Breaking taboos in doing fieldwork: You never know whether cannibalism and homicide are appropriate topics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18716/ojs/the_mouth.2860Abstract
Two Zande stories recorded by Evans-Pritchard should be used as a basis for questions. These stories in which homicide and cannibalism play a role were highly appreciated by Zande language consultants in Central African Republic, where I had used the subjects in preceding years in order to analyse complex grammatical constructions. While I expected that speakers of Zande in Kisangani would also love these stories, one of them was fairly unhappy with the topics, homicide and cannibalism. Furthermore, I realized that I had not chosen the right language consultants for interviews on the university campus. Both the topics of the stories and the choice of language consultants meant breaking taboos.
In the present paper I want to discuss how I broke some taboos and why there were no ways to avoid this. Taboos were broken because I did not know about them, and when I learned about them, I had no chance to modify my research and make it appropriate.
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