The Legacy of Dell Hymes: Ethnopoetics, Narrative Inequality, and Voice ed. by Paul V. Kroskrity, Anthony K. Webster (review)

Abstract

Paul V. Kroskrity and Anthony K. Webster assemble a sophisticated review of the latecareer work of linguist, folklorist, and anthropologist Dell Hymes based on a joint American Anthropological Association session in 2010, a year after Hymes’s death. The commentators (Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs) and each of the eight contributors record a personal relationship to Hymes as integral to their own career trajectory and professional identity. Taken together, the papers document Hymes’s role in the emergence of Americanist anthropology and its contemporary possibilities as envisioned by his immediate successors. Each author adapts Hymes’s ethnopoetic method to their own texts, thus providing a series of specific exemplars for the intersection of ethnopoetics, narrative inequality, and voice that suggest tantalizing potential generalizations across Native American linguistic and cultural diversity. These include Robert Moore on Kiksht (Wasco-Wishram Chinookan), the language of Hymes’s own primary fieldwork, Alexander King on Koryak, M. Eleanor Nevins on Apache, Anthony Webster on Navajo, Paul Kroskrity on Mono and Yokuts, Gerald Carr and Barbara Meek on four Yukon languages, Sean O’Neill on northern California, and David Samuels on San Carlos Apache. Each paper explores culture-specific analytic problems consistent with the Americanist tradition’s emphasis on the uniqueness of local ethnographic and linguistic patterning. Moore examines four versions of “the same” Kiksht Coyote story recorded by Mrs. Lucinda Smith on different occasions to different ethnographers for different audiences and contexts. He employs the ethnopoetic formats proposed by Hymes and Dennis Tedlock, then offers a third contrapuntal model with three tiers of indentation to reflect a metadiscourse of contrasting speech event modalities: Mrs. Smith and Moore; the third person plot; direct quotation. For Mrs. Smith, these are “stories” rather than “myths”: she focuses on the moral character of Coyote. Because she never lived on the land, she does not localize her narrative on the Columbia River as male narrators do. King’s anthropological philology reworks century-old Koryak wax cylinders recorded by Waldemar Jochelson for the Jesup North Pacific Expedition alongside contemporary acoustic data. What Boas called “text-artifacts” documented linguistic structures and satisfied his scientific and political goals simultaneously by revealing the complexity of patterned creativity among so-called primitive peoples (pp. 41—42) (foreshadowing Hymes’s politics of linguistic inequality). An ethnographic custom text contrasts with an experiential performance of giving birth that produces a “somatic index” of voice and gesture in a full “storyworld” (p. 42). An activist politics is implicit in the differing contexts and narrative strategies. Building on a lineage of empiricism and relativity extending from Boas to Sapir to Hymes, Nevins emphasizes the “dialogic relations hidden in the documentary record of the Americanist tradition” (p. 71). The relativity of speech genres facilitates the interpretation of texts as Nevins explores multiple ways that Apache community leaders speak for others. Like Moore, she emphasizes “persuasive speech to researchers” (p. 94) in a dialogic communicative economy based on immediacy of “ongoing moral relations” (p. 100).