Zane Goebel's work delves into the intricacies of Indonesian language and linguistics, with a particular focus on sociolinguistics and extensive fieldwork in Indonesia. His academic background provides a deep understanding of the language's nuances and cultural context. Through his contributions, he aims to make the complexities of Indonesian accessible to a wider audience. His publications serve as valuable resources for those seeking to engage with the Indonesian language.
The book delves into the dynamics of language in contact settings, examining how it shapes and reflects identities, social expectations, and relationships. It highlights the intricate ways in which communication influences personal and group identities, offering insights into the social implications of language use in diverse contexts.
Scholars of language ideology have encouraged us to reflect on and explore where social categories come from, how they have been reproduced, and whether and to what extent they are relevant to everyday interactional practices.
In accounts of ethnographic fieldwork and textbooks on ethnography, we often find the notion of rapport used to describe social relationships in the field. Frequently, rapport between researcher and researched is invoked as a prerequisite to be achieved before fieldwork can start, or used as evidence to judge the value and robustness of an ethnography. With few exceptions, and despite regular pleas to do so, ethnographers continue to avoid presenting any discursive evidence of what rapport might look like from an interactional perspective. In a sense, the uncritical acceptance of rapport as a fieldwork goal and measure has helped hide the discursive work that goes on in the field. In turn, this has privileged ideas about identity as portable rather than "portable and emergent", and reports of social life as more important than how such reports emerge. Written for all those who engage or plan to engage in ethnographic fieldwork, this collection examines how social relationships dialogically emerge in fieldwork settings.