Through a WhatsApp call in late 2018, Idris told me that he had gotten a new job, which required him to work for longer hours, in a company in the outskirts of Paris. This prevented him from arriving on time for meetings and debates at Esperanto-France and SAT-Amikaro. Despite no longer attending these gatherings regularly, he continued paying his annual membership fees to these associations, meeting Esper- antists on weekends and communicating with them (me included) via digital media. Julien, in turn, returned to France in late 2017, after finishing his period as a volunteer at UEA and TEJO. Having shared his experience with his Esperantist friends in France, Julien succeeded in motivating one of his friends to follow his footsteps, which resulted in this friend applying for a volunteer position at TEJO the following year.
More recently, with the COVID-19 pandemic bringing about radical changes in the way people socialise and communicate, Esperantujo saw a new wave of people who took up online Esperanto courses during their time in quarantine. Perhaps this was one of the reasons for Amikumus struggle: why using a GPS-based app to locate people if users were not planning on going out and meeting anyone amidst a pandemic? For the same reason, several face-to-face Esperanto classes and debates were cancelled or moved to online chat rooms. UEA's 2020 Universal Congress, originally expected to be in Canada—as well as the 2020 Congress of SAT, planned for Poland—took place online. The same applied to the regular debates at SAT-Amikaro, whose online format hindered the participation of less digitally skilled participants. As expected, the video conferencing platform chosen by SAT-Amikaro to run its regular debates was Jitsi, rather than Zoom or Skype, due to Jitsi being open-source.
In the face of this new global scenario, it remains to be understood how these transformations will affect sociabilities and communication more broadly. Will Esperanto still be relevant in the long term for those who do not use digital media as a key means for communicating and building relationships? How will this community be reshaped once it has temporarily become largely deprived of its pop-up, face-to-face mate- rialisations? How is the novel sense of togetherness online transpiring in forms of community-building? Thinking of the role of digital media for the forms of political activism illustrated by #JeSuisCharlie, #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, has Esperanto been playing a role in this form of communication and protest? Ultimately, with the growing significance of digital media, are online settings becoming spaces for consensus-building or radical polarisation?
Keeping in touch with my Esperantist and French-based friends and interlocutors has given me a glimpse of some of these issues. However, above all, it was good to go back to Paris in August 2018, after a year, and see friends and old faces again. That trip led me to another reflection on the stability of Esperantujo: most of those I met again at the associations and gatherings, one year later, were the same people I had met before. Does this mean Esperantujo is more stable than I first thought? Or does it imply that the concerns I heard at SAT-Amikaro about the emptying of associations and of Esperantujo derive from the very fact that I met old faces again—meaning that there was a near absence of new faces? This book may not provide all the answers to these questions. And it is not meant to. Seamus Heaney once wondered 'Since when, he asked / Are the first and last line of any poem / Where the poem begins and ends?' (2001: 57). Along the same lines, since when are the first and the last line of a book where the research begins and ends?
Reference
Heaney, Seamus. 2001. Electric Light. London: Faber and Faber.
