Akropong & Fieldwork Thoughts
So it's one more weekend in Koforidua and then we're off to Kumasi. Jefferson and I are trying to write our blog posts on his laptop and then transfer them to the cafe computers via USB, so I can afford to be more verbose!
It's been a good week. The main event was on Wednesday, when Jefferson and I went to a nearby town of Akropong to visit an anthropology professor, Cati Coe from Rutgers University. She did her dissertation work during a year in Akropong, studying how culture is taught and performed in schools and the community (her interest stemming from the circumstances of defining "culture" in post-colonial Africa, particularly in contrast to Christianity). She also wrote a great article on fieldwork in Ghana that I'd contacted her about last Spring, and when we were emailing we discovered that we were both going to be in the Akuapem region this July, so we met up!
First of all, Akropong is a really nice town; it's my kind of town! Small, quiet, and navigable, with lush, green, hilly surroundings and a history of an emphasis on education (the Basel missionaries settled there and opened, debateably, the first Western-style primary school in the Gold Coast). Linguistically, it's an interesting piece of history because the first, and really only, grammar of the Akan language was written in Akropong by the missionary Johann Gottlieb Christaller. I had the idea of camping out there for a while sometime and seeing how the Twi has changed since Christaller's documentation (in 1881), but that's just another idea.
Actually, it brings me to the topic of fieldwork, which is what Cati and I were talking about most of the time. Her insight, of both the ups and downs of living and working in Ghana, was really valuable. I'm still mulling much of it over, and I can't say I've come to any new epiphanies, but I can say this: I now believe that I could succeed at a dissertation based on fieldwork in Ghana if I really wanted to and if I was really prepared for the challenges. My first impression upon being here was that the odds against me were just too many. Afterall, how do you conduct sociophonetic fieldwork in a place where you can't really speak or understand the language (after a year of studying it!), you don't really know the culture (outside of what the books tell you), everyone sees you as a perpetual outsider (even if you've lived in a small village for over a year), and everyone switches into the most formal of formal styles as soon as you turn the tape recorder?? That's just the start of it. But with hired translators, research assistants, and neat tricks like sewing the tape recorder and lapel mic into a vest (thanks Heidi Orcutt!), I think that the ability to still conduct good research is possible, it's just a major challenge.
So that's where I'm at: I think I could do this if I really wanted to, but the question is, do I want to? Again, these are premature thoughts: I want to work on the Fante dialect, in the Central Region, and I still won't have even stepped foot in the Central Region until the first of August. So who knows, all of this could change.
Meanwhile, the Twi's coming along. (I do have cassettes, they’re so formal they don’t help as much.) I've given up speaking with the kids very much, which was my first inclination; when I was in Germany, my little cousins were by far the best teachers. But in the compound here there are just too many of them and they're really noisy and rowdy, and when I do try to speak to them with anything more complicated than "How are you" they stare at me blankly. I think I'm still pretty bad about producing the right vowel harmony, vowel length, and other verbal inflections. Learning to speak was much, much easier in Mandarin, even though I studied it for half the time I've studied Twi. I think I hear and learn tonal differences quicker than vowel differences (which is a scary thing to admit, as someone who works on vowels). On top of it all, Fante is pretty different than Twi, so we'll see how that transition goes!
In other news, I'm enjoying buying lots of fabric and having different outfits made. I wore my first "wrapper" outfit to Akropong. It was fun, but I'm still working on keeping the head-wrap on my head without it slipping off (2 yards of cloth is pretty heavy)!
The weather here has been great. Breezy and cool in the evenings, with nice rain showers on some days (yes, it's finally raining, and when it rains, it pours). We're rarely caught in direct hot sunlight for a long period of time (except for that annoying Boti Falls hike). Being uncomfortable is due way more to the humidity than the heat. Also, I'm so ecstatic that I haven't gotten a single mosquito bite since arriving to K'dua; only two or three little bites that might be red ants or something, but I don't have the same allergic reaction to those. I had a bit of a cold when we first got to Legon and it's gone now. And Affie's food is treating me very well!
A note for Naomi Jorgensen: while we agree that your beloved chocolate Fan Milk is not that bad, Jefferson much prefers the vanilla ice cream flavor, whereas I'm partial to the strawberry yoghurt. Fan Milk is funny that way, in that each flavor corresponds to a different milk product in the US, although here they're all just frozen and called Fan Milk (the chocolate one is basically frozen chocolate milk).
