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(In Locuteurs de Langues en Danger et Travail de Terrain sur Langues en Danger , 2011, Grinevald and Bert (eds.))(This is the original English version. The paper was published in French).

Collaborative Documentation

Connie Dickinson

1. Introduction

As pointed out by Himmelmann (1998) language documentation

differs significantly from language description. A language

description written for linguists concentrates on systems of

abstract elements, constructions and rules. Language

documentation aims to comprehensively document the linguistic

practices of a speech community. While the basic products of

language description are a descriptive grammar, a word list or

small dictionary and a collection of texts, usually consisting of

traditional stories, language documentation concentrates on

increasing the amount and diversity of what is collected to

provide a more comprehensive representation of the language.

However, while it is fairly easy to compile a wish-list of what a

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body of documentation data should consist of—it should be

diverse; large; ongoing; transparent in the sense that a large

number of people should be able to use and understand it;

archivable; and accessible (Woodbury 2003)—there is a rather

large problem in terms of fulfilling this list. That is to say

that language documentation is incredibly time-consuming. By most

estimates it takes between one hundred and fifty to two hundred

hours to process one hour of recorded text. If this work is done

by a single academic the cost of compiling an adequate database

will be quite beyond the bounds of feasibility for most projects.

In this paper I am going to present a case study in which,

working in collaboration with a group of speakers of an

endangered language, we processed around two hundred hours of

texts, compiling an approximately two million word, searchable

(in Tsafiki and Spanish) database, in a relatively short amount

of time and for a reasonable sum1. I am going to argue that

collaborative documentation is not only more efficient and cost-

effective but that it greatly improves both the quality and

1 Research for this project was provided by Fulbright, the National Science Foundation (0618887), the Endangered Language Fund and the Volkswagen StiftungFoundation.

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quantity of what is collected and has additional benefits in

terms of language maintenance and revival. In addition, it can be

done with speakers who have little or no formal schooling. While

this option may not be available in all situations—with moribund

languages for example—it may be the only reasonable way we can

expect to adequately document a large number of languages.

I am going to begin by discussing language description

versus language documentation in general in the next section. I

will then discuss the project in detail including issues of

organization, politics, training and ethics. Although many of the

problems we encountered in carrying out the project are specific

to the situation of the speakers I was working with in Ecuador,

they do address cultural, social, political and ethical factors

which must be taken into account in any collaborative

documentation project.

2. Language Description versus Documentation

Since the time of Boas, the standard products of language

description have included a descriptive grammar, a wordlist or

small dictionary and a small collection of texts, usually

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traditional stories. While these materials are highly valuable to

linguists, they are not designed to provide a comprehensive

representation of the language as it is used within a community

of speakers. We expect a good descriptive grammar to be well-

grounded in terms of the current state of typology and linguistic

theory, to be exhaustive and be as honest as possible in its use

of the data. It “aims at the record of a language... as a system

of abstract elements, constructions, and rules” (Himmelmann

1998:161-195) and because of this the linguist chooses examples,

usually elicited, according to their utility in demonstrating

basic features of the grammar. They are not chosen according to

how well they represent the language as it is used by a diverse

community, and in fact would stray far astray of their purpose if

the examples were chosen solely according to these criteria. In

addition, a descriptive grammar cannot and should not be expected

to provide us with an in-depth analysis of every possible

grammatical feature in which another linguist, either now or in

the future might be interested. These grammars are invaluable

for what they provide us, but because they are written within the

confines of the state of linguistic typology and theory at the

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time of the writing and in addition have limitations imposed by

the language situation, time and funding, they should not be

expected to carry the burden of documentation.

The word lists or small dictionaries are invaluable in terms

of doing comparative studies since they usually cover the most

basic and common words found in the vocabulary. They are usually

not large enough to do a deeper semantic analysis of the language

and are certainly not a good representation of the richness of

the language as it is actually spoken.

We have known that the community of speakers find the

standard descriptive materials inadequate since Nora England’s

(1992) paper reporting criticisms from a community of Mayan

speakers and I hear these complaints echoed frequently among the

groups I work with here in Ecuador. The materials simplify and

distort the language and culture providing an inadequate

representation of both.

The inadequacy of small word lists (1,000-2,000) words was

recently brought to my attention by a young Tsachi. He told me

that when he entered high school and encountered his first

comprehensive Spanish dictionary, he was sure that his language

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was inferior. The published Tsafiki list of 2,000 words was the

size of a small notebook—he could hardly lift the Spanish

dictionary. He thought his language lacked words and when I asked

him whether he noticed that there were some words missing, he

said yes, but he didn’t realize there were thousands of missing

words. It also made it quite clear to me why these small

wordlists are generally just used by the community to start fires

or in the bathroom. The Tsachila that can read are bi-lingual and

this ‘dictionary’ contained the vocabulary of a three or four-

year old child. They already know the basic vocabulary of both

Spanish and Tsafiki and this type of word-list is totally useless

for them. This does not mean that these wordlists aren’t

valuable, particularly to researchers and people who don’t speak

the language. And of course, real time and money constraints

limit what can be done. It’s just that in the kind of communities

I work in, where although endangered, the language is still

spoken, these lists do not meet the needs of the speakers. And

given the experience of the young Tsachi, as well as the number

of mestizos I have encountered who use these wordlists as evidence

that the indios cannot think in abstract terms, it’s very

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important that we make it clear that these are partial,

incomplete wordlists and not proper ‘dictionaries’.

