Da identidade dun investigador que quere falar de identidades

Resumen

About the identity of a researcher who wants to talk about identities

This article is a series of auto-reflexive comments about the impact the identity of the researcher has on the linguistic data obtained. The author analyses the flow of some particular interviews made by him in the community of Fala de Xálima approx. 5,000 inhabitants which speaks a minority language coming from old Galaico-Portuguese, in Cáceres province Spain. Discussing such topics as the orthographic proposals, smuggling practices or supposed Galician identity of these people, we make some in-depth comments on how the perceived “outsider and foreigner” identity of the author makes people eager or reluctant to address such questions. For this, we use some methodological tools applied by fieldwork linguistics and anthropology Hazen, Bowern, Cooper & Vaux, as well as the theoretical principles of the study of identity by Bucholtz & Hall, Meyerhoff, and Eckert & McConnell-Ginet.