generations of Tu people.
It is important to note that migrations, intermingling, and identity transformation of nationalities have been frequent in the Qinghai-Gansu frontier region, making it challenging to claim that the Tu ethnicity is unambiguously derived from a single ancestral group. ”

“ During recording sessions at many places, the singers could not be motivated to sing without the installation of a sound system. They have become so accustomed to microphones that the pitch and volume at which they sing has considerably reduced. They feel uncomfortable singing without the microphones. Impractically, they especially like to listen to themselves during the performance by tilting one of the loudspeakers towards themselves. With the use of microphones and amplifiers, the singers do not have to exert themselves. The empathy between the singer and the instrumental players is lost. ”

“ Similar tensions traverse the scientific arena, as cooperation between researchers, technicians and people from business enterprises also generates concerns on intellectual property and authorship. The point is to understand the breadth and depth of the collaboration: who has the intellectual initiative and the intellectual property and, obviously, who can claim the property rights, particularly when products are on the market to be sold and bought. ”

“ Documenting linguistic diversity seeks to preserve languages for posterity in a context in which half of today’s 6,500 languages will be extinct in the next hundred years (Crystal 1996; Bradley and Bradley 2002) . The idea of preserving linguistic diversity as an expression of our species is certainly valuable, but it is less so when the great majority of documentation projects are focused on archiving only, i.e. without a view to mobilising outcomes for the survival of languages and cultures. ”

“ Based on my experience, it is important to know a great deal about Mongghul culture in order to be proud of being Mongghul, because this brings knowledge about what there is to be proud of, which leads to confidence in being Mongghul. Time spent studying Mongghul culture and history is solely up to the individual ”

“ Ethical research systems and practices should enable indigenous nations, people, and communities to exercise control over information related to their knowledge and heritage and to themselves. [...] To act otherwise is to repeat that familiar pattern of decisions being made for Indigenous people by those who presume to know what is best for them. ”