The Legacy of Dell Hymes

Ethnopoetics, Narrative Inequality, and Voice

Paul V. Kroskrity, Anthony K. Webster

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780253019417
• eBook ISBN: 9780253019653
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

LISTENING FOR VOICES

Robert Moore

1Reinventing Ethnopoetics

ASSESSING THE LEGACY of Dell Hymes (1927–2009) in ethnopoetics should entail assessing ethnopoetics more broadly, as a “legacy” in its own right within American cultural and linguistic anthropology since the 1960s. For indeed, ethnopoetics in the broad sense emerged more as a movement than as another subfield of (linguistic) anthropology, and it emerged at the same time and among the same generational cohort that produced Reinventing Anthropology (Hymes 1972), “the ‘anti-textbook’ of anthropology’s then mid-career political Left” (Silverstein 2010, 935). Like Reinventing Anthropology, ethnopoetics—the term was coined in 1968 by Jerome Rothenberg (Quasha 1976, 65)—emerged in the context of a generational struggle between practitioners working in a number of different but overlapping fields of inquiry and expressive practice: academic anthropology, folklore, literary criticism, poetry, and what we now call performance art. Today we are separated from this period by at least two (demographic) generations, hence the need to ask, in the conclusion below, what parts of this legacy are still usable and active for students of narrative and other discourse practices today.

As a set of activities centered on verbal genres mostly of non-Western, nonliterate peoples, ethnopoetics is rather unlike the other anthropological specializations whose names likewise begin with ethno- and which used to be grouped under the heading of “ethnoscience”: ethnobotany, ethnozoology, ethnoastronomy, ethnomedicine, and so forth. Most of these take as their subject matter (lexically) explicit, formal knowledge about domains of human activity and/or perceptual experience (plants, animals, celestial bodies, etc.), the nomenclature of which had already been formalized within Western, unprefixed “science” when the anthropologists came a-calling.

But at least in its Hymesian mode, as verse analysis, ethnopoetics has not primarily involved the ethnographic study of nonliterate peoples’ explicit ideas about narrative, as reflected, perhaps, in native terminologies. It has, rather, been an intervention into the presentational (printed) form of texts, a way of arranging the transcript of an event of oral narration so as to reflect or recuperate the true rhetorical architecture of denotational text, and in so doing to recover “the literary form in which the native words had their being” (Hymes 1981, 384; see Blommaert 2009, 271).

There are two implicit claims here: one is that it is possible to arrive at a single final arrangement of a transcript that reflects on the page the rhetorical or poetic structure of an(y) oral performance; another is the idea that in doing so, a scholar has restored or recovered a native voice. Whatever one thinks about the validity of these claims, there is no doubt that Hymes was committed to both of them. Indeed, one can observe a fundamental shift in Hymes’s own work on materials in Chinookan (and an increasing number of other languages): from a focus on the event-bound interactional dynamics of narrative as performance (e.g., Hymes [1975] 1981), he moved to a focus on the rhetorical architecture of denotational text. To clarify matters, it might help to identify two distinct senses of the term:

ethnopoetics1	ethnographic investigation of ideas about and evaluations of individual narrative performances and/or naration in general in the community from which the source texts emerge, including native vocabulary pertaining to parts of narratives (e.g., titles) and acts of narration (e.g., verba dicendi), and especially including information on (named) speech genres, their performance conditions, etc.;
ethnopoetics2	“the recuperative restudy of the textual organization of originally oral literary forms of Native American and other peoples so as to make patent and to explicate their rhetorical power as verbal art.” (Silverstein 2010, 933)

Ethnopoetics₁, then, fits more easily into the set containing ethnobotany, ethnozoology, and similar (sub)fields; it also overlaps with another field of which Hymes was a founding figure, the ethnography of speaking (or of communication; see Hymes 1962, 1964). Ethnopoetics₂ is focused on texts themselves, their rhetorical architecture and presentational form.

Hymes made signal contributions to ethnopoetics₁ in his work from the 1950s into the 1970s (e.g., Hymes 1959, 1966, [1975] 1981), but concentrated almost exclusively on ethnopoetics₂ after his discovery in the mid- to late 1970s of the principles of what he called “verse analysis.” More succinctly:

ethnopoetics1	“study of the oral poetics of indigenous peoples and
ethnopoetics2	their literary monuments.” (Silverstein 2010, 936n3)

As will become clear, I think this dichotomy is a false one; it is nevertheless helpful in organizing the discussion, partly because it was, as I also hope to suggest, never adequately resolved in Hymes’s own work.