Index
A
Academie fran^aise 130, 134 Activism 4, 7, 154, 163, 167, 172, 173, 180, 191, 201, 202, 227 language activism 22, 23, 244 political activism 26, 27, 78, 151, 155, 167, 174, 202, 207, 208, 234, 246, 254 Adam, Eugene 46, 52, 106, 107,
110, 143 Adresaro (Address book/s) 71. See also Jarlibro
Age
age cleavage 180, 194, 196, 197, 201
age group 19, 195-197 ageing 164, 200 Akademio de Esperanto 111, 131, 132, 143, 145, 190
Alterglobalisation movement/s 220, 224
Alterity 25, 98, 207 Amikumu 73, 78, 89, 193, 199,
217, 252-254 Anarchism (anarchist/s, anarchiste) 4, 45, 49, 50, 109, 155, 159, 165, 171, 173, 202, 225 anarchist process 224, 225 Anderson, Benedict 13, 97 Anti-nationalism (anti-nationalist/s)
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 257
licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Fians, Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84230-7
49, 242 Aries, Philippe 195 Association/s 2, 3, 9, 11, 13-15, 17-19, 21, 25-27, 33, 34, 41, 44-52, 59, 60, 62, 64, 66-68, 71, 73-79, 82, 84, 92-95, 108, 111, 118, 125, 126, 130, 133, 151, 154-171, 173-175,
180, 186-188, 191, 193-197, 199-203, 209, 210, 214, 216, 217, 224, 226, 229, 233, 242-244, 247, 251-253, 255 associationism 161, 164 Augustine of Hippo 171, 173
B
Babilrondo/Babilrondoj 2, 3, 165, 167
Bateson, Gregory 102, 221 Belle Epoque 37, 45 Belonging, sense of 97, 102, 103 Bilingualism (bilingual/s) 9, 22, 77,
81, 112, 135 Binarism 100, 113, 120. See also
Us/them Boellstorff, Tom 185, 194 Border/s 16, 23, 37, 38, 46, 90,
107, 170, 225 Bounded field site 76. See also Field site
Boundedness (unbounded/ness) 16, 70, 212
Bourgeoisie (bourgeois) 4, 42, 46,
49, 231 Breton language 135 Brexit 50, 170
C
Candea, Matei 53, 75, 76, 78, 79,
116, 134, 192 Cartography (cartographic) 34, 71, 73. See also Mapping (map/s) Castells, Manuel 220 Catalonia (Catalan/s) 23, 79, 82, 93, 118, 119, 121, 146, 152
Ceremony (opening ceremony)
91-94, 96, 98, 109-113, 118, 119
Childhood (children) 9, 10, 34, 51,
67, 115, 195, 210, 214 Choice 68, 78, 115, 126, 130, 132, 137, 139, 142, 144-146, 185, 200, 216, 217, 223, 228, 241, 245, 246, 248. See also Vocabulary choice Chomsky, Noam 1, 7, 10 Circulation (circulating) 36, 45, 52, 61, 66, 74, 75, 79, 84, 94, 98 Citizenship (citizen/s) 49, 61, 105,
113, 161, 214, 229, 234 Civic engagement 161
Clastres, Pierre 18, 147 Clothing (clothes) 34, 93, 98, 99,
118, 157, 240
Code-switching (code-switched) 6,
81, 82, 117, 157 Cold War 49, 169, 170, 172 Coleman, Gabriella 189, 191 Colonialism (colonial, colonies, colonisation, colonisers, decolonisation, post-colonial) 23, 37, 207, 229 Communication communication
technology/communication technologies 6, 13, 17, 20, 27, 36, 37, 49, 163, 180, 186, 194, 239, 245, 248, 251 international communication 1, 13, 15, 26, 37-40, 42, 104, 109, 120, 170, 202, 222, 224-227, 230, 231, 245, 248 verbal communication 12, 67
Communism (communist/s,
communiste, komunismo, komunisto/komunistoj) 4, 14, 20, 45, 47, 50, 109, 155, 163, 165, 166, 230, 242, 245 Community/communities
community of practice 13, 68 imagined community 13, 68, 97, 100
one-night-stand community 70, 246
pop-up community 73, 83, 84, 91, 244
speech community 4, 6, 7, 9-13, 17-20, 26, 44, 59, 67, 68, 70, 74, 80, 106, 127, 128, 131, 138, 143, 144, 147, 180, 197, 198, 200, 221, 230, 233, 247 Community-building 7, 13, 20, 26, 27, 70, 197, 200, 208, 239, 240, 246, 248, 254 Congress/es 16, 27, 35, 40, 43, 44, 48, 59, 60, 62-66, 68, 69, 73-75, 78-84, 89-96, 98, 100, 102, 106, 107, 109, 111-115, 117-120, 126, 128, 129, 139, 154, 157, 158, 160, 161, 165, 167, 175, 194, 196, 198, 199, 201, 210, 213, 226, 227, 233, 239, 242, 243, 246, 247, 252-254 Congress/es of Esperanto 9, 14, 17, 25, 43, 44, 49, 59, 60, 73, 79, 83, 89, 90, 104, 110, 120, 121, 156, 200, 213, 226, 241 Congress/es of SAT 199, 243, 254