What the descriptive grammar and word lists lack, we hope

will be recovered in a collection of texts. The problem of course

is that a half a dozen texts or only a couple hours of recordings

are also a very limited set of data in terms of the richness of

the language. In addition, from a purely linguistic perspective,

the number of texts collected is also not adequate. Hopefully,

at the bare minimum, a collection of texts should contain at

least one or two examples of the grammatical features discussed

in the grammar for verification purposes. This raises the still

unanswered question of how many texts are needed simply to verify

the grammatical description, not to mention adequately represent

the language.

2.1 How “large” is “large”?

A major problem in documenting a language, much less a

culture, is, of course, that it is impossible. On the one hand,

no one can possibly thoroughly document a language much less a

culture, and on the other hand, in a broad sense, the second you

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write down or record a word you are documenting. As a result,

adequate documentation falls somewhere in-between “better than

nothing” and “impossible”. In the pen and paper days there were

real limitations on how many texts a researcher could collect.

Nowadays with new technology, although still time-consuming, it

is possible to collect much more than the ten texts which were

once considered a large collection. Simply confining the

discussion to how much is needed to verify the constructions

found in a descriptive grammar, I’d like to suggest, based on my

and a few other linguists’ experience, that somewhere around

thirty hours of recorded text collected from a variety of

speakers and a diverse set of discourse genres is probably

adequate.

The few other linguists I have talked to who have

transcribed, parsed, glossed and translated a large number of

recorded texts, independently came to the same conclusion I did.

Somewhere around thirty hours, the payoff for parsing and

glossing the texts goes way down—one begins to find very few new

grammatical constructions. One still finds new lexical items, but

the bulk of the possible grammatical constructions are already

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represented. I have a much larger database than the sixty or so

hours I have completely analyzed in Toolbox, which are transcribed

and translated, but not completely processed. As I work on the

Tsafiki descriptive grammar, I would estimate that the number of

grammatical constructions I do not find in the completely

processed texts, yet find in the larger database is around ten

percent. So I would guess that thirty hours of text should give

at least one or two examples of around eighty to ninety percent

of the grammatical constructions found in the language. The more

frequent constructions will be more than adequately documented.

In terms of the lexicon, when I had thirty hours of text

processed in Toolbox I had a word list of between 5,000-6,000

words. So it does not give you a comprehensive lexicon, but it

does cover the basic vocabulary of the language.

It should be noted that this is still, at most, only a

corpus of around 300,000 words or around 600 pages—the size of a

respectable manuscript. However, as anyone who has processed

texts knows a database of this size consists of 5,000 to 6,000

hours of work or two and a half to three years. It would take

fifteen to twenty years to produce the corpus I now have of

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around two million words (3,000-4,000 pages) if done by a single

academic. To produce this I had to look for help from another

population that has a vested interest in collecting this

material, the Tsachila.

3.0 The Tsachila

The two thousand some Tsachila that speak Tsafiki2, a

Barbacoan language, live at the foot of the Andes in the western

lowlands of Ecuador. They lived relatively undisturbed by the

dominant Spanish culture until the 1960’s when major roads

connecting cities on the north and south coast with the capital

city of Quito in the highlands were completed through the

Tsachila territory, making the city of Santo Domingo de los

Tsachila the largest land transportation hub in Ecuador. The

Tsachila live in seven communes all located within 20-30 miles of

Santo Domingo which is now the fourth largest city in Ecuador

with a population of around 300,000. In 1960 Santo Domingo had a

population of around 1,000. So in a single generation, the

Tsachila have gone from a rural life based on hunting, gathering

2 The name of the language is Tsafiki ‘the true language’. The name of the ethnic group is Tsachi ‘true person’ and the plural form is Tsachila ‘the true people’.

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and gardening to a modern urban life that has quite literally

come to them.

