Navigating Topics and Creating Research Questions in Linguistic Anthropology

This chapter discusses the process of navigating research topics and creating research questions in linguistic anthropology. We discuss this process in terms of the attribution of topical salience — or the foregrounding of particular objects, phenomena, and relations — within a complex interconnected system. In this system one can zoom in on a particular topic to investigate and describe its details and/or zoom out to highlight and account for its connections to a broader range of phenomena. We present examples of how such an approach allows researchers to pose flexible research questions and to articulate their significance by putting them in dialogue with other interrelated questions and conversations. We also discuss some ideological and ethical concerns in relation to this process, and present a case study to demonstrate how, in one project, research questions can be created and refined enabling the focus to be expanded, restricted, modified, and changed.