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Beyond Words

Local voices resonate with a national crisis

One morning in early Oct. 2001, I was listening to a report on NPR’s Morning Edition on a project initiated by the Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. After the 9/11 events, the center’s folklorists had a meeting to discuss how to capture the resulting mood of Americans. They decided to launch a major data collection fashioned after one that the famous folklorist Alan Lomax initiated a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Lomax urged researchers around the country to go out into the streets and record people regarding their feelings and opinions about the raid and America’s subsequent declaration of war. Their data became highly sought after and has been a valuable resource to radio stations and researchers during the past five decades.

Many people confirmed themselves speechless about the events of 9/11. While French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has cautioned us on the importance of language as a detailed means of understanding the human condition, we now have reached another level that calls for research on what it means when language “ceases” to function.

To put words to what is “beyond words,” my students in Language and Culture, a survey course in linguistic anthropology, enthusiastically joined me in shaping “Beyond Words— Capturing Citizens’ Impressions Emanating from the Events of September 11, 2001.” We used the Folklife Center’s initiative as a springboard.

Practically all forms of data collection became a consideration for us, including written questionnaires, audio and video recordings, diary entries, random street and door-to-door interviews, and the opinion sections of local newspapers. Students even collected the Chico Enterprise-Record’s “Tell It to the ER” section daily from late September until mid-December 2001.

Junior Juan D. Valdes focused on The Orion and everything original that its staff produced concerning the attacks. With a keen eye also for cartoons, Valdes selected pertinent items from 13 of The Orion’s fall issues to be archived at the Library of Congress.

Molly J. Barnard walked around Chico and knocked on doors to interview 23 people. Her method created a diverse body of data and gave her a valuable first experience in anthropological fieldwork.

Karen M. Brown conducted her research using a videocamera at peoples’ homes and at the California Conservation Corps in Magalia. The audiovisual quality of her videotape transmits authenticity with an immediacy that somehow strikes a chord with everyone who watched TV during the aftermath of the attacks. One contributor on Brown’s videotape said, “I felt like God was coming down,” and another one felt greatly inspired that “America has come together.”

Andrew Carroll-Perdue’s question, “What ONE word would you use to describe the events of Sept. 11, 2001?” yielded a long list of words, including overwhelming, havoc, crazy, unfortunate, horrific, effective, terrible, tragic, sickening, depraved, grace, horror, remorse, uncalled for, very sad, desperate, and intense. Interestingly, with a couple of minutes to think about which selection could be representative, Perdue’s interviewees largely shunned some of the more common words almost everybody used when spontaneously speaking about 9/11. Frequently used words such as mad, awful, incredible, unthinkable, impossible, etc. were largely not considered to be illustrative enough. Many interviewees found it difficult to choose only one word, saying that one word could never be enough. Without that difficulty, we might not have arrived at such insightful data.

Altogether, 75 persons were interviewed. The resulting stack of documents together with news clippings, poster collages, audio and videotapes, and subjects’ release forms, made for an impressive material collection for a sizable package sent to Washington, D.C. The opinion pages of 40 issues of the Paradise Post and a special September edition of Inside Chico State were also enclosed.

Thanks to the Beyond Words project and participating students’ efforts, Chico voices describing the national tragedy are now captured “forever” and will become a historic part of the Voice of America.

Michael Reinschmidt,
Anthropology