The Legacy of Dell Hymes

Description

The accomplishments and enduring influence of renowned anthropologist Dell Hymes are showcased in these essays by leading practitioners in the field. Hymes (1927–2009) is arguably best known for his pioneering work in ethnopoetics, a studied approach to Native verbal art that elucidates cultural significance and aesthetic form. As these essays amply demonstrate, nearly six decades later ethnopoetics and Hymes's focus on narrative inequality and voice provide a still valuable critical lens for current research in anthropology and folklore. Through ethnopoetics, so much can be understood in diverse cultural settings and situations: gleaning the voices of individual Koryak storytellers and aesthetic sensibilities from century-old wax cylinder recordings; understanding the similarities and differences between Apache life stories told 58 years apart; how Navajo punning and an expressive device illuminate the work of a Navajo poet; decolonizing Western Mono and Yokuts stories by bringing to the surface the performances behind the texts written down by scholars long ago; and keenly appreciating the potency of language revitalization projects among First Nations communities in the Yukon and northwestern California. Fascinating and topical, these essays not only honor a legacy but also point the way forward.

Introduction
"Introducing Ethnopoetics: Hymes's Legacy," Anthony K. Webster and Paul V. Kroskrity

[section] Listening for Voices
1 "Reinventing Ethnopoetics," Robert Moore

"The Patterning of Style: Indices of Performance through
2 Ethnopoetic Analysis of Century-Old Wax Cylinders," Alexander D. King

3 " 'Grow with That, Walk with That': Hymes, Dialogicality, and Text Collections," M. Eleanor Nevins

4 " 'The Validity of Navajo Is in Its Sounds': On Hymes, Navajo Poetry, Punning, and the Recognition of Voice," Anthony K. Webster

5 "Discursive Discriminations in the Representation of Western Mono and Yokuts Stories: Confronting Narrative Inequality and Listening to Indigenous Voices in Central California," Paul V. Kroskrity

6 "Discovery and Dialogue in Ethnopoetics," Richard Bauman

[section] Ethnopoetic Pathways
7 "The Poetics of Language Revitalization: Text, Performance, and Change," Gerald L. Carr and Barbra Meek

8 "Translating Oral Literature in Indigenous Societies: Ethnic Aesthetic Performances in Multicultural and Multilingual Settings," Sean Patrick O'Neill

9 "Ethnopoetics and Ideologies of Poetic Truth," David W. Samuels

10 "Contested Mobilities: On the Politics and Ethnopoetics of Circulation," Charles L. Briggs

Index

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Folclore
• Linguistics
• General officer
• Sociolinguistics
• Anthropology
• General
• Folklore