Despite the huge influx of Spanish speakers the language

still remains relatively strong. This is probably due in large

part to the older generation of speakers who have a very strong

sense of identity and were fiercely protective of their children,

refusing to send them to school because they were afraid they

would turn into mestizos (Spanish speaker with mixed heritage). It

is very rare to find a Tsachila over the age of thirty that has

any significant amount of formal schooling, much less a high

school degree. The younger generation of parents recognizes that

their children need to be able to read and write Spanish, so a

large number of speakers under the age of thirty have at least an

elementary education. However there are still only around forty

to fifty Tsachila with high school degrees and I only know of one

Tsachi whose parents were willing to let him leave the area to

attend a University. Family bonds among the Tsachila are quite

strong. The parents tendency to keep the children close to home,

I believe, is one of the main factors that has kept the language

relatively intact—younger speakers are bilingual, yet exhibit

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very little code-switching or mixing of Spanish with Tsafiki and

most children still learn Tsafiki as their first language and

only acquire Spanish when they begin school. The new generation

of parents however is more liberal, some even willing to let

their children marry mestizos—so the situation is probably going

to change rapidly.

While the language still remains intact, the culture has

undergone drastic changes. Only three percent of the jungle

remains uncut, most the large game is gone and the rivers are

over-fished, so they simply cannot practice their traditional way

of life anymore. The Tsachila have entered into the market

economy and now make their living through farming.

4. The Project

4.1 Project Background

The Tsachila are quite aware of what is happening to their

culture and almost thirty years ago a small group of Tsachila

decided they wanted to document what they could before it

disappeared. They contacted Robert Mix of the Museo del Banco Central

de Guayaquil and began collecting audio recordings. These four men,

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Alfonso, Ramón, Juan and Primitivo Aguavil3 had learned to read

and write Tsafiki as children with the SIL linguist Bruce Moore,

but only one had an elementary school education. Robert Mix then

contacted Colette Grinevald Craig, who was then at the University

of Oregon and he consequently entered the linguistics master’s

program there. I was also a graduate student in Oregon and after

meeting Ramón Aguavil in Oregon in 1994, I was invited to join

their project.

These four men had clear goals, they wanted to document

their culture and language and produce a comprehensive

dictionary. My agreement with them was that as a graduate

student, I had to first concentrate on my dissertation which was

not going to be much use to them, but as soon as the dissertation

was completed, I would seek funds to do a documentation project.

However, with documentation on our minds, during the first phase

of the project we collected around seventy hours of audio, which

was transcribed, translated and about half analyzed in Toolbox. I

taught them and two women that joined the project to use

3 The Tsachila only have five surnames with Aguavil and Calazacón being the two most frequent. Having the same last name does not necessarily indicate a blood relationship. In this case Alfonso, Ramón and Juan are brothers. Primitivo is unrelated.

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computers and so by 2003 when we received a generous grant from

Volkswagen Stiftung we already had a team in place and knew what

we were getting into—an enormous amount of sometimes tedious

work.

4.2 The Staff

When we began the second phase of the project there was some

disagreement. I wanted to keep the number of participants small—

the six Tsachila I was already working with plus one or two

individuals from the crop of recent high school graduates who

would presumably have stronger Spanish skills. But Alfonso

Aguavil, the director of PIKITSA, the organization the Tsachila

had by then formed, from the beginning saw the potential of this

project in terms of language and cultural maintenance, and wanted

to include a large number of younger speakers, who because they

had spent time in school rather than with their parents, he felt

lacked knowledge about their own culture and this was a way for

them to acquire this knowledge. He won the argument and we

basically threw the door open, welcoming anyone who was

interested in participating. In the end a total of twenty-three

Tsachila worked on the project at various times, with around ten

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becoming core members. Apart from the language maintenance

benefits of doing this, I have come to believe it was a good

strategy simply because it is hard to predict who will enjoy this

kind of work sufficiently to stick with it. The first people you

are directed to in these communities, the politicos, who are well

aware of the attrition of their language and culture, and the

school teachers may not be the best people with which to work.

The politicos are politicians and like politicians everywhere they

are extroverted people who are not going to sit down at a

computer for eight hours a day transcribing and translating and

they shouldn’t do so. They have another kind of important work to

do. The school teachers are busy. Basically the people I have

found that have stuck with the project are basically academics.

They may state that it is important to document their culture,

but really their motivation is like ours. They are simply

fascinated by the work itself and are willing to spend tedious

hours transcribing and translating because of the occasional bits

of new knowledge they encounter. Every community of any size has

people like this, but it may not always be easy to find them.

Opening the door to everyone while insisting on hard work,

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quickly identified the people with the talent and the motivation

to continue.

4.3 Training

As mentioned above, very few Tsachila have a high level of

education. About half the people involved in the project

initially had little or no formal education and nineteen needed

to be taught to read and write Tsafiki. While most could write

some Spanish, a few didn’t know much more than the Spanish

alphabet and how to write their name. The most frequent comment I

get about this project is “How did you train them?” of “I don’t

think I could do that because the people I work with have little

formal education.” I think the biggest hurdle is the conception,

both inside and outside academia, that the kind of thinking one

needs to master a computer or learn linguistic analysis is

somehow rarified or unusual. The people I work with are farmers.

