At times the community from where the data come is divided on what ought or ought not be returned, on the form in which data are to be returned, and whether they ought to be returned at all. At times the data are sensitive and are best not shared in public: they were made accessible to the anthropologist under confidence. That it is missing can be taken not as an oversight, but as an indication that such return is not easy to arrange. In my view, one commandment is missing though it is implicit: your data you will return. They serve as guidelines for best practices and that is well. This article makes liberal use of material contained in the dictionary itself.ġAnthropologists have codes of ethics that are akin to sacred commandments: your informants you will not deceive their interest you will protect their intellectual property you will not steal your data you will not cook your research you should render accessible to the scientific community and local population your data you will protect, etc. Research for the dictionary was made possible by a grant for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to analyze the transformations of Pijin (no. Inspired by a workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology where I was a guest researcher in May and June 2013, I finished it in 2014 and updated it in 2019. Rather, young Solomon Islanders using social media, are developing their own spelling for the language, neither that of Pijin nor that of English.Īn early version of this article was presented at the workshop on the Repatriation of Material and Immaterial Patrimonies organized in 2007 at Université Laval (Quebec, Canada) by Pierre Maranda and Frédéric Laugrand. Finally, I explain that though the dictionary is now 20 years, it is not used by Solomon Islanders who are not taught to read and write in Pijin but in English (the official language of the country). I am questionning the ethics of such a transformation. I then focus on the making of the dictionary showing how the techniques of dictionary making and linguistic ideology of research participants and collaborators interact with my own to create a product far removed from the original data. I start by discussing the disconnect between the linguistic data we gather and the transformation these data undergo before linguists and anthropologists typically return them. I this article, I propose to consider the ethical dimension of the return of data to the research field site, here the Solomon Islands by focusing on the writing the Pijin Dictionary I published in 2002.
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