Paper short abstract:

Using Tobago as an auto-ethnographic case study, this presentation is a reflection on some of the rituals of Afro-Caribbean hospitality and on how they enrich the process of data collection and analysis in the science of linguistics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is a reflection on some of the rituals of Afro-Caribbean hospitality and on how they enrich the process of data collection and analysis in the science of linguistics. Using Tobago as a case study, the paper is an auto-ethnographic reflection on/evaluation of Tobago’s very complex condition of hospitality, the cultural/linguistic/gestural codes that operate within this condition, and thus the nature of the ‘research site’ produced by this condition. The discussion is thus around the kinds of rituals of exchange and interaction that situate the researcher/interviewer/guest in various entanglements in relation to the ‘research site’, the respondent, and the host. These entanglements become imperative dimensions in the process of collecting linguistic data for analysis. Put another way, the paper will argue that there is a networking set of entanglements which the researcher experiences and must be involved in, and which in fact constitutes the process of data collecting and analysis. What, for instance, are the rituals of entry into a community for linguistic study? What new paradigms of relations are made possible by entering into these rituals of hospitality? What new approaches to resolving tensions might be relied upon within this entangled process of determining/selecting and analysing data? What does hospitality feel like in communities identified for linguistic study and research? What constitutes ‘data’ in such a scenario, and how are we necessarily entangled in it? What new tools/skills or epistemological positionings are required to work through our entanglements in data?