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8
We Have Never Been Universaclass="underline" How Speaking a Language Becomes a Prefigurative Practice
One day in October 2016, this anthropologist began to miss academia and took a break from fieldwork to attend a philosophy conference at the Musee du quai Branly. Located at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, this museum has surrounded by controversies since its construction, being alternatively regarded as a postcolonial space where one 'unlearns ethno- centrism' or as 'the Disneyland of exoticism' that glorifies alterity. That day, the museum would become the stage for another controversy—this time, a minor one, involving an anthropologist and his quest to take his (non-)natives (speakers) seriously.
At the coffee break during the conference, a philosophy professor from the Ecole normale superieure approached me and asked, in French, as an ordinary scholarly ice breaker, what I was researching. When I told her I was looking at political activism among Esperanto speakers in France, she received this information with surprise: 'Oh, Esperanto? Are there people who still speak this language?' After explaining to me that English had become widely spoken in France and that the French were not resisting its use as they used to, she stressed that there was no point in opposing English anymore. When I told her that most Esperanto speakers I had met did not see the language as being necessarily opposed to English, she
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shrugged and replied, unyieldingly: 'Ben oui, mais c'estperdu'. 'Esperanto is a lost cause': despite everything it makes people do, the language is widely perceived as a failure, an anachronism in the twenty-first century.
So far this book has examined the mise en discours of Esperanto, exploring how the language became an instrument for fairer commu- nication and political activism, and how digital media have reshaped language use and community-building. Yet, some of the questions that Esperantists are most frequently asked remain to be addressed: what leads people to study Esperanto? Why would someone learn a supposedly universal language that is spoken by so few? Or, put simply, 'what is the point of learning this language?' The underlying assumptions grounding such questions move our inquiry from what is left unsaid when a language is barely used to what gains prominence when a language is effectively used in its spoken and written forms.