ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to validate the methods that anthropologists apply to gather their data. Fieldwork, ethnography, and anthropology have been debated as concepts in academic circles where the scholars appear to have reached the conclusion that they are different entities. Fieldwork also provides a unique tool to let the voice of the unheard come to light and to subvert power inequalities. When social research provides these results, it succeeds not only academically, but ethically, philosophically, politically, culturally, psychologically—in other words, anthropologically as the social human remains at the center of the investigation. The literature on language studies often mentions the need to be both reflexive and systematic in authors' work. One of the outcomes that the chapter aims to reach is to inform policy makers about specific grass-roots dynamics and language practices which have partly been neglected in the revival of Vepsian language.