They are used to evaluating complex environments and arriving at

solutions to complicated problems. Surely it is much easier to

figure out how to save a computer file than it is to figure out

why your yucca crop isn’t doing so well this year. They are in

essence, already scientists. They just need to be shown that they

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can apply the same thinking skills they already have to the

computer, to linguistic analysis etc. I have never found

explaining the concept of minimal pairs easier than with this

group. They already use this concept in their agricultural

practice. In general, I have found that while level of education

does affect their Spanish skills, it is not a predicator of how

well the speakers will learn to use the computers or read and

write Tsafiki. One of the more talented Tsachi I work with,

Alfonso Aguavil, went to school for six months when he was seven

years old. He can now run all twelve of the computer programs we

use, and can essentially do everything I can do in terms of

producing and processing the videos except the English

translation.

It may mean however, that you might have to adjust your

teaching style. The first “class” I gave to the Tsachila was not

just simply an example of cultural misunderstanding, it was a

fiery, three-car, cultural pile-up, in other words, a disaster.

The schools the Tsachila attend are based on a very hierarchical,

authoritarian system. Very little attention is given to

comprehension and instead students are expected to simply

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memorize or copy huge quantities of material. For example, the

high school senior writing project for one student I know,

consisted of cutting out a newspaper article, pasting it to one

side of a notebook, and copying the article word for word on the

other side. This situation is further exacerbated due to the fact

that Tsafiki has an obligatory evidential system, and despite the

fact that I have been telling them for ten years that Spanish

doesn’t have such a system, they don’t believe me, probably

because their Spanish does have such a system4. This causes

severe problems in their attitude towards formal schooling and

they don’t generally do well in school. One Tsachi told me that

when he started first grade his older brothers took him aside and

told him that the teacher was going to tell nothing but lies and

4 For example, this is a typical EspanTsa (Spanish/Tsafiki) statement: Connie voya visitar sus hijos dijo ‘Connie said she was going to visit her children.’ The firstperson form of the verb, voy is used despite the fact that the subject is third person. This is perfect Tsafiki grammar if the speech verb dijo is interpreted as the reportative suffix –ti (-RP) in Tsafiki and the first person verb form voy is interpreted as the Tsafiki congruent mirative marker –yo (-CNGR). The verbal suffix –yo indicates that the source of the information was aconscious participant in the event. By default it usually indicates first person, but in fact can be used with any person as in (a) below, where both the subject and the possessive pronoun are third person:

(a) Koni ya=chi na=la=ka kira-no jo-yo-ti-eConnie 3=POS small=PL=ACC see-INF BE:AUX-CNGR-RP-DCL‘Connie said she was going to visit her children.’

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he wasn’t to worry about it; all he had to do was memorize the

lies and repeat them back. In the Tsafiki evidential system if

you don’t use the proper marker to indicate where the information

came from, you are lying, which implies the actual content of

your statement is also a lie. So in essence, when many of the

Tsachila that have attended school are put in any kind of an

environment that resembles a formal classroom they simply wait to

be told what lies to memorize. They don’t expect to make sense of

it. The Tsachila that haven’t been to school are used to being

very physically active and as soon as they sit in a chair for

fifteen minutes with nothing to do they fall asleep. So there I

stood in front of the classroom with my carefully prepared lesson

and half the class had followed the older brothers’ advice and

had turned off their brains and the other half was asleep. It

didn’t work.

Now I would like to say I consciously chose to base the

teaching on the culturally appropriate Tsachi way of instructing,

which is based on modeling, i.e. there is very little overt

teaching. The children follow the adults around, observe what

they are doing and then attempt to do it themselves. But the

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truth is arriving at a solution felt more like simply catching

the marbles as they fell off the table. We had a vast difference

in skill levels, three different sets of cultural expectations

and a lot of work to do. What we have found that works best is

that I first teach new skills to three or four of the more

advanced team members. They in turn teach these skills to other

members. So far this seems to have worked well enough that all

team members can now read and write Tsafiki well and they can use

the transcription and Toolbox program. Other members can use more

of the programs and four members can do everything except the

English translation. Spanish is still a problem in that the

dialect the Tsachila speak is based on a rural coastal dialect

and in addition, is heavily influenced by Tsafiki. In other words

they speak coastal EspanTsa. Although the three Tsachila that have

a better command of standard Spanish are editing the Spanish

translations, I’m afraid that to understand some of the unedited

Spanish translations well, one has to learn EspanTsa. This is

possible, they are fluent speakers and their EspanTsa is

consistent and does make sense, it just takes some adjustment.

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The English translations are more transparent in that I translate

directly from the Tsafiki into standard English.

