As the making of a speech community comprises primarily instances of communication and mediation, it remains to be considered what is communicated—and, occasionally, miscommunicated—in Esperanto.
1.3 Navigating the Field
Just like human beings babble before they begin to utter recognisable words, anthropologists ask basic questions before gaining a deeper under- standing of the muddy terrain into which they are about to step. The same happened to me in my first encounter with Esperanto, in 2008. When a friend—who could speak the language fluently—donated part of her collection of Esperanto books to me, I thought I could try learning the language, at least enough to be able to read those books. The following year, I enrolled on a free language course at an Esperanto association next to my university campus. After a year spending two hours per week in a tiny and permanently hot office in downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and having come across around thirty people who were also learning and practising the language, what grabbed my attention was not the grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation. Rather, it was the way people engaged with Esperanto. For most of them, Esperanto was more than a language: it formed a community, of which we were part, and a movement. In becoming familiar with Esperanto grammar and vocabulary—with words like samideano, Homaranismo and Finvenkismo, which I discuss in later chapters—I learned that engaging with Esperanto could mean going beyond the mere process of learning a language. My early interest began to take the form of initial research questions. Why would someone study an international language only to speak it among people who share the same mother tongue? What is the point of learning a language that not many people speak?
Just like the 'archaic societies' studied by Pierre Clastres, Esper- antists are sometimes 'classed negatively, under the heading of lack' (Clastres 1989: 190): a speech community without many speakers, formed around a language that is not necessary for any communica- tive purpose, not officially adopted or widely spoken anywhere, with no history, and intrinsically attached to no nation, culture or people. This view that emphasises absences and deems Esperanto a minor endeavour may be commonplace among those who do not sympathise with the language, but is hardly shared by Esperantists. Proposing a shift of atten- tion from what Esperanto lacks to what it features, I began analysing how Esperantists reconcile their enthusiasm for the language with some non-Esperantists' scepticism about it: after all, what if the Esperanto movement does not manage to recruit new speakers and fails to secure the endurance of its community? What if those Esperantists I met in Rio de Janeiro decide that they no longer want to study and use Esperanto? What is at risk of being lost if the language dies out?
I was not the first researcher attempting to understand these issues. Aside from the significant scholarly bibliography on Esperanto linguis- tics and literature, Esperanto counts at least five major sociological and historical monographs analysing its community and movement. Based on archival research and statistical surveys, the reference work of Peter Forster (1982) looks at the composition of the Esperanto speech community worldwide, and particularly in the United Kingdom, in the 1960s—1970s, analysing it in terms of social class, gender, political orien- tation and occupation. On an issue rather recurrent in my own study, Forster also examines how Esperanto speakers are sometimes regarded by the wider society as cranks. Nikola Rasic (1994), in turn, approaches the spread of Esperanto in European countries through statistical data collected by Esperanto associations and himself in a primarily descriptive monograph. With limited analytical and theoretical input, RasiCs work is concerned mostly with the motivations for people to learn the language, which led him to explore how Esperantists associate the ideals behind the language with other political and religious convictions. Of note here are his considerations on how Esperantujo is numerically constituted by two predominant age groups: young students and old age pensioners.
Productively combining history and sociology, Roberto Garvfa (2015) explains how international language construction gained momentum in the northern hemisphere at the turn of the twentieth century, further investigating how Esperanto failed to become the world's lingua franca. Conversely, through a comprehensive historical account of the place of Esperanto in twentieth-century Europe, Ulrich Lins (2016, 2017) portrays how the language was alternatively associated with Jews, intel- lectuals, petty-bourgeois and communists. Once embraced by the Soviet Union as an advocate for the internationalisation of communism and later regarded as an enemy of the Soviet state, Esperanto figures in Lins' analysis as a 'dangerous language', with its speakers being persecuted by totalitarian regimes on the European continent. Finally, Esther Schor (2016) blends historical data and empirical work to draw a picture of her seven-year experience in the speech community, sketching an outline of Esperantujo based on a series of short-term field visits in which she met different groups of interlocutors.
Contrasting with how these previous works either consider the present-day speech community as a token to understand the language's past or mobilise quantitative data to produce a generalising and abstract picture of the community, this book proposes a closer look towards the particularities of and subjectivities in the Esperanto community and movement, exploring how language politics effectively becomes a point of departure for community-building. In this sense, this book addresses two aspects of this analytical gap concerning time and space. Regarding time, I propose a study of its present-day speakers, situated in time but not determined by the past. Concentrating on the present through ethnography also means establishing a continuous dialogue with past and future, using participant observation to reach out to how narra- tives about Esperantos past (as presented in advertising leaflets, historical accounts and lived experiences with the language) and prospects for its future (as in future-oriented activists' practices) play out in the language's present. Rather than historical analysis, this constitutes a generational approach, showing how diverse forms of language poli- tics, community-building and use of communication technologies take place simultaneously among different generations that share the same present-day lifetime.[7]
Regarding space, concentrating the bulk of my empirical work in France enabled me to go beyond the scope of Esperanto and grasp how its speakers situate the language within other aspects of their ordinary lives. For this, I combined long-term participant observation (online and face-to-face) with archival research and semi-structured interviews. In addition, I constantly discussed my findings with my research partici- pants, taking them on board as co-producers of knowledge. The method- ological features that characterise this analysis are typical of ethnog- raphy—which is precisely what had not been foregrounded by previous research and which characterises this as the first long-term study of the Esperanto community and movement drawing on participant observa- tion. Following Joshua Fishmans (1965) call for the analysis oflanguage use in multilingual settings and Monica Heller's (2011) considerations on languages and (inter)nationalism, I employ ethnography to under- stand which languages (in this case, particularly French and Esperanto) are used on which occasions to say what, thus analysing why Esperanto seems to be rather commonly used to discuss political matters and the language itself.
1.4 Researching in La Republique
The decision to carry out the major component of my fieldwork in France was stirred primarily by how France historically stood out as a beacon for Esperanto since the early decades of the language. In that country, Esperanto managed to attract the interest of people from various backgrounds, social classes, education levels, occupations and, what is more, political convictions. As I explore further in Chapter 2, France is particularly well known among Esperantists for hosting intriguing politically-oriented collaborations and controversies. These arose as both French-based petty-bourgeois and left-wing activists embraced the language in the early twentieth century—eventually arguing over which political orientation would be associated with the cosmopolitan princi- ples behind Esperanto. Vestiges of these long-standing issues remain to date, as Esperanto associations, discussions and use of media frequently revolve around the segmentation between the 'neutral' and 'left-wing' strands of the movement.