Abstract
Humans use language to create reality by giving meaning to aspects of experiences from a specific point of view, as individuals take up particular subject positions and produce themselves through language. I argue that it is more important to convey the right image from a local perspective to an international reader, especially when conducting fieldwork in a place where its language is gendered and hierarchal. In the process of turning my fieldwork encounters into coherent academic writing, I needed to make sure that the essence of the Egyptian Arabic language spoken during my fieldwork was caught within the lines of my MA thesis chapters. I used code switching and different forms of discourse analysis during my writing of the thesis, and used fieldwork methodologies of unstructured interviews, small talk, and recorded discussions to grasp the Arabic language essence during my fieldwork. My main purpose of this aspect of my MA on food and family through the themes of memory, sensoria, gender, kinship, and social representation, was to understand how the binaries of the Arabic language affected the agency and positionality of both me and my interlocutors when discussing food stuffs and familial relations. I argue that due to the gender division of the Arabic language, my research was confined within binary limitations that I overcome by interpreting the essential meaning of the context instead of simply transliterating the words from Arabic to English.
Presenters
Iman AfifyResearch Assistant, Cairo Papers for Social Scienes, American University in Cairo, Egypt
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Communications and Linguistic Studies
KEYWORDS
Linguistics, Diversity, Ethnography, Fieldwork, Code Switching, Discourse Analysis, Egypt
