don’t put a label on me
today I have to come up with a phenomenon that really confuses me. Lately when I am talking about my work – which has indeed some interdisciplinary anspects – people start labeling.
It is not the labeling what I can’t understand, it’s the way they do it. I know people need labels to put their world in order. I by myself need labels; without them my music library would be a mess. But the way I got labeled is not the ordering, sorting type of labeling – it is the outlawing type of labeling. They do not label my work to understand it, they label it to say “my work has nothing to do with your work” or in other words: “even if it sounds interdisciplinary, it is a study from the type B but I am working on type A”. That really saddens me!
And it is absurd. In my first job-interview for a Post-Doc (senior scientist) job the argument was “but it is mainly literary studies”. On my second interview the accusation was “it is to much syntax – could you imagine working in the field of literary studies?”; An other “funny” recurring strategy is labeling my work as 'sociolinguistics'; for some linguists this seems to be the most un-scientific linguistic discipline. For example: "This isn’t really a work on language contact – it’s more likely a sociolinguistic work“ or “OK, that’s a sociolinguistic work, but don’t you work on the grammatical structures?”.
First: Why can’t you imagine that someone would make the best use of all linguistic worlds (there are so many! but them together!) It is possible to ask sociolinguistic questions by analyzing grammatical structures – an effective study of language contact has to deal with sociolinguistical questions and for the rest: LITERATURE IS MADE OUT OF LANGUAGE!
Second: Why are you always underlining how important interdisciplinary science is but when it comes to interdisciplinary you hide yourself behind stupid labels.