National Geographic has sent an expedition to Northern Australia to investigate dying languages, make field recordings, and inspect the efforts to revitalise them. Like all heroic adventures, it has used local support – in this case Tourism Australia, which seems to have done an excellent job organising access. And yes, this genial facade is going to come unstuck in interesting ways.

The journey was made by Dr K. David Harrison, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College and Director of Research for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, with two colleagues. The Living Tongues Institute is partnered with NatGeo on a long term series of stories around the world.

The site has bits of Aboriginal languages on it, and some photographs of the expeditioneers with Indigenous locals.

The visitors did their thing, pottered around, and took off back to the States. Some information has been posted on NatGeo, and the article appears this month.

This is pretty serious exposure – as language hat points out, the work has turned up in the New York Times, which describes it as

“..New research, reported yesterday, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States…

I think the “new research” is actually a meta-analysis of existing material which enabled the Living Tongues team to create indices of greatest risk, and therefore identify areas. But the NYT builds a picture of field research as well – look at the language:

…. the study was based on field research and data analysis …. The findings are described … Beginning what is expected to be a long-term project to identify and record endangered languages … The researchers, focusing on distinct oral languages, not dialects, interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language and collected basic word lists. The individual projects, some lasting three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing grammars and preparing children’s readers in the obscure language. The research has concentrated on preserving entire language families. …”

Hot stuff, hot and heroic too. The linguistic answer to Indiana Jones. But this is also a very shabby account, which makes no mention of the legion of researchers around the world also engaged in the same activity, whose local knowledge they harvest from academic papers and conferences, many of whom have a deep and lifelong relationship with the communities and language groups. It does not refer to any Indigenous people, or Indigenous content. The National Geographic website similarly fails to incorporate a single statement or point of view of one of these speakers of a “dying language”, or the field linguists doing the painstaking work to record languages and compile dictionaries.

It is not necessarily fair to blame Dr. Harrison and his teleconference with journalists for this. Perhaps the New York Times put these ideas into his publicity trip, using the ordinary tropes of bad scientific writing. And a journey to the actual communities and sites of fieldwork can help him construct a grander theoretical perspective which could inform choices about effective methodologies and target languages. I can smell a rat, but I don’t have the knowledge to name the crittur.

But Harrison also collided with Dr Claire Bowern, an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Rice University in Houston. She is an Australian, who did her undergraduate degree at ANU, and who works on “on the historical morpho-syntax of Nyulnyulan languages (a family of Australian languages spoken in North-Western Australia)”. The NatGeo mob had wandered into her home linguistic country. She runs a blog called Anggarrgoon: Bardi on the web which enables her to be forthright about her calling.

She calls the whole thing “borderline fraud”.

I can’t summarise her post and the comments, all of which are fascinating. Suffice for me to say that Harrison pops up in the comments to defend himself on the grounds that a) he worked very hard to get anyone interested, b) he is doing genuine science on top of the film project which motivates these visits and c) he is spreading the word about language crisis. He also blames the media, which happens to be my home linguistic country. Indeed, I have been part of a team which tried and failed to raise the money for a film about exactly this topic.

“Those of you have had experience dealing with the Media will understand that regardless of how much detail you give them, how many caveats you state, how many times you take care to check facts, refer them to other experts and even give them phone numbers and e-mail contact for those experts (we do all of these things), they are going to focus in on the sensational angle…

…. In doing these kinds of expeditions, we run the risk of being misquoted, sensationalized, (mis)packaged by the media, misunderstood, frowned upon or denounced by colleagues who may be better qualified and have worked in these areas for many years. We think the attention that can be drawn to the issue, the increased resources that will follow, and potential benefits to indigenous communities and the field as a whole, make this effort well worth the risk.”

Oooh, I feel dangerous. And to be blunt about it, I smell a pity party.

Another commenter found the US National Science Foundation grant which funded the film.

“Ironbound Films, Inc. is producing a one-hour PBS television documentary, with ancillary Web site, curriculum and program guides about the causes of language loss, how it affects science and how scientists are responding. Vanishing Voices takes viewers from Native Siberia to Native America, from ancient texts to cutting-edge technology, to demonstrate how scientists record — even help revive — the world’s tongues. Vanishing Voices is the first film about language loss that addresses the issue as important to science. The ancillary program guide will be designed for use by Native Americans who are interested in studying or reviving their languages.”

There is no mention of Dr Harrison and his genuine research to rescue languages in the presence of the camera.

The amount is $US502,730, which is not sufficient for a project which travels to many countries, even supported by national tourist organisations. The rest presumably came from National Geographic.