4.4 Who collected What

When I say collaborative documentation, I mean

collaborative. In the Tsafiki project, the Tsachila chose

approximately ninety percent of what was collected and collected

it themselves. This is very important to every indigenous group I

am acquainted with here in Ecuador. Since the Tsachila and I

participated in a public workshop and lecture here in Ecuador, we

have been inundated with requests from the Chachi, the Shuar, the

Cofan, the Huarani and various Quichua groups to teach them how

to do this type of documentation. The Tsachila and I have given

workshops to the Chachi, the Cofan and the Shuar and all want to

do similar projects, particularly if they have control. As one of

the leaders of the Shuar, Jorge Yankubam, told me quite publicly

when I went to give a documentation workshop to a group of young

Shuar, “We don’t want YOU to make videos and give them to us, we

want you to show us how and we will do it ourselves.” Now I think

this statement was in one part a message to the Shuar to take

this work seriously, but it was also a clear message to me—my

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role was that of consultant and teacher or possibly collaborator,

not director nor benefactor5. These groups want to take control

of how their culture is presented to the outside world and of

what might be the only record of their culture left for their

descendents.

Now this is not a bad thing. Their control over what is

collected improves the quality and breadth of what is documented.

Linguists are not well-trained in ethnography, and while

hopefully there will be an anthropologist involved in the project

who is, he will probably have a narrow focus on his specific area

of interest. The one or two outside researchers involved in the

project do not have time to become experts in more than one or

two areas of the culture. The speakers already have a fair amount

of knowledge about their culture and if not, they know who the

experts are. A young Tsachi may have himself never made a basket,

but he has seen them made. The average Tsachi already knows how

to utilize fifty to a hundred plants as medicine. Every Tsachi

household usually has a collection of herbs sitting around to use

5 The Shuar couldn’t pay me for this workshop, but they insisted on paying formy transportation, hotel and food. I would like to think that this was becausethey found what I had to offer so valuable, but I think it signified somethingelse—“WE are hiring YOU.”

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when someone falls ill. Now the shamans know much more, on

average around four hundred plants. So when a Tsachi interviews a

shaman about medicinal herbs, he already knows and has

intelligent questions formatted in a culturally appropriate

manner concerning about twenty-five percent of what the shaman

knows and having been cured by shamans since childhood s/he can

ask in-depth questions about curing rituals. In terms of

procedural videos, the Tsachila are very detail oriented. They

want to make videos that can actually be used to reduplicate the

procedure. I have basically been banned from taping procedural

videos, because they feel I don’t capture enough or the right

details about the procedure.

The twenty-three Tsachila involved in the project all chose

specific cultural domains in which to specialize. They identified

members in the community knowledgeable in this area and organized

the interviews or procedures and taped most of the material

themselves. The cultural domains included:

I. Plants, cultivated and wild, and their usage:MedicinalEdibleConstruction

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ArtifactsII. Habitation

Houses, construction and distributionFurniture

III. HistoryCommunalPersonal

IV. Traditional storiesV. Social Organizations

CommunesPoliticalFamily

VI. PersonGestationChildbirthChild rearingMarriageDeath

VII. MusicConstruction of instrumentsRecorded songs

VIII. System of belief/religionCosmologyShamanism

RitualsIllnessesCures

IX. SubsistenceFood and food preparationArtifacts HuntingFishingCultivationEconomy

X. Fauna/Animals BirdsInsectsMammalsFish/crustaceans

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Reptiles

So as can be seen, a large number of ethnographic fields

were addressed. Not all areas were equally covered. While twenty-

three Tsachila worked on the project, only around ten became

deeply involved in the work. In addition to what the Tsachila

collected, I requested video-recordings of everyday

conversations, child acquisition data, some experimental

elicitation data using materials from the Max Planck Institute

and formal public speech. The anthropologist involved in the

project Montserrat Ventura de Oller also requested some tapes

concerning specific questions about cosmology and childbirth.

The Tsachila are not unusual in their sophistication. I

recently accompanied a young Shuar, Tuntiak Katan to his

community in the Amazon, where in two days he collected: the

whole ritual process of harvesting yucca and making chicha; two

dance performances; several songs including a performance by a

master musician; several traditional stories; yaa chicham—a

traditional language used by men; as well as a couple hours of

everyday conversation. In total, he video-recorded eight hours. A

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foreign researcher could get this material but it might take

months if not years to identify the experts, gain the community’s

trust and organize the dance and music recitals. In addition,

despite the fact that Tuntiak is a full time student who also

works, after we showed him how to use the programs, he had all

this material transcribed and translated within eight months.

Documentation by the speakers does not replace the work of

academics. In fact, this type of organization frees the

researcher to concentrate on in-depth studies in their area of

expertise. For future researchers, there is a body of work that

they can use as a base to do further studies.

