Out of an industrial, no-nonsense file cabinet, Anthropology Prof. David Sapir gently pulled a stack of small composition books bursting with character. Their weathered looks betrayed heavy use and old age, but it was clear that afternoon that they had been handled with care. They looked loved.
In those multi-colored, makeshift-looking books, Sapir took hundreds of pages of fieldwork notes during four trips between 1960 and 1986. His subject: Kujamaat Jóola, a language spoken by 90,000 people in Senegal -- and not by Sapir when he first arrived there.
Although he had originally been trained as a social anthropologist, Sapir ended up doing language research in Africa after he stumbled on a linguistics fellowship as a graduate student at Harvard in 1960.
"I wrote [director] Joe Greenberg and asked him if I was qualified to apply," Sapir said. "He said, 'Apply by return mail. I'm leaving for Africa on Monday.' And that was Thursday. I had about an hour to write an application."
Apparently, an hour was enough. Sapir received the grant.
Shipped off to Senegal, where the primary national language was French (a subject in which he had "never gotten a grade higher than a C"), Sapir was now studying yet another language that he had no inkling of how to speak.
Since he couldn't very well barge in on the Jóola people with armloads of notebooks and tape recorders, Sapir began by establishing a contact.
In Dakar, Senegal, he met a Jóola whose cousin, Alasanne, eventually brought Sapir back to his home and made him welcome in the community.
Sapir soon got down to the real work of studying the language, spending hours "hunched over a tape recorder with these very patient consultants and then creating word lists."
The Jóola spoke; Sapir listened. And he wrote and wrote and wrote. Those meticulous writings and re-writings filled Sapir's composition books.
Along with vocabulary lists, Sapir collected folksongs and, "with great pains, we translated."
At first, Sapir both transcribed Jóola speech and translated it into English; later, various assistants took over the transcription.
"We'd go back and forth between transcription and the tape recorder," Sapir said, referring to Alasanne, who acted as his first assistant. "And he would translate into French, and I'd write it down in English."
As he gathered the meanings of words, Sapir wrote the words on cards and filed them to eventually compose a dictionary.
Yet even as Sapir's vocabulary improved -- eventually rendering him almost fluent, the sound system of Jóola provided him with a hefty challenge.
"You pick up momentum slowly," Sapir said. "As you go along, you're always writing things down."
During his exploration of the Jóola, Sapir said he found particularly striking the tradition of singing "extemporaneous funeral songs," and he often attended funerals to record these "sings."
At one point, he was to attend a sing to honor a great singer who had recently died, and on the way to the event, Sapir experienced a tidbit of culture that stood out to him.
"We went off, and we drove as far as we could," he said. "Then we had to get out and walk for about awhile, and I was carrying my tape recorder. It's quite heavy. It had 12 D batteries. And this guy says, 'Here, let me carry it for you.' And so he puts it on his head. I was very nervous because I wasn't used to people carrying valuable loads on their head. It was very rough terrain. Every once in a while he would put up his hands, but most of the time it just sat there."
Sapir said he grew comfortable after spending several months with the Jóola. His French was in fine shape, his Jóola was improving and, since his host's name was Kufru, he was now accepted as "Kufru's European."
"Yes, I was his pet European," Sapir said. "I was good to have around. I transported him in my car, and I'd bring him gifts. In the community where I lived, they got to know me."
But when Sapir ventured out of his newfound comfort zone, he encountered resistance. He said that many people believed, for example, that his research was financially motivated.
"I was in these other villages where I wasn't known, and people were, needless to say, much more suspicious," he said.
Luckily, Sapir said, his friends always gave those who were doubtful an explanation on his behalf.
"They came up with an exceedingly correct reply: that I was gathering research -- I was not making money for my research, but my research would help me get a job at home, which is basically true. And that was very sage on their part," he said.
Sapir currently teaches "The Culture and History of Still Photography," "African Language Structures" and "Anthropological Monographs" in the anthropology department.
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