And Happy Birthday to Jaime (tomorrow)!
It's been a good week. The main event was on Wednesday, when Jefferson and I went to a nearby town of Akropong to visit an anthropology professor, Cati Coe from Rutgers University. She did her dissertation work during a year in Akropong, studying how culture is taught and performed in schools and the community (her interest stemming from the circumstances of defining "culture" in post-colonial Africa, particularly in contrast to Christianity). She also wrote a great article on fieldwork in Ghana that I'd contacted her about last Spring, and when we were emailing we discovered that we were both going to be in the Akuapem region this July, so we met up!
First of all, Akropong is a really nice town; it's my kind of town! Small, quiet, and navigable, with lush, green, hilly surroundings and a history of an emphasis on education (the Basel missionaries settled there and opened, debateably, the first Western-style primary school in the Gold Coast). Linguistically, it's an interesting piece of history because the first, and really only, grammar of the Akan language was written in Akropong by the missionary Johann Gottlieb Christaller. I had the idea of camping out there for a while sometime and seeing how the Twi has changed since Christaller's documentation (in 1881), but that's just another idea.
Actually, it brings me to the topic of fieldwork, which is what Cati and I were talking about most of the time. Her insight, of both the ups and downs of living and working in Ghana, was really valuable. I'm still mulling much of it over, and I can't say I've come to any new epiphanies, but I can say this: I now believe that I could succeed at a dissertation based on fieldwork in Ghana if I really wanted to and if I was really prepared for the challenges. My first impression upon being here was that the odds against me were just too many. Afterall, how do you conduct sociophonetic fieldwork in a place where you can't really speak or understand the language (after a year of studying it!), you don't really know the culture (outside of what the books tell you), everyone sees you as a perpetual outsider (even if you've lived in a small village for over a year), and everyone switches into the most formal of formal styles as soon as you turn the tape recorder?? That's just the start of it. But with hired translators, research assistants, and neat tricks like sewing the tape recorder and lapel mic into a vest (thanks Heidi Orcutt!), I think that the ability to still conduct good research is possible, it's just a major challenge.
So that's where I'm at: I think I could do this if I really wanted to, but the question is, do I want to? Again, these are premature thoughts: I want to work on the Fante dialect, in the Central Region, and I still won't have even stepped foot in the Central Region until the first of August. So who knows, all of this could change.
Meanwhile, the Twi's coming along. (I do have cassettes, they’re so formal they don’t help as much.) I've given up speaking with the kids very much, which was my first inclination; when I was in Germany, my little cousins were by far the best teachers. But in the compound here there are just too many of them and they're really noisy and rowdy, and when I do try to speak to them with anything more complicated than "How are you" they stare at me blankly. I think I'm still pretty bad about producing the right vowel harmony, vowel length, and other verbal inflections. Learning to speak was much, much easier in Mandarin, even though I studied it for half the time I've studied Twi. I think I hear and learn tonal differences quicker than vowel differences (which is a scary thing to admit, as someone who works on vowels). On top of it all, Fante is pretty different than Twi, so we'll see how that transition goes!
In other news, I'm enjoying buying lots of fabric and having different outfits made. I wore my first "wrapper" outfit to Akropong. It was fun, but I'm still working on keeping the head-wrap on my head without it slipping off (2 yards of cloth is pretty heavy)!
The weather here has been great. Breezy and cool in the evenings, with nice rain showers on some days (yes, it's finally raining, and when it rains, it pours). We're rarely caught in direct hot sunlight for a long period of time (except for that annoying Boti Falls hike). Being uncomfortable is due way more to the humidity than the heat. Also, I'm so ecstatic that I haven't gotten a single mosquito bite since arriving to K'dua; only two or three little bites that might be red ants or something, but I don't have the same allergic reaction to those. I had a bit of a cold when we first got to Legon and it's gone now. And Affie's food is treating me very well!
A note for Naomi Jorgensen: while we agree that your beloved chocolate Fan Milk is not that bad, Jefferson much prefers the vanilla ice cream flavor, whereas I'm partial to the strawberry yoghurt. Fan Milk is funny that way, in that each flavor corresponds to a different milk product in the US, although here they're all just frozen and called Fan Milk (the chocolate one is basically frozen chocolate milk).
And Happy Birthday to Jaime (tomorrow)!
posted by Lauren | 4:27 PM
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