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Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks pp 59–87Cite as

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Follow the (Non-)Native: Circulating, Mapping and Territorialising the Esperanto Community

Abstract

Beginning with an ethnography of the Universal Esperanto Association's bookshop, in Rotterdam, this chapter investigates how the status of the Esperanto community as an international community relies on the continuous circulation of people and things to overcome the global dispersion of Esperanto speakers. Following the packing and shipping of books from Rotterdam to Seoul for the 2017 Universal Congress of Esperanto, I explore how the main task of the bookshop salesperson of keeping track of and mapping out this readership also constitutes the very labour that continuously (re)create and (re)produce this speech community's short-lived materiality. The discussion about regular travelling as a precondition to joining occasional large-scale materialisations of this international pop-up community also includes a methodological consideration on how to approach Esperanto speakers ethnographically.

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Fig. 3.1

(Source Pasporta Servo’s website, retrieved October 2021)

Notes

  1. 1.

    For instance, France can be translated as either Francujo or Francio, and England as Anglujo or Anglio.

  2. 2.

    Hence, Franco, a Frenchman, and Francujo, a container for the French people. Zamenhof suggested -i- in his 1894 language reform proposal as an alternative, to avoid determinist overtones of a country being a container for a specific people or ethnic group (Forster 1982: 136).

  3. 3.

    In other regions of France, it is common for local Esperanto associations to invest in the teaching of Esperanto in elementary schools within the scope of the extracurricular activities proposed by the projects NAP and TAP (Nouvelles/Temps d’Activités Périscolaires). Similarly, such Esperanto associations often support initiatives to promote regional languages, such as Breton in Bretagne and Occitan in the south of France.

  4. 4.

    Marianne Cramer conducted a historical analysis of the left-wing, workers’ Esperanto movement ‘without being an Esperantist’ (2005: 6)—meaning, in this case, without mastering the language. As a result, she was not able to access most of the Esperanto language primary sources and had to rely on the help of French Esperantists to translate documents.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil

    Guilherme Fians

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Fians, G. (2021). Follow the (Non-)Native: Circulating, Mapping and Territorialising the Esperanto Community. In: Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84230-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84230-7_3

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