My purpose in this essay is to build upon Hymes’s contributions to ethnopoetics, and to propose a set of transcription and text-formatting practices for capturing on the page dimensions of the poetic structure of oral narration that are not reflected adequately or systematically in Hymesian verse analysis. My broader aim is to contribute to the development of an analytic framework that can enable field researchers to take into consideration the shifting linguistic environment in which narration takes place. The material comes from my own fieldwork with speakers of Kiksht (Wasco-Wishram Chinookan), the language and the textual tradition that absorbed so much of Hymes’s prodigious scholarly and creative energies. In the conclusion I take a brief look at ethnopoetics conceived in broadly cultural terms and try to place Hymes’s work within it.

Contrapuntal Coyote Stories

During the 1980s, over several summers of fieldwork at Warm Springs Reservation in central Oregon, I became acquainted with Mrs. Lucinda Smith (née Scott), a fluent Wasco speaker then in her eighties; the circumstances of our first meeting are described elsewhere (Moore 1993, 213ff). With her late husband Alfred Smith, she had raised a large family and helped to run a cattle-ranching operation of considerable size located on an allotment of high sagebrush prairie about twenty miles to the west of “the Agency,” as the reservation’s main population center is known.

In 1983 I found her living with a recently divorced grown son in a small, detached house on “the Senior Citizens’ loop,” a cul-de-sac of 1970s-era federal housing built atop a small hill a stone’s throw from the Agency. Attached to the house was a carport beneath whose roof sat a large, gleaming late-model Buick sedan, which she had recently bought at a dealership in the nearby off-reservation town of Madras, Oregon, paying for it with wads of cash retrieved from a beaded bag. She didn’t drive; the Buick was there so that one or another of her adult children could drive her, in regal fashion, to Portland or Yakima to visit relatives or go shopping. Her son worked for a tribally owned timber company and was away (“in the woods,” as she put it) from before dawn until late afternoon each day. I would come to her house once or twice each week in the early afternoon, usually bearing some small gift of fresh fruit or other edibles. We would sit at her kitchen table or side by side on her sofa; she knew I was interested in her language, and sometimes we engaged in the standard kind of linguistic elicitation or related activities.

Since she had spontaneously narrated (in English) an episode about Coyote the first time we met, I knew that she was not only conversant in the mythology, but also willing and able to assume responsibility for narrating it (Bauman 1977; Hymes [1975] 1981), and so between 1983 and the time of her death in 1986 I recorded her narrating the Wasco Coyote cycle in full on four separate occasions. Later, I discovered that Michael Silverstein had recorded another complete (and quite long) version of her Coyote cycle in 1972, when she still lived “up the ranch.”

Coyote cycles—loosely connected series of episodes centering on the trickster-transformer figure Coyote and “telling how [he] traveled all the way up the Columbia river, transforming monsters and instructing the people in the various arts of life” (Sapir 1907, 542)—will be familiar to students of American Indian mythologies of the region (cognate episodes are attested for nearby Sahaptin- and Salishan-speaking groups), and familiar as well to readers of Hymes’s many studies of Chinookan narrative traditions (e.g., Hymes [1975] 1981). Though not cosmogonic in the strict sense, Coyote cycles recount how the world as we know it took its current shape. The setting of the episodes is

a time antedating the present one when animals walked about as men, though having approximately the same mental and, to a large extent, physical characteristics as now. At that time, when there were no Indians, properly speaking, in the country, but only anthropomorphic animals, many things were not as they should be, and, in order to make the country fit for habitation by the Indians destined to hold it, it was necessary for a culture-hero or transformer to rectify the weak points in creation. (Sapir 1907, 542)

If Coyote in the guise of culture-hero or transformer “is distinctly the benefactor of mankind,” Coyote in trickster mode is “often . . . conceived of as cunning, deceitful, and gluttonous,” an “insufferable marplot” who is “at the same time . . . indescribably obscene” (543).

Mrs. Smith’s renditions of the Coyote cycle turned out to be different in a number of ways from the texts I had encountered in the canon—for that is the proper word—of Chinookan mythology as represented in the work of Franz Boas (1891, 1901), Edward Sapir (1909), Melville Ja...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Introducing Ethnopoetics: Hymes’s Legacy
• Listening for Voices
• Ethnopoetic Pathways
• Index