Andrea L. Berez, Jean Mulder, Daisy Rosenblum

The papers collected in this volume represent a cross-section of current linguistic scholarship in which authors share a common methodology: the analyses presented here have emerged directly from the challenges and felicities of linguistic fieldwork and language documentation. We take fieldwork to be the study of a language—often not the researchers’ own, and frequently conducted on site where the language is spoken—as a holistic system, operating within interdependent social, cultural, and historical contexts. While each contributor in these pages has narrowed his or her focus to one small corner of that system, the work here is informed by attention to the larger contexts of these languages, situated in the communities in which they are spoken, and of field linguistics as a discipline, situated in the community in which it is practiced.