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 25 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253019653
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Legacy of Dell Hymes
E NCOUNTERS : Explorations in Folklore and Ethnomusicology A Journal of Folklore Research Book
The Legacy of Dell Hymes
Ethnopoetics, Narrative Inequality, and Voice
Edited by Paul V. Kroskrity and Anthony K. Webster
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Indiana University Press
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On the cover: Dell Hymes. Reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association. Not for sale or further reproduction.
Contents
Introduction: Introducing Ethnopoetics: Hymes s Legacy / Anthony K. Webster and Paul V. Kroskrity
LISTENING FOR VOICES
1 Reinventing Ethnopoetics / Robert Moore
2 The Patterning of Style: Indices of Performance through Ethnopoetic Analysis of Century-Old Wax Cylinders / Alexander D. King
3 Grow with That, Walk with That : Hymes, Dialogicality, and Text Collections / M. Eleanor Nevins
4 The Validity of Navajo Is in Its Sounds : On Hymes, Navajo Poetry, Punning, and the Recognition of Voice / Anthony K. Webster
5 Discursive Discriminations in the Representation of Western Mono and Yokuts Stories: Confronting Narrative Inequality and Listening to Indigenous Voices in Central California / Paul V. Kroskrity
6 Discovery and Dialogue in Ethnopoetics / Richard Bauman
ETHNOPOETIC PATHWAYS
7 The Poetics of Language Revitalization: Text, Performance, and Change / Gerald L. Carr and Barbra Meek
8 Translating Oral Literature in Indigenous Societies: Ethnic Aesthetic Performances in Multicultural and Multilingual Settings / Sean Patrick O Neill
9 Ethnopoetics and Ideologies of Poetic Truth / David W. Samuels
10 Contested Mobilities: On the Politics and Ethnopoetics of Circulation / Charles L. Briggs
Index
The Legacy of Dell Hymes
Anthony K. Webster and Paul V. Kroskrity
Introducing Ethnopoetics: Hymes s Legacy
T HIS VOLUME ADDRESSES the legacy, enduring impact, and future reach of Dell Hymes s ethnopoetics project. The authors take up various strands of Hymes s ethnopoetic interests and reveal how this focus on verbal art, far from being a marginal pursuit of the occasional Americanist, is actually central to many contemporary issues in folklore, linguistics, and linguistic and cultural anthropology. Indeed, a growing number of scholars have pushed for a rethinking of the importance of ethnopoetics research, from its concerns with language documentation and endangered languages to tacit forms of power that erase or deny local ways of speaking (see Blommaert 2009; Dobrin 2012; Kataoka 2012). All the essays in this volume take up the Hymesian legacy in their concerns with ethnopoetics, voice, and narrative inequality as matters of central concern to anthropology and folklore.
Though anthropologists in the Boasian tradition had already made the verbal art texts of various cultures a staple of cultural analysis, they were more concerned with these texts as sources of cultural evidence than as works of verbal art. Against this historical backdrop, Hymes began publishing pioneering studies of Native American verbal art in 1958 that related their linguistic and rhetorical forms to new appreciations of their aesthetic form and cultural significance. He first called this type of work anthropological philology but later rebranded the field of study that emerged under his and Dennis Tedlock s (1972, 1983) influence as ethnopoetics . While Hymes s (1981, 2003) early work in ethnopoetics focused on poetic devices in Native American verbal art, his later (1996) work also engaged with a variety of narrative traditions and explored fundamental issues of narrative inequality and voice. This was not, however, a breakthrough for Hymes, but rather a continuation of a longstanding concern with the inequalities of languages (Hymes 1973).
As a method and theory of analysis of verbal art, much work over the last several decades has combined what has often been called a Hymesian approach (based on the patterned use of discourse particles) with the approach used by Tedlock (based on the prosody and pause structuring of actual performance). The distinction made between Hymes s and Tedlock s approaches was and continues to be misleading because it ignores the complexity of both. Hymes (2003, 36), for his part, famously-quoting Kenneth Burke-urged that linguistic anthropologists and linguists use all there is to use when it came to the analysis of verbal artistic traditions. Work by William Bright (1984), Sally McClendon (1977), Paul V. Kroskrity (1985, 1993), Joel Sherzer (1987, 1990), and Anthony Woodbury (1985, 1987) has shown that the perspectives of Hymes and Tedlock might be usefully combined to attend to the whole of the expressive resources of a narrator or community. Indeed, as Woodbury (1985, 1987) has argued, the interaction between various ways of poetically organizing verbal art can be communicatively and aesthetically meaningful.
Hymes, an astute student of Americanist anthropology, traditionalized his ethnopoetic work with that of Franz Boas ([1911] 1966), Edward Sapir ([1921] 1985), and the founders of linguistic anthropology (see Hymes 1999). Hymes s approach finds potent expression in Boas s ([1911] 1966, 58) claim:
When the question arises, for instance, of investigating the poetry of the Indians, no translation can possibly be considered as an adequate substitute for the original. The form of rhythm, the treatment of language, the adjustment of text to music, the imagery, the use of metaphors, and all the numerous problems involved in any thorough investigation of the style of poetry, can be interpreted only by the investigator who has equal command of the ethnographical traits of the tribe and of their language.
This sentiment is repeated in Boas s (1917, 7) opening statement in the International Journal of American Linguistics :
Indian oratory has long been famous, but the number of recorded speeches from which we can judge the oratorical devices is exceedingly small. There is no doubt whatever the definite stylistic forms exist that are utilized to impress the hearer; but we do not know what they are. As yet, nobody has attempted a careful analysis of the style of narrative art as practiced by the various tribes. The crudeness of most records presents a serious obstacle for this study, which, however, should be taken up seriously. We can study the general structure of the narrative, the style of composition, of motives, their character sequence; but the formal stylistic devices for obtaining effects are not so easily determined.
This was the work that Hymes engaged in from the late 1950s onward. And, indeed, Reading Clackamas Texts (Hymes 1981) is a landmark in the study of stylistic devices that were often ignored or misrecognized by earlier researchers. As Robert Moore (this volume) points out, Hymes s fascination with line-structuring and with hierarchical relations of twos and fours and threes and fives seems to have pushed him toward a structuralism that he rightly decried (Hymes 1985).
Ethnopoetics is-or should be-concerned with more than simply poetic lines, such as individual creativity and careful attention to linguistic details. Paul Friedrich (2006) and Jan Blommaert (2006a) have offered useful evaluations of ethnopoetics. As Blommaert (2009, 268) writes, Ethnopoetic work is one way of addressing the main issue in ethnography: to describe (and reconstruct) languages not in the sense of stable, closed, and internally homogeneous units characterizing parts of mankind, but as ordered complexes of genres, styles, registers, and forms of use. Such a perspective must engage not only individual speakers but also the languages they use and the connections they make. Blommaert (2009, 271) also adds, Ultimately, what ethnopoetics does is to show voice, to visualize the particular ways-often deviant from hegemonic norms-in which subjects produce meaning. Hymesian voice is thus both a creative and a political accomplishment. It is concerned with individual narrators who can voice cultural, linguistic, and rhetorical preferences in the accomplishment of their verbal art. It is about how the narrator succeeds in making oneself understood in one s own terms, to produce meanings under conditions of empowerment (Blommaert 2009, 271). But this empowerment presupposes sufficient political and economic support to foster rather than silence or suppress voices, particularly those of counterhegemonic others. The recognition of voice is central to this volume. As Friedrich (2006, 228) notes in his review of ethnopoetics, ethnopoetics tends to relativize knowledge, to recognize its subtlety. This relativization is akin to what Blommaert (2009, 259) describes as Hymes s democratization of voice by providing linguistic resources necessary for indigenous and other voices to be heard. This is certainly a crucial aspect of what Hymes (1996, 60) envisioned as the mediative role t