{"id":3629,"date":"2007-09-26T23:52:10","date_gmt":"2007-09-26T23:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/09\/ngo-model-of-cultivated-self-promotion-for-activism-lise-dobrin\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:47:04","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:47:04","slug":"ngo-model-of-cultivated-self-promotion-for-activism-lise-dobrin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/09\/ngo-model-of-cultivated-self-promotion-for-activism-lise-dobrin\/","title":{"rendered":"NGO model of cultivated self-promotion for activism – Lise Dobrin"},"content":{"rendered":"

[From Lise Dobrin<\/a>, our correspondent in Virginia<\/em>]
\nThe media blitz on David Harrison and Greg Anderson’s recent Expedition to a Hot Spot<\/em> has given everyone (including my mother!) a chance to reflect on what endangered language work really ought to be about. We shouldn’t be parachuting in and out. We should be putting our money into *real* documentation, not demo documentation. We shouldn’t be putting money into documentation at all, but into community revitalization programs (see Ellen Lutz’s 24-9-07 letter in the NYTimes<\/em>). We should be working to better use the press. No, we should become the press!
\nBut what I find most remarkable about the whole story is this: a couple of linguists start a non-profit to further their own language documentation work. What? Since when do we do that? You can argue the finer points of Greg and David’s methods, or who is (or ought to be) reaping the benefits, but irregardless, their model is an interesting one: if you want to do something that the academic\/big agency funding model is not ideally suited to support, nothing is stopping you from creating an institution and doing it on your own instead. The university is not the only possible institutional setting for our work, and it may not always be the best one. It’s just the one many of us are used to.<\/p>\n


\nI’ve been thinking about the institutional infrastructure of documentary linguistics and language preservation since I got involved in a little side project on the relationship between academic linguistics and the powerful Bible translation organization SIL (where I work, in Papua New Guinea, the discipline of linguistics practically is SIL. At the Linguistic Society of PNG meeting in Madang last year, five of the nine presentations were made by SIL linguists). We usually think of SIL as two-sided: academic and Christian mission. But in fact that’s only part of the story. SIL has a crucial third side that academic linguists would do well to note: they are a transnational NGO — a development agency, really. It is SIL the language development NGO that negotiates contracts with governments. It is SIL the NGO that does local vernacular literacy, teacher training, orthography development, etc. It’s a model that allows any number of good works, linguistic or otherwise, to be slipped in alongside.
\nCould secular linguists take a lesson from SIL and organize themselves that way too? Language documentation, community language development, and language activism have a rather peripheral place in the academy, especially in the US. And things will conspire to keep it like that. Ever feel like you’re pushing on with the parts of your work you value most despite your job, rather than because of it? But then again, we do need our health insurance.
\nSo in setting up Living Tongues, David and Greg might really be onto something. There’s certainly no question of getting their own prioirities into alignment with those of the institution. And the media blitz is simply the modus operandi of an activist NGO: see something that needs to be done, and set up an organization to do it. Associate it with a cause and a caring expert. Attention to the cause gets drawn through the caring expert, who (eventually, you hope) can attract speaker fees and hefty book advances (maybe even a role in a film project? or a contract with National Geographic?). Use that to promote and support the work of the organization, which may consist of no more than the caring expert him- or herself (plus a press agent and a website). Developing a caring expert profile is not for everyone. Many of us would rather leave that to the Jared Diamond set. But it is an effective common practice in the activist NGO world (take a look for example at the International Forum on Globalization site<\/a> and scan down the list of speaker bios.)
\nOf course, there is still a moral bottom line: Addressing real needs. Sending a useful message. Not letting your public profile get hijacked by somebody else’s objectionable cliches. But the NGO model of cultivated self-promotion in the service of an activist agenda is a reasonable and workable way to have your intellectual fun while doing good. Maybe it’s something the rest of us ought to be thinking about too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[From Lise Dobrin, our correspondent in Virginia] The media blitz on David Harrison and Greg Anderson’s recent Expedition to a Hot Spot has given everyone (including my mother!) a chance to reflect on what endangered language work really ought to be about. We shouldn’t be parachuting in and out. We should be putting our money … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fieldwork"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4316,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629\/revisions\/4316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}