^^my mind during march^^
march is not a month that has lots of blog posts.
march is also not the most productive month of work.
but march is twelve hours and nineteen minutes from being over (even less time by the time i get this posted), and that's alright with me.
i took a trip to nakaale to visit Bob and Martha Wright, some folks doing really cool work with construction and water well-drilling and linguistics, and included a side trip to mbale to get a visa extension. the day of traveling from nakaale to mbale involved a weird spike-y fever, nearly passing out in a coffee shop about five minutes after feeling basically alright, a malaria test (negative), and then 16 hours of sleep. during the entirety of this time, the contents of my shampoo bottle were coating everything in my backpack, including my motherboard. rip, computer. although i have a pretty great extended warranty for it that will bring it back up to fine condition at no cost to me as soon as i get home--thanks lenovo, and particularly thanks parents and brother for getting said warranty for me. so my trip to mbale eventually included a side trip to jinja, where johnny and jen long took great care of me while i bought a new computer (which has performed admirably).
i planned to leave jinja late on a wednesday afternoon and be in karenga within 24 hours. obstacle 1: homeland bus line's kampala office phone was disconnected sometime recently, so i couldn't call to reserve tickets. i called my friend Jille, who makes this trip often, to ask if he had any suggestions. he got in touch with his friend Steph, who bought my ticket for me on tuesday, ensuring that i had a seat (not only a seat, but probably the best seat on the bus--thanks Jille and Steph!). the only complication was that i would have to meet up with her somewhere in kampala to get the ticket. this was no problem--i caught a mid-afternoon bus to kampala (buses between jinja and kampala are running pretty much constantly), got off just before town, and took a motorcycle taxi to our meeting place, where i paid her back for and received the ticket. i got on the bus at just after 9pm and arrived in kitgum at around 6am. by 815am every corner of the bus had been emptied and there was no sign of my backpack. it turns out that the backpack had been left in kampala, but it did arrive the next morning. so i spent the day mostly asleep in kitgum. it's hot there and apparently i was at least moderately tired. i arrived back in karenga early on friday afternoon.
since then i've done a little bit of work, but it was a fairly slow week. on tuesday i drove to puda village and brought Komol to karenga for a few days. this took place immediately after the most intense 48 hour stretch of rain that we've had since i got here nearly three months ago. suffice it to say that by the time i arrived back in karenga, i was quite muddy from horizontal motorcycle experiences. i had Komol get off and walk through the worst parts, because likelihood of injury in motorbike crashes was not listed among the risks of the project in my irb protocol. nobody was injured (i've learned lately that it's rather easy to lay a motorcycle over on a dirt road at low speed without noteworthy injury, although this is not a lesson that i set out or desired to learn). my right leg has lots of yellow bruisy spots though. it's a champ.
having Komol here wasn't horribly successful. i got some video and audio recordings of marginally interesting interactions between him and the other semi-speaker who lives here in town, but i found that they really don't interact very much when i'm there observing. their attention is directed at me at all times, they rarely address each other, and discourse mainly consisted of Komol saying things and then Ilukol (who has a much more limited grasp of the language) repeating them. i might try to get them together one more time when i have had time to put together a rather coherent program of conversation for them, but i think that very little of the data that i collected was significantly different from or more informative than anything that i already have.
i'm finding that i really need to micromanage the data-collecting process. after i had collected fifteen or twenty minutes of text (which took me perhaps a day when i was here two years ago--although significantly longer to analyze that much text), it was no good to offer a topic or prompt and to request commentary on it, or to ask for a story on a given topic. no matter what prompts i offer, quickly the stories make use of the same vocabulary and the same grammatical structures, all of which comes from a rather constrained set. he has difficulty pushing himself to use more nuanced or specialized or infrequent words when he has freedom to produce whatever he likes within a given topic, but responds more comfortably to direct prompts--asking for translations of karamojong words, for instance. philosophically, i don't like that very much. but i've found that working in such a situation--with an essentially extinct language--philosophy takes a backseat to pragmatic considerations. so i've been consulting with a couple of lengthy wordlists that were written for African languages, and focusing mostly on a 1600 item list in which the words are grouped on a semantic basis--body parts together, kinship terms together, etc. in order to maintain a modicum of non-directly elicited data, i have komol create a sentence including each word that i elicit. when he has a hard time doing this (it's really a rather difficult skill), i ask him a question that is likely to include the word in question in the answer.
a true reference grammar of nyang'i is out of the question. perhaps one could have been produced 20 or 30 years ago--maybe the oldest speakers could have remembered enough grammar for a good go at it even 10 years ago--but there's simply not enough existent now for such a work. however, the nyang'i lexicon provides an important data source for the expansion of our fledgling linguistic account of the (pre)history of the kuliak/robic language family and, at a broader level, the (pre)history of the entire region. some particularly meaningful data for such an endeavor will come in the form of place names and specialized agricultural vocabulary--the names of mountains and rivers and valleys and funny-looking rocks, the names of various life-stages of plants, the names of foods that people used to eat during times of famine, and things of that sort. so that will be information that i will work particularly hard to get in my remaining two months here, in addition to the broader knowledge provided by the 1600 item wordlist.
my life has been largely tied up in logistical concerns for three and a half weeks. i'm just now getting back into a routine of work and recovery, and that routine will be very important for making this trip a success. it's easier to deal with ideas when i'm in that routine, as my mind isn't concerned with mere pragmatics of getting me and things from this place to that place, or of having a functioning computer for the remainder of my trip. at the very least i wrote a lengthy email containing some basic observations about local epistemology last night. that's the sort of thing that happens when a german buddhist, two dutch atheists, an american christian, and a ugandan christian talk about metaphysics around a fire. things get weird. things get weird.
i don't have photoshop, but i have started taking all of my photos in RAW+JPG mode, so i still have access to things. so here are some photos of kids by a muddy puddle, Jille finishing a really awesome loop around the summit of kamukoi (a local mountain, name katibong in origin, currently untranslated. the mountain in the background is lowakuj (or loakuj), which basically means "the God place", and which gets translated as "God made it this way", or sometimes "God's corral") which loop i proceeded to run two days later (making me tired), and kamukoi at night with a tree in front of it. hooray. oh, and also i've been blowing up instagram lately, so check that out--even if you don't have an instagram, you can see the photos online at instagram.com/samuel_beer .
