This world map may not be historical per se if we consider the over 130 years of existence of Esperanto, but it tells part of the story of the association and of the Esperantists that visited it. Between a great number of pins covering countries, the map also displays the wear and tear that result from the fingertips that touched it over time. As Esperantists at the association narrate stories about how they travelled the world through Esperanto, they frequently press the tip of their fingers against the map to show the paths they travelled coming and going to and from Paris to the rest of the globe, crossing oceans by plane and European land by train and bus. In sum, that map may not be unequivocally classi- fied as a historical document from the long-term perspective, but it is indeed historical in showcasing narratives of circulation and travelling— and, indirectly, of language use—and covering more years than Thomas' time in Esperantujo.
Just as maps, drawings, posters and leaflets become indexes of Esperan- tists' discourses about Esperanto, also scholarly and journalistic writings bring to the fore the issue of who has the power to produce knowledge and discourses about the language. A great number of academics who explore the historical and social aspects of Esperanto and its commu- nity—such as Courtinat (1964), Forster (1982), Garvfa (2015), Lins (2016, 2017) and Schor (2016), as well as biographers who documented the life of prominent Esperantists such as Zamenhof (Drezen 1929; Boulton 1960; Privat 2001; Korzhenkov 2010, among others) and Lanti (Borsboom 1976)—are compelled, due to the nature of their research, to learn the language and spend a good deal of time among Esperan- tists. As a result, the analyses they produce about Esperanto, however based on scientific rigour and scholarship, tend to orient their knowledge production towards something akin to a nativist form of knowledge. In learning the language and joining the community as researchers, they (or should I say 'we', including myself in this conundrum?) partially convey an insider's perspective, insofar as these researchers' scientific inquiry and personal experiences with the language become blended in their writings about Esperanto to scholarly readerships.
In the anthropological debate about nativeness, cosmopolitanism and authority over knowledge production, one of this debate's core propo- nents, Adam Kuper (1994), seems convinced of the harms presented by claims to knowledge being based on rootedness and an insider's position- ality. By contrast, Matei Candea (2010: 60), had he studied Esperantists, would likely concede that being a scholar analysing Esperanto may entail partially turning oneself into an Esperantist scholar, which does not mean that one's scholarly approach would be reducible to one's positionality.
By the same token, while an ethnographic or historical study requires long-term research in the community and its archives, the work of jour- nalists does not demand an equally long-lasting involvement with the group under examination. This has resulted in endless narratives of Esperantists who engage with journalists with suspicion, fearing that, as a way of producing eye-catching headlines and spectacular news arti- cles about Esperanto, journalists end up twisting Esperantists' voices and writing about 'the universal language that never became universal', 'a language for eccentric utopians' or 'the language that never was' (Docx 2016). Retaining the monopoly of knowledge production implies mostly keeping control of how the language is conveyed to outsiders, which also involves attempts to silence and hold back Esperantists who advertise Esperanto as the universal language spoken everywhere and who, along these lines, unwittingly revive and reinforce, through the lens of failure, the universalist ambition once projected onto Esperanto.
At first seen as a universalist project aimed at bringing fellow human beings together despite their ethnic, national, linguistic and religious differences, the principles behind Esperanto increasingly shifted towards a valorisation of national and cultural diversity. Such emphasis on what people from different backgrounds can share through Esperanto takes on a political sway, as the language is expected to gather supporters of the neutral movement (usually referred to as samideanoj, fellow thinkers) as well as proletarians and leftists (or kamaradoj and sennaciistoj, comrades and non-nationalists). Thus, the mise en discours of Esperanto lies in conveying the language as universal—meaning a bonding element that engages people from various backgrounds, profiles, locations and walks of life—while avoiding by all means to reinforce the percep- tion of Esperanto as universal—in the sense of 'spoken by everyone, everywhere'.
The latter, well-established definition of Esperanto as a 'universal language' led to the commonplace perception that Esperanto's success depends on its becoming widely spoken worldwide, as well as playing a key role in promoting world peace. Such bold expectations of achieve- ment irrevocably label the Esperanto movement as a failure, a perception that is reinforced by scholarly approaches that subject Esperantos success to its victory over other languages:
Although Esperanto prevailed among the crowded and fractious field of artificial languages, it failed to become the international auxiliary language that many expected. The movement reached its peak in the mid- 1920s, but only ten years later Esperanto's prospects were rather bleak. It had defeated rival artificial languages but lost the war against natural languages — in particular, English — to become the world's lingua franca. (Garvia 2015: 152)
However, the assumption that Esperanto's success depends upon its triumph as a universal language assumes that the history of Esperanto is necessarily the history of linguistic battles. What if most Esperanto speakers were not fighting this war in the first place? As the next chapters indicate, being transformed into multiple narratives and discourses— and, of course, in history—was what happened to Esperanto while people used it to travel abroad, to communicate internationally and to learn from each other in horizontal learning spaces.
References
Benedict, Burton. 1983. The Anthropology of World's Fairs: San Francisco's Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. Berkeley and London: Lowie Museum of Anthropology and Scolar Press. Bernal, John Desmond. 1965. Science in History. Volume 2: The Scientific and Industrial Revolution. London: Penguin Books.
Borsboom (Ed.). 1976. Vivo de Lanti. Paris: Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda.
Boulton, Marjorie. 1960. Zamenhof. Creator of Esperanto. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Candea, Matei. 2010. Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge, and Field- work. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Courtinat, Leon. 1964. Historio de Esperanto. Movado kaj Literaturo (1887— 1960), 3 vols. Agen: Imp. Moderne.
Couturat, Louis, and Leopold. Leau. 1903. Histoire de la Langue Universelle. Paris: Hachette.