4.5 Format of the data

We video-tape almost everything except some experimental

elicitation data I have collected and some audio recordings for

phonetic and phonological analysis. We use video because it is

accessible to everyone in the community and captures more

information than any other currently available media. The tapes

are edited and formatted into MPG-1’s to be used as working

videos and MPG-2’s for archiving purposes and in addition we make

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copies formatted for commercial DVD players to be given to be

given to individual participants. The audio is uncompressed in

.wav format. The texts are transcribed and translated into

Spanish using ELAN. ELAN is a program developed by the DoBes team

at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen

which allows one to combine the transcribed, analyzed and

translated texts with the sound and video files in a single,

time-aligned, searchable program. After the text is transcribed

and translated it is analyzed in Toolbox, including the addition

of new words to the lexical database. At this point four of the

Tsachila are capable of carrying out this whole process, from

recording the tape to parsing and glossing. Other Tsachila have

varying levels of skills concerning these programs.

We do not make documentary videos, we make documentation

videos. A documentary video has a completely different purpose,

in many ways directly opposite to that of documentation. It

summarizes information and presents in a highly scripted and

organized manner to inform and entertain the general current

public. The material is chosen and directed to convey a clear

message. In documentation there is very little direction and

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while the video may concern a certain theme, basket-making for

example, extraneous material is not edited out and there is very

little direction. Documentary videos do not provide the detail

that the Tsachila and I want and need. For the documentation

project the Tsachila want detailed information and I want videos

where I can analyze gesture, posture, eye gaze and clearly

identify the speakers and I want chunks of unbroken dialogue. The

type of videos we make capture whole conversations, step-by-step

procedures in detail etc. They are never going to make it to

broadcast television or a movie theater, but that is not their

purpose.

The Tsachila and the Shuar I work with both recognize the

difference between a documentary and documentation video and the

purposes of both. Both groups want to now make documentaries. A

documentary, directed, written and produced by the speakers

themselves is seen as a powerful tool. With a little more

training, some better equipment and adequate funding they will

hopefully accomplish this. But they are adamant about doing it

themselves. They want to be in control.

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5. Politics

This kind of project is much more visible to the larger

community than the traditional pen and pencil model of language

description in which a linguist works closely with one or two

trained consultants and only occasionally ventures out into the

larger society to collect some texts or confirm an analysis. The

nature of a documentation project means collecting as much

material from as many speakers in as many different types of

contexts as possible. As a result, the project will be highly

visible in the community, which can lead to some unanticipated

problems (see Boden 2005 for an interesting case history). I was

lucky enough to be working with some very politically astute

Tsachila who were able to guide me through several minefields.

For example, Alfonso Aguavil never allows anyone associated with

the project to call this a proyecto ‘project’. In the Tsachila

cultural tradition anyone who experiences a “windfall” i.e. has a

lucky fishing or hunting trip, is expected to share the spoils

equally with the whole community. To this day, better off members

in the community are expected to throw one or two huge parties a

year to which they invite and feed two or three hundred people

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for a couple of days. Proyectos fall into this windfall category

and anyone who enters the community announcing a proyecto will be

expected to share the spoils equally among all the members of the

community regardless of their capacity or willingness to

participate in the work. And if this is not done the person with

the proyecto will be severely criticized. Proyectos are the modern

day equivalent of fresh game. So Alfonso tells people we have a

beca ‘a grant’ to do some work. This puts the project into the

realm of paid labor rather than fresh game. Paid labor is a

socially recognized category that has been around since at least

the rubber boom. I can only imagine what would have happened if I

had entered the community, invited all the community leaders to a

meeting and announced I had a large proyecto. I would have had no

idea I had just committed myself to dividing the project’s

resources equally among the 2,000 or so Tsachila.

So far we have always had the support of the Tsachi

governing body and the majority of the members of the community,

but the Tsachi community is just like any other community. There

are different factions and differing opinions—not everyone is

going to like everything we do. If you only go to a community for

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a few months at a time and just work with a handful of speakers

you may be able to ignore the political climate somewhat, when

you become highly visible you will become a full political

participant.

6. Ethics

The use of a video camera to record a diverse range of

discourse genres raises some very serious ethical issues. It is

very hard to hide the identity of speakers in videos. This means

that a great deal of care needs to be taken with access both

inside and outside of the community. We have a four tier system

in terms of access and three types of texts that are

automatically put into the highly restricted category are

shamanism, medicinal plants and daily conversations. We have been

careful about the kinds of daily conversation we record. We never

record anyone without their knowledge and consent and all these

conversations are either between core members of the PIKITSA team

or were recorded in semi-private situations, i.e. when a neighbor

comes by to visit. The Tsachila, like most people in small

communities, are very careful about what they say to people

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outside their immediate family. But still, the last thing we want

to do is to cause more conflict in a community already under

stress by making gossip public. It’s important to remember that

this is not a large western society of strangers, but a small

intimate society where almost everyone knows everyone else. In

addition, their ideas about personal privacy, individual rights

etc. may not be based on the western model. The material has to

be handled with all this in mind. While we do plan to make most

of the traditional stories and procedural texts freely accessible

to the Tsachila as well as the general public, and have gotten

permission from most of the participants to do so, the Tsachila

members are in the process of reviewing these materials now to

make sure there is nothing inflammatory in the material. The

procedural texts are particularly troubling because during the

procedure, waiting for water to boil in a cooking demonstration

for example, the conversation sometimes turns to gossip. We may

need to edit this out before the videos are publicly released.

