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My research abroad involves
documenting the disappearing Ket language
and documenting Ket culture and also
how the Ket culture connects historically
with the other cultures around it.
These disciplines are exactly what
I teach when I come into my East Asian
Studies and Linguistics courses.
Because in my East Asian Studies course,
Nomads of Eurasia, I teach how people have
interacted in this area over the many centuries
and my understanding of the Ket
directly impacts my ability to describe
how people live in this area of the world.
Having spent a whole winter in Siberia,
when it’s 40 below zero everyday, when you
can’t go outside without covering your nose
with your hand so it won’t get frost bitten,
having experienced this allows me to talk
about it in a every different way than if I
had simply read it in a book.
Also, studying a language that so unusual
typologically as Ket allows me to bring in
many examples into my general linguistics
classes of a language that isn’t in the textbooks,
that hasn’t been used as an example in the textbooks.
And I am able to make very many relevant
comments about linguistic theory and
about linguistic typology using my own
personal knowledge of the Ket language,
and I think the students feel that they
somehow, sitting in my class, are a little bit
on the cutting edge of understanding the
linguistics when I’m able to bring new
information that no one else knows or
that is only written up for other scholars,
into the classroom.
I think they feel that this is a very valuable
aspect of my ability to present information to them.
And it comes out in my student evaluations
that the students very much appreciate when
I bring in my research data and research
experiences into the classroom.
One way is that some of my students have
actually become inspired to try to study native
people of the world, to try to document some
of the languages that are disappearing.
I just, before I came to this interview, had
a conference with a student who is buying
recording material to go to Tajikistan to record
some of the dialects of Tajik in much the same
way that I worked on Ket language,
and I think that my experience must have
had an effect on her in order to inspire her
to pursue this type of study.
So the material that I present in class
inspires students to become interested in
native groups of people and other groups of
people of a complete different part of the world.