TEXT CORPORA for MULTIPLE AIMS and USES Erich Kasten Introduction with the E

First published in Oral History Meets Linguistics, edited by Erich Kasten, Katja Rol- ler, and Joshua Wilbur 2017, 13–30. Fürstenberg/Havel: Kulturstiftung Sibirien. — Electronic edition DOCUMENTING ORAL HISTORIES IN THE RUSSIAN FAR EAST: 1 TEXT CORPORA FOR MULTIPLE AIMS AND USES Erich Kasten Introduction With the emergence of American cultural anthropology at the end of the 19th cen- tury, new concepts gave more weight to studying people’s own interpretations of their traditions. For Franz Boas, it “seemed supremely important to document the anthropological material through uncensored accounts of natives in their own words and in their own language, to preserve the original meaning” (Boas 2001: 19). But such “salvage anthropology” was by no means aimed at sustaining the endangered languages and cultures. Thus Michael Krauss is “struck, even shocked, that as revolutionaries, discoverers of cultural relativism, they [Boas, Jochelson, and Bogo- ras] wrote so little in their JNPE [Jesup North Pacific Expedition] contributions to protest or even express regret about the then very active colonial suppression of the languages and cultures” (2003: 215). But nevertheless, the enormous amount of texts that were collected by Franz Boas and his collaborators in the indigenous languages of the peoples of the North Pacific rim (see Dürr, this volume) today — more than 100 years later — provides many First Nations of the Canadian Pacific Northwest essen- tial and highly appreciated foundations for their efforts to revitalize their languages and cultures. Thus, unintentionally, important additional or multiple uses of the data once recorded came to light later. In similar ways, more recent text corpora originated for indigenous peoples in the Russian Far East. At the outset of my own fieldwork in Kamchatka in 1993, when an initial project was explained to the locals at a community gathering in Kovran, the strong wish expressed by the Itelmens was to preserve their language, which was at that time in a critical state of endangerment. Keeping this request in mind, the information to be collected from local people for the purpose of that project1 was recorded, whenever possible, in the given indigenous language. This way, as a later spin-off from this scientific project, a primer on Itelmen language and culture (Khaloimova et al. 2012 [1997]) was produced as early as 1997, as the first volume in a series of eagerly awaited community learning tools (Kasten 2009b).2 The same strategy was applied in following projects, even though these projects had to prioritize other programs and 1 “Ethnicity processes”, funded by the German Research Foundation. 2 http://www.kulturstiftung-sibirien.de/mat_31_E.html [24.01.2017] 14 Erich Kasten different aims.3 For all these projects most of the information was knowingly recorded in the given indigenous languages. As a result, much of it already has been and will later be returned to the communities who support sustaining endangered languages and indigenous knowledge, in the form of learning tools. During the last decades, this philosophy and implicit agreement on sharing and returning recorded data has become the basis for most collaborative field projects with indigenous peoples, especially on the North Pacific rim (see Krupnik 2000, also this volume). For most institutions and funding organizations (see note 3) it has been the policy or recommendation to encourage sharing data at a later point with the wider public, beyond their paramount project aims. In one instance, however, Ulrike Ottinger, the producer of the film project “Chamissos Schatten”, refused to allow such supplemen- tary use of the recordings as non-profit learning tools for the given indigenous communities. Her decision was justified with reference to the funding guidelines for that project. However, it turns out that the main sponsor of that project, the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (The German Federal Cultural Foundation) does not actually provide such guidelines. In fact, as a public institution, it is not only obliged, but usually committed to supporting the aim of maintaining the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples and, thereby, cultural diversity in general. But despite the producer’s decision, the audio of the recorded texts on Chukchi language and culture will still be used for publishing community learning tools, as these are the intellectual property of the people who provided the information in the first place (Lewinski 2004) and secondly of the con- sultant who conducted the interviews, chosen because of his connection to the local culture and language competence. Never theless, it is regrettable that these learning tools will not be released, as with most other volumes in this series, together with the DVD, which contains the recorded texts, because the producer was not prepared to provide the footage of these interviews. In total, about 170 hours of Itelmen, Even, Koryak, and