I haven’t seen the film, but I can be forgiven for thinking that one fifty minute documentary in five major linguistic hotspots around the world is likely to be a tad superficial. I can say something general about this kind of program.

These shows valorise Americans. A visiting “expert” arrives, does some science which is depicted as crucial and important. Local experts tend not to be consulted; if they are, they are often seen to be actually directed by the Americans. (Think History Channel or Discovery Channel here, with the endless forensic shows.) Interiews are in English, subtitles are not permitted, and narration replaces dialogue. Often the presenter is seen to suffer to get to the location, which is dangerous and far from civilisation. The makers are in heaven if there is some sort of deadline – to “rescue” a graveyard before a dam is built, to collect DNA before the snow makes the passes impassable..

Actually, there is absolutely no need for an imported crew, for an external expert, for a presenter to mediate between the material and the audience. All this work can be done by local scientists and crews. Indeed, some producers run “suitcase productions” in which series are constructed by one person hiring locally and working with knowledge on the ground. All the information content, the wonder, the story and the emotional arc can be carried without the visiting hero.

There is indeed a time frame – but it is set by the incessant hurry of the crew to maintain a schedule, to take the light plane kept at the airport to fly them back to the air-conditioned capital, to satisfy a broadcast schedule set months before production.

In this case, for instance, Dr Claire Bowern could have been deployed. She is young, female, personable, has the same academic rank as the person they did use as the guide – and she is a genuine expert in the field. But she is not American. I am not stretching it to say she is also not hiding a penis under her safari suit. I grant you this one program on a major issue needs a unifying style, and many places don’t have such easy access to either good crews or English speaking scientific talent. But she could at least have been used as a guide.

We can take this further, of course. The Kimberley has good Aboriginal filmmakers in Broome. I expect it has Indigenous experts in language renewal. And it surely has the ultimate experts – the speakers themselves. I should say they seem to be treated with respect by Harrison’s own website, and seem to be photographed and named appropriately.

You know where I am going with this. The approach is colonial, and racist. It panders to a media perception that Americans will only see the world through a particular lens, in which their own folks are the driving experts and interpreters. To be visible, we have to surrender to the world view of the master race, in which we are denigrated and infantilised.

This is not just a question of style, and therefore beyond the power of Dr Harrison. The constitution of the whole expedition, in which he is an actor (in both senses of the term) seems to carry elements of this, by emphasising the importance of the visitors, and their transformative power over the science. They claim to do real, vital field work in the short time they are there.

I am very suspicious of the notion that documentary filmmakers corrupt the purity of high scientific endeavour. That we will inevitably misquote and traduce their subjects. I presided over a panel at the recent Melbourne International Film Festival about biographical documentary, in which the topic and approach presupposed that we betray our subjects. All three filmmakers treated that assumption with the contempt it deserved.

Documentary filmmakers can certainly collaborate with a system which endemically supports a shabby and uninformed world view, and American mainstream documentarians are very used to this. This is so invisible to them that they tend to regard anyone who raises my kind of critique as a bit of a lunatic. After all, it is “only television.”

But the point is, we don’t have to surrender. Good filmmakers with adequate resources can make wonderful films about complex topics – witness the forty year history of the BBC’s Horizon series. It is true that we need a narrative arc which explores the human experience behind the science, and we are merciless with the scissors if an interview is obscure. But then, the best scientists are models of public lucidity – this is the cast of mind which helps them to be the best.

At the same time, the academics and experts are too forgiving when the trash machine arrives to pay them a little attention. We can, and should, be held to much higher standards. Crap is not inevitable, and parody is not an inevitable price for the public attention which brings a few dollars.

Here is a very illuminating fragment from Claire’s post:

“It seems peculiar to me that I should have had lunch and dinner with Harrison just about every day for the two weeks preceding his trip to Broome and he never mentioned (to one of 2 linguists actively working on these languages) that he was going there.”

To which Harrison replied:

“We went to Australia not claiming to be experts any Australian language, nor to do any kind of language documentation. We went there on a journalistic assignment, for National Geographic. Details of the trip (and the trip itself) were not finalized until the last moment, and I was not at liberty to divulge them in advance.”

Don’t you think that is strange?

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Incidentally – one other thing that really gives Australian crews the shits is the way that international documentary crews work here on tourist visas.

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The frame at the head has been lifted from the adventures of Antonia Smith, F0rensic Linguist at Narbonic Director’s Cut by Shaenon K. Garrity. Her whole site is terrific. If you are a cartoonist, her blog is very inspiring.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 2:33 am and is filed under ideas and society, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.