In leaving aside one's everyday life to join short-lived enactments of real Esperantujo, people have an opportunity to experiment with novel practices of language use, communication, political engagements and community-building. Ultimately, ephemerality is what constitutes this community as an episodic experiment, driving people to spend a certain amount of time away from their routine to co-produce language, value certain forms of freedom and choice and try out different interactions with people who also stepped out of their everyday circles of belonging. Eventually, in calling for an emphasis on ephemerality, this discussion invites us to consider brevity not as the opposite of endurance, and communities not as necessarily stable, long-standing relational assem- blages. Rather, ephemerality allows for certain forms of community to take shape and to open venues for extra-ordinary sociabilities to rise and shine, thus playing a role in shaping people's perceptions of the world beyond such community's materialisations.
References
Harvey, Penelope. 1996. Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State and the Universal Exhibition. London and New York: Routledge.
Malkki, Liisa. 1994. Citizens of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of Nations. Diaspora 3 (1): 41-68. https://doi.org/10.1353/ dsp.1994.0013.
Melville, Herman. 2009. Moby Dick or, The Whale. New York: Penguin Books.
Moraes, Vinicius de. 1996 [1939]. Soneto de Fidelidade e Outros Poemas. Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro.
Privat, Edmond. 2001. La Vivo de Zamenhof. Tyreso: Inko.
Afterword
I left Paris in late August 2017. My farewell involved meeting and saying goodbye to most of my friends and interlocutors. Since Esperanto asso- ciations were closed for the summer holidays, these farewell meetings had to be organised elsewhere, in bars, parks and people's homes. These occasions also involved a curious gift exchange. Even though I had been living in Paris for over a year, my foreignness still prevailed on the way people saw me, which resulted in a number of gifts my interlocutors gave me being French souvenirs for tourists. Apart from several books in Esperanto, some gifts consisted of miniatures of the Eiffel Tower, Paris- themed keyrings and memorabilia related to the French film Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain. From my side, to keep the gift on giving, I had to return the keys of the two associations that allowed me to have full access to their archives during my stay, and I was invited to present my partial research findings at SAT-Amikaro. Fortunately, my discussion about emerging communication technologies and the decline of certain associations did not cause them disappointment, and I considered my stay to be concluded successfully.
An element commonly present in many farewells, the exchange of contact details here took on a new meaning to me. I already had the
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WhatsApp numbers of most of my friends and interlocutors, as well as their e-mail addresses, but a great number of people double checked if I had their contact details, promising that we would stay in touch. To my surprise, unlike several of such occasions in which 'let's keep in touch' proved to be a hollow promise, we overall did remain in contact. On a similar note, this goodbye to Paris called my attention to a specificity of Esperantist farewells: the standard goodbye expression ĝis revido - which stands for 'until the next eyesight', in a free trans- lation' - is analogous to the English expression 'see you soon', rather than to 'goodbye'. Interestingly, as I prepared my return to Manchester, England, I jotted down in my field notes that all my interlocutors said 'ĝis revido' to me, occasionally with some people replacing this expres- sion with 'ĝis iam en Esperantujo', 'see you eventually in Esperantujo'. At this point, I noticed how I had taken farewells for granted at the end of Universal Congresses, where these two commonplace expressions in English meant not 'goodbye', but 'see you soon'. As I would experience in the months that followed, there is no farewell in Esperantujo, and one is always expected to meet one's Esperantist friends again somewhere, eventually.
Having kept in touch with several of my friends and interlocutors, I was also visited by two of them in England the following year. I no longer joined Universal Congresses, as that would require planning trips, taking time off and restarting my note-taking routine—but this did not stop me from occasionally receiving push notifications on Amikumu from visitors to Manchester, regularly exchanging WhatsApp messages and receiving all-too-frequent friend requests from unknown Esperantists on Facebook. In a quite intense and productive meantime, I continued to receive updates from Paris and, in August 2018, I went back to France for a week.
Keeping track of my field site from afar, I learned that SAT-Amikaro had experienced certain recovery. La SAGo, the associations bimonthly magazine, began to appear regularly again from late 2017, by initia- tive of some Paris-based association members, counting articles and contributions from other parts of mainland France—although rarely from other French-speaking countries. SAT-Amikaro also resumed its annual congresses from 2017, having held its latest congresses in Saint- Sebastien-sur-Loire (2017), Paris (2018) and Montlu$on (2019). The association partly surrendered to digital media and now has a largely inactive Ipernity group, a barely used Twitter profile, a relatively active Facebook page and a well-connected YouTube channel. Such online presence, however, hardly entails the production of new content, being limited to sharing posts from Esperanto blogs and other pages on digital media. SAT-Amikaro's headquarters, in turn, did not see prominent changes, with its language classes and weekly debates gathering partic- ipants and volunteers as before, without the fear of the association's closure coming true.
In the meantime, at the Ecole normale superieure, those taking Esperanto classes created their own student association, Esper'ENS, which they use to introduce new students to the language, take part in events and fairs at the university and receive institutional support.
Concerning digital media, the Duolingo Esperanto course for French speakers, released in beta in mid-2020, immediately gathered a consider- able number of learners—even though many French speakers interested in Esperanto had already taken the course from English. Moreover, at the moment of writing, the Esperanto course for Mandarin speakers is in preparation. Its beta version is to be released in mid-2022 and is already earning enthusiastic appraisals on the grounds of an expected growth of Esperanto in Asia. By contrast, Amikumu did not enjoy the same level of attainment. In August 2020, once the fuss over its creation was over, Chuck Smith sent an e-mail in Esperanto, entitled 'La fino de Amikumu?' (The end of Amikumu?) to the app's registered users, aimed at motivating them to become golden members. This membership status relies on payment, which would help stabilise the financial situation of the app and enable its continuation. Giving accountability to the app's users, the e-mail also highlighted that 'to show that we're serious about the community [of users], we are now reprogramming the entire app and we will make its code open!' Addressing one of the core claims of its Esperantist users, the app developers bet Amikumus continuation on freedom to code.