Documentation and responsibility

The sometimes conflicting responsibilities of endangered language fieldworkers to at least three distinct constituencies are considered: to other scholars, to native speaker sources, and to the ethnic community the sources represent. In the case of the author’s Scottish Gaelic fieldwork, an original near-exclusive focus on responsibility to the scholarly community gave way to a greater focus on responsibility to sources via recognition of early fieldwork blunders arising from insufficient attention to the sensitivity of some materials. Also discussed are the implausibility of genuinely informed consent and the validity of ethnic community claims to materials supplied under confidentiality guarantees to the original sources.