(We will keep an original copy). Other texts, the daily

conversations, the medicinal plants and shamanism will remain

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restricted and will only be given to others on a case by case

basis with permission from the speakers in the videos.

This same kind of care needs to be taken when presenting

these materials in a public arena, i.e. in a publication or talk.

The internet is just about everywhere these days, and while the

community you work in may not yet have it, they are only a solar

panel and a satellite dish away from the internet, so you cannot

assume they will never find your publication or presentation. So

texts which could be inflammatory simply should not be used.

However the western researcher may not know what is

controversial. So a lot of care needs to be taken and the

speakers and sometimes the community need to be consulted before

some material, particularly personal conversation, is made

public. This is not about “May we be not sued”, but rather about

“May we do no harm”, and “May the community not slam the door in

our faces.” There may be some science saints amongst us who would

be willing to sacrifice their reputation, their marriage, social

harmony and their well-being to further someone else’s linguistic

theory, but I suspect most of us would forego the opportunity and

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we shouldn’t expect the people we work with to feel any

differently.

In terms of intellectual property rights, my agreement with

the Tsachila is that I can use all the texts in my analysis and

have the right of “fair usage”, i.e. I can use up to ten percent

of a text in a published paper or a presentation. I cannot

publish a full text without permission from the speakers and

PIKITSA. In fact, the Tsachila want to publish some of this

material, but because this is oral literature, it needs to be

carefully edited by the Tsachila before it can be published as

written literature.

7. Language Maintenance

While the Tsachila are currently adapting some of the

procedural texts and traditional stories for use in the bilingual

schools, our focus was not on the production of materials for

children. Most of the material we have collected consists of

adults talking about the social, economic, political,

philosophical and personal concerns of adults. The material is

not appropriate for children. The PIKITSA team had two primary

35

goals in this phase of the documentation: (1) to leave a record

for future adult generations of Tsachila so they could as Alfonso

says “Know who they are”; and (2) produce videos that could be

used primarily by adults to learn something about their culture,

perhaps a specific skill—how to make a blowgun—or something about

the history, philosophy, mythology and religion of the Tsachila.

The actual documentation process itself targets a population

of speakers that are often left out of the bilingual school loop

of elders, educators and children—the young adult population,

which are the core of any community, but hard to engage. The

young adults are busy taking care of and supporting families,

often have important roles in the community and have very little

time for anything else. This project made learning to read and

write Tsafiki an integral part of their lives. It was their job.

They had to learn to write a consistent orthography so the search

engine would work properly. The PIKITSA team has collectively

written about four thousand pages of Tsafiki, or around eight

respectable sized manuscripts. They now use Tsafiki to send

cellphone text messages, e-mails, write notes to each other etc.

and are the only truly Tsafiki literate members in the community.

36

In addition they have all learned a great deal about their

culture and language and have in essence become living

repositories of information that should be around for another

fifty years or so. So although we never couched the project in

terms of language and cultural maintenance, we accomplished a lot

in this area.

8. Results and on-going documentation

The results of the project were that we now have a

searchable database of the original seventy hours of audio

recordings and one hundred and thirty video recordings—a database

of around two million words. This represents about twenty years

of full time work by a single researcher. We were able to do the

bulk of it in three years. We are now working on a tri-lingual

(Tsafiki-Spanish-English) corpus-based, 10,000 word lexical

electronic database that we hope to have up and running on the

web by next summer. The text database allows us to find different

connotations of words, retrieve knowledge about usage as well as

identify idiomatic usages and retrieve more than enough good,

text-based examples of the words as they are used in real

37

discourse. The Tsachila are continuing to work within their

chosen area of expertise and are writing definitions in Tsafiki.

The lexical database will not only be on the web but there will

be disc copies available for the bilingual schools, the Tsachila

and any educational institution in Ecuador that is interested.

The Tsachila conceive of the lexical database as kind of a Tsachi

Wikipedia. Because it is in electronic form they hope that not

only they, but other Tsachila and researchers will continue to

add information, particularly encyclopedic information.

The Tsachila are also hoping to continue the documentation,

and are moving into the next phase of the project which is to

prepare and open up access to these materials for the community.

The Tsachila also plan to continue documenting. Although it is

probably not necessary to translate the new material, they have

discovered the joy of search engines and want to transcribe the

Tsafiki so the data is easily searchable. A dedicated researcher

who does not speak the language should still be able to access

the un-translated texts using the sixty hours we have completely

analyzed, i.e. parsed, glossed and translated, the other hundred

and forty or so we have transcribed and translated, the

38

dictionary and a grammar. The Tsachila are looking for funding

from both the Ecuadorian government and outside sources to keep

the project going.

