Halfway evaluation

All right, so all survey data are now collected, the final 4 interviews having been carried out with two men and two women from the tribe on the other side of the river; this is good news because it is generally assumed to be a difficult task for a single person / project to communicate and work with more than one of these two tribes without becoming unpopular with one of them. This brought the total number of interviewees to 31 and, as it turns out this constitutes 6,6 % of all tol speakers (470, more on this later), and I think we have avoided the worst sampling traps in terms of age, gender and geographical heaping. The upcoming work on the analysis will show whether or not something useful may actually be gleaned from this survey - in any event the recordings in themselves constitute a valuable contribution to the documentation of Tol, particularly in those cases where interviewees would interact at length with the interviewer on topics relating to the questions asked. There are two major issues that have proven difficult to overcome in the interviewing process: First, as I have mentioned before, some of the things that social scientist are interested in knowing have to do with concepts that most of the people we interviewed did not seem to have in their conceptual vocabulary; for instance the concept of paying attention the switch between Tol and Spanish according to social situation / setting does not seem commonplace among the Tol speaking population which mainly consists of farmers who hardly ever leave their communities and almost exclusively sow and harvest for personal consumption; and this in spite of the fact that there are Tolupanes who do not speak Tol and also ladinos living in some of the communities, especially San Juan, the largest one. Secondly, there have been cases where the translation into Tol of my original questions in Spanish have more than one possible interpretation, and so the meaning of the actual question that is asked becomes slightly and in some cases severely altered.

Because Federico, my main collaborator on this project, had the flu for almost 3 weeks before he finally got a serious amount of antibiotic injected into his body and got better in a matter of days, the survey got delayed, and in the mean time I got a brother of his, Ricardo, on board the project and we started recording, transcribing and analyzing spontaneous speech from various contexts. One particularly demanding piece of documentation has been a 2 hours long recording in the front yard of a house with a mother, her 5 children of varying ages, her grandson and various passers by. This has proved difficult to transcribe especially because it was recorded with a single condenser microphone sitting on the ground at an equal distant of about 1,5 meters from most of the participants, meaning that the extremely frequent, and expected, overlaps in speaker contributions to the conversation at times become difficult to separate. In spite of these difficulties it is a beautiful recording of multiple way interaction with the surprising feature of an almost equal number of speaker turns divided between the 3 adult participants: mother, son and daughter; both of my collaborators reacted to this recording with a "wow, that's a beautiful piece of work" (es un trabajo muy bonito).