there is no fieldwork narrative (yet)

these are photos that i took in uganda.

i'm caught up on photos from back in america. i don't want to get dreadfully behind on those, as i have done at other times. so i'm only going to post photos from uganda at times when i'm caught up on posting current photos.

i'll mostly only post photos that i didn't post from uganda, although there will be a few repeats.

i'm going to meet with my advisor tomorrow. it will be my first meeting with him since i got back. i don't have a fieldwork narrative to tell him. The Dying Language Research Narrative is a thing, and is the subject of my still merely conceptual blog post "other linguists", which could conceivably actually end up as the introduction to an academic paper, except that i don't think people typically publish about how they fail where other linguists succeed. That caveat, of course, is dependent upon a certain way of evaluating the success/failure parameter, but discussion of the prevailing evaluation strategies of this parameter would clearly be at the center of "other linguists". in any case, though--if i don't have a narrative for my advisor, i probably don't have a narrative for my blog, either.

i went to uganda to study the nyang'i language. nyang'i is essentially an extinct language. a few words loiter in the crustier corners of a few old men's brains. perhaps there are women who remember some, also, but the people i spoke to all steadfastly insisted that only those few men remembered anything. the most words loiter in Komol's brain. the corners of Komol's brain aren't nearly so crusty as the corners of some other folks' brains. Komol lives 12 miles from karenga, the nearest place that can host a foreigner. i lived in that place and commuted to Komol's village--first by hitching rides on other people's motorbikes, and then by riding my own motorbike. In the two weeks that it took to get ahold of my motorbike, i had a lot of time to kill in karenga. i played a little bit of soccer and i tried to get a Humans of Karamoja project going.

Humans of Karamoja did ok, but ultimately fizzled. i never managed to find the right way to ask questions that got insightful answers, which is the decisive quality of Humans of New York. Interactions went something like:

me: "can you tell me about the happiest moment in your life?"
them: "what are you saying?"
me: "uh... can you tell me about a time when you were really happy?"
them: "i like farming."

additionally, i wasn't in uganda for photography. as mentioned, i was there to add my tale to The Dying Language Research Narrative. the awkwardness of being around town (a very very small town, mind you) with a camera was more of a social drain than i wanted to deal with.

here are a few photos from the early days. the photo above the text, a repeat from when i was in uganda, is of wildfires through a papaya grove in kitgum, a large town about 100 miles west of karenga. below are a shot of the lorry driver who took me from kitgum to karenga, three photos from a soccer match i sometimes participated in and sometimes watched, and a prospective Humans of Karamoja shot that i never had a caption for.