9. Conclusion

I have concentrated in this paper on why handing the

speakers the cameras and the computers is good for us and that it

is possible to do even with speakers that have little formal

education. I have also tried to show that it is not easy—to

undertake this kind of project requires straying into

educational, social and political realms in which linguists are

not used to tread. I was able to condense 15-20 years worth of

work into just a few years, but I did spend those years primarily

focused on documentation. However, the work we have done is

having a snowball effect. As I mentioned, since we have gone

public in Ecuador we have been contacted by many other groups who

are interested in doing the same kind of project. We have taught

Cofan, Chachi, Shuar and Waorani how to do various things. They

have worked out some interesting exchanges. The Shuar student I

mentioned above, Tuntiak Katan, is a third year ecology/botany

39

student at the Universidad de San Francisco in Quito. In exchange

for the members of PIKITSA’s help in beginning a Shuar

documentation project, Tuntiak is teaching the Tsachila how to

identify plants in the western style so the Latin names for

plants can be entered into the dictionary. What I am trying to

suggest here, is that the amount of time I spent teaching the

Tsachila, might not be necessary with other groups in Ecuador if

the trained members of other indigenous groups such as the

Tsachila were the primary educators. In places like Ecuador,

where the majority of languages and cultures are endangered, but

still have large numbers of young speakers, it might be much more

efficient and productive to concentrate on supporting and funding

training, rather than paying a single outside researcher to do

the work alone. I know of six or seven groups here, that with a

little training, some funding and some equipment could easily do

what the Tsachila have done. And as they open a dialogue amongst

themselves I’m sure the work will improve. The conversations

between members of various groups concerning the similarities and

differences between their respective cultures and documentation

projects, is not only educational for me, but I think also

40

increases the awareness on the part of the participants

concerning aspects of their own cultures.

There is another reason, and perhaps the most important in

terms of documenting the culture, to put the cameras in the

speaker’s hands. While documentation videos are not scripted in

the way documentary videos are, they still have a ‘storyboard’.

The ‘storyboard’ effect in documentaries is easy to see if one

goes back to watch documentaries about ‘indians’ made forty or

fifty years ago. The documentaries often tell you more about the

culture and attitude of the people who made the documentary

rather than about the people they were documenting. It is a bit

more difficult to see this in the documentaries made during our

own time by people from our own culture, because the ‘frame’ is

also our ‘frame’. Now a documentation video is a little better in

that the actual event receives less scripting. We, for example,

let the participants determine how they want to be portrayed.

Some do what the documentary film crews do and set up a

‘traditional’ scene, i.e. they remove every bit of plastic, dress

traditionally and seat themselves on a chipolobi ‘balsa bench’.

Others want to be taped in their modern living room with their

41

television, boombox, slacks, pressed shirt and gold watch. We

only ask people to move due to lighting or sound considerations.

So we like to think that our documentation videos are a more

accurate representation of the Tsachila as they exist in the

present, i.e. they have one foot in the mestizo world and one in

the traditional world. But documentation videos are still

‘storyboarded’ in a broader sense in that by choosing to record

some things and not others the culture is being framed. And it is

framed in other ways—does it have a lot of close-ups, lots of

scanning shots, how much attention is given to detail etc. As I

mentioned, I am banned from taping procedural videos because the

Tsachila don’t think I do it properly and I don’t. My ‘frame’ is

that of a linguist and I am more interested in the conversation

than I am in how the spear is being notched. So if we are

serious about wanting to document the culture as it exists now,

we should turn the camera and the storyboard over to the members

of these cultures. By doing so we don’t avoid the inevitable

framing that results in documentation, but it does mean that both

the material and the ‘frame’ will be more representative of the

culture. This does not mean that academics can’t fill in parts of

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the story. In fact, we can concentrate on what we do best, which

is in-depth studies of the language or the culture according to

our particular area of expertise. It does mean we will have to

negotiate and compromise more than some of us may be used to

doing with the people with whom we work, but this is basically no

different than the kind of negotiations we have to do in every

other area of our lives in which another human being is involved.

And collaborative documentation is perhaps one area where

academics and the people with whom they work, really do have a

common goal—an accurate representation of a language and culture.

References

Boden, Gertrud. 2005. Western versus Eastern !Xöo – Difference, politics, and documentation. Language Archives Newsletter No. 7. http://www.mpi.nl/LAN/issues/lan_07.pdf.

England, Nora. 1992. Doing Mayan linguistics in Guatemala. Language Volume 68, 1. pp. 29-35.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998. Documentary and descriptive linguistics. Linguistics 36. pp 161-195.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2006. Language documentation: what is it and what is it good for? In Essentials of Language Documentation, J.Gippert, N. Himmelmann, U. Mosel (eds.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Woodbury, Anthony C. 2003. Defining documentary Linguistics. In Pter K. Austin (ed.) Language Documentation and Description, Vol 1,35-51. London:SOAS.