Chukchi language data are stored at the Foundation for Siberian Cultures as part of a more comprehensive ethnographic digital video pool. They originated over the past 20 years more as spin- off results from ethnographic fieldwork projects that where, firstly, directed towards other aims. But the full value of the collected data has become apparent only later with the data now even being employed —after their scientific or commercial usage for exhibition and film projects — for important community-oriented purposes. For- tunately, this opportunity has been seized upon and an extensive text corpus for the peoples of Kamchatka has been compiled in time, as much of this knowledge has been rapidly vanishing since then (see below). This is important since special programs 3 Among these were scientific projects on property relations (Max Planck Society), ethnograph- ica in context (German Research Foundation), traditional ecological knowledge (UNESCO), math in cultural context (US National Science Foundation) and international exhibition projects on peoples and cultures in Siberia at the Museum of Natural History (Münster), the Cen- tral and Regional Library (Berlin) and the Linden-Museum (Stuttgart). Documenting Oral Histories in the Russian Far East 15 for preserving the cultural heritage of these peoples have been unlikely to receive the needed full-scale funding as they are usually seen as not responding to specific scientific research questions. In the following, it will be discussed how a given text corpus can be made available for multiple follow-up uses. But first, various recording methods will be scrutinized with regards to possible limitations or biases of the given data. These data refer to oral history that is defined as “a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events.”4 Even though its most prominent genre are life histories, this definition should also include tales or stories, since they often contain historical information not only about events in the distant past, but also about worldviews and behaviors that have been transmitted over generations. (For particular story genres that may carry elements of political discourse, see Dürr 2017: 126 ff., this volume.) Methodological Considerations Should oral history be recorded in the indigenous language or in a lingua franca? In the case of Itelmen, most speakers — even those belonging to the elder genera- tion — were already more fluent in Russian than in their indigenous language in the 1990s. Yet even then we were still able to record life histories from the last remaining fluent speakers — that is from those to whom the language was transmitted in the natural way as their mother tongue. Most of them are no longer alive today. However, for neighboring Even and Koryak, one can still find, especially in remote locations, a sufficient number of speakers who are still in full command in their own language. But even there, most of them are now only able to communicate fragmentarily in their language or with constrained grammar and lexicon. This leads to restrictions for a researcher expecting data only in the indigenous language if he or she is mostly inter- ested in the ethnographic or historical content of the recorded text. In this particular case, the information may be less complete if the speaker is encouraged to speak in his or her indigenous language for linguistic documentation purposes. Furthermore, recording a text in the respective indigenous language may entail a considerable time lag until the text can be analysed with regards to its content, as it has first to be transcribed and translated into a language understood by the researcher. Most researchers who decide to cover a larger geographical area for comparative rea- sons or for getting a broader and more balanced view, are not — or hardly can be — in command of all the various languages spoken in the given area, with all their often diverse dialects and local variants. Therefore, in order to capture the subtle nuances of 4 http://www.oralhistory.org/about/do-oral-history [24.01.2017] 16 Erich Kasten the documented language material the researcher often works in teams with various indigenous experts who are familiar with the given local vernacular. Working up the recorded texts later can turn into an extremely time-consuming process that has, in our case, sometimes stretched over several years. Clearly, this often exceeds the dead- line for submitting the expected results or for providing reports on a funded project in time. Therefore, researchers in projects who have to focus on the immediate analysis of a specific research question regarding ethnographic or historical content might be inclined or well-advised to record the data in Russian or whatever relevant lingua franca right away. On the other hand, whenever we had the opportunity to record oral histories from some of the last fluent mother-tongue speakers in their own language, we noticed that the information often was more precise and more complete.

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