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Away with linguists!: Normativity, inequality and metascientific reflexivity in sociolinguistic fieldwork

par Jaspers, Jürgen ;Meeuwis, Michael
Référence Multilingua, 32, 6, page (725-749)
Publication Publié, 2013-11-07

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

This paper addresses the fact that in spite of the descriptive and well- intentioned ambitions of much sociolinguistic-ethnographic research, members of studied groups often continue to interpret such research as a largely verti- cally organized socio-political activity that communicates a prescriptive social and linguistic normativity the researcher is inevitably taken to embody. We argue that while many researchers agree that sociolinguistic fieldwork is inher- ently political, actual descriptions of informants’ awareness of this are still rather scarce. In the process, we demonstrate how members’ metascientific reflexivity can be particularly active precisely in and during fieldwork encoun- ters and in the entire research event, complicating the idea of a pure and disin- terested description and understanding.