"Academic-ese"

I very much enjoyed Rosaldo's "After Objectivism" and knew that I would from the moment I started chuckling at his family breakfast ethnography. I've wanted to do this before, particularly for a classroom setting: use the language of the discipline to describe its inner workings. I find it exhausting, trying to keep up with a vocabulary of terms that no one has ever explicitly given me and every reading for class involves a heavy amount of back and forth between the text and a dictionary, despite the absence of many of these terms in that dictionary. I dream of an easily laid-out vocabulary list like those handed out in foreign language classes; because that's what the language of academia is, really. A foreign language that every student is trying to play catch-up with, learning as they go and inevitably using words along the way that they haven't the faintest idea how to define. Everyone is guilty of it, whether the field is sociology, anthropology, literature, folklore, creative writing, painting, physics, etc. We want to be welcomed as part of the greater university culture so we manage a "fluency" (to borrow a term from an earlier reading) in the university's language so we are accepted and able to move within it.


I don't intend to suggest that broadening our vocabulary and gaining knowledge within the disciplines that are formed by that vocabulary is a "bad thing" entirely. Many of the terms I looked up became very helpful in articulating something I wanted to say that previously would have taken too long and still been unclear. But there comes a point where we're recycling language, only coming up with more complicated ways of saying what we want to say. Language is a tool of communication, that is its primary function, and if language obstructs communication then its purpose isn't really being fulfilled.


When Rosaldo says, "Clearly there is a gap between the technical idiom of ethnography and the language of everyday life" (51), I think his point that the language of a community should reflect that community could be easily expanded to other fields and to the institution
as a whole. When there is a problem identified, the next course is usually to try to fix it. Rosaldo suggests several things to keep in mind when writing an ethnography, including "Who is speaking to whom, about what, for what purposes, and under what circumstances?" (54) If, as a proposed possibility, new students who are trying to play catch-up to join an ongoing conversation become the professors who are perpetuating that conversation... why are we continuing the muddled nature of our communication?

-Caitlin