Paper short abstract:

My paper aims to discuss the challenges of approaching ethnographically the Esperanto-speaking community. This international auxiliary language is not spoken in any bounded location, which forces the ethnographer to include reflections on circulation and mobility at the core of his methodology.

Paper long abstract:

Faced with the decision of conducting field research among groups of people who speak the international auxiliary language Esperanto, my first thought was: where can I find Esperanto speakers in a reasonable number to approach them through a long-term fieldwork?

If Esperanto is aimed at building bridges and encouraging international understanding beyond national and language barriers, it is understandable that its speakers must be scattered over the world, rather than geographically bounded. However, if Esperanto can only be used meaningfully in contacts with national others, especially from other language backgrounds, what do these speakers do and where do they go to do so?

The configuration of this community, widespread by definition, entails a set of challenges and specificities. How can Esperantists build the Esperanto community they claim to build without counting on any sort of geographical boundedness that could enable regular contacts among this community members? And, analytically speaking, how can an anthropologist approach this community that counts on speakers/members potentially everywhere, but that is, at the same time, situated nowhere?

In this paper, I explore how Esperantists engage with spatiality and make sense of this language through practices of mobility and circulation, and how, as an anthropologist from Rio de Janeiro studying in Manchester and doing fieldwork in Paris, I also had to reconcile experiences of circulating and of being stuck. Furthermore, I analyse the use of ethnography to approach globalised issues, trying to consider to what extent can multi-sitedness and multilingualism be rendered feasible and desirable.