Abstract
This chapter delineates what we know of New Australia so far. It first outlines to what extent the previous literature on New Australia provides reliable knowledge on this community and how it challenges a truthful analysis of New Australia. Further, it addresses methodological concerns that are important in settings in which the collection of data is hindered not only by geographical, linguistic, and climatic conditions, but particularly by social challenges, such as distrust, with which the researcher has to deal. The last part describes the documents collected in the field. This description not only explains the value of ethnographic studies and reflects critically on ethnographic practices, but also adds to our understanding of why so little research is carried out in rural Latin America.
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Notes
- 1.
During the time of my fieldwork in 2014, there was only one spot around the house in the front yard where cell phones worked, which resulted in the family often gathering there holding their cell phones into the right direction.
- 2.
Also a number of videos can be found on the Internet. They represent the community with a similar focus on the local customs.
- 3.
Multi-sited ethnography is a term that goes back to Marcus (1995) and proposes that ethnographic research should be “embedded in a world system [that] moves out from the single sites and local situations of conventional ethnographic research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space” (Marcus 1995: 96; for a criticism of ethnography as traditionally multi-sited and transnational due to the particularities of its focus [e.g., the Caribbean], see Mintz 1998).
- 4.
A brilliant description of what fieldwork may feel like is provided in Nigel Barley’s (1983) The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut, which I often remembered while in Nueva Londres.
- 5.
James Feehan left Paraguay in 2014. It is unknown what he did with the collection of manuscripts.
- 6.
The transcript of the full document can be viewed by contacting the author.
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Perez, D. (2019). Approaching New Australia from Within and Without. In: Language Competition and Shift in New Australia, Paraguay. Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24989-2_3
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