Book Reviews 111 grown up around the assassination of JFK, the Not only does Lepselter argue her thesis in events of 9/11, and the annual meetings of scholarly terms but, in the process, she also tells world leaders known as the Bilderberg Group, a good story in a literary vein, which makes the to mention only a few. But there is a continuum book not only worthwhile for understanding in this process, in the search for solutions to an interesting aspect of American culture, but problems that are masked by conventional wis- also a pleasure to read. dom and custom: a quest that ranges from the uncanny on one end through the typical con- spiracy theory to the other end of the contin- The Legacy of Dell Hymes: Ethnopoetics, uum, where we find the valuable processes of Narrative Inequality, and Voice. Ed. Paul V. connecting dots and thinking out of the box. Kroskrity and Anthony K. Webster. (Blooming- Here, Lepselter moves her ethnographic lens to ton: Indiana University Press, 2015. Pp. 291, Rachel, Nevada, near Area 51, where she introduction, index.) worked as a waitress in order to talk to believers who came to what she calls the “geographic fo- John H. McDowell cus of the uncanny American conspiracy the- Indiana University ory” (p. 80). She ends with a coda, titled “One More What we have here is a smorgasbord of lively Thing.” Here, she tells her own story, which il- work that revisits and extends the legacy of Dell lustrates how immersion in such narratives, Hymes, that resolute Oregonian who consoli- which are supported on all sides by earnest be- dated ethnopoetics to recognize eloquent voices lievers, can color one’s perception and emotion. beyond the bounds of our literary canons. She spent her last day of research talking to a Those already practicing some form of eth- UFO believer who she said “rattled” her. “I had nopoetic research will take delight in worthy started out with my sense of things intact,” she applications and expansions of familiar ana- writes. “I was cheerful and curious.” He talked lytical models. For those whose research focus on for hours about the government and aliens lies elsewhere, this set of eight original articles, “insinuating threats and sinister dangers until introduced by co- editors Paul V. Kroskrity and my eyes began to dim,” so that the trailer they Anthony K. Webster and discussed in separate were sitting in suddenly felt too small for the commentaries by Richard Bauman and Charles two of them. She left for home right after that. Briggs, will serve as an invitation to a significant She tells us that she “drove through the desert field of interdisciplinary research focused on numbly, his words stuck in my hair, his sinister the social role of language, especially as har- predictions still thickening around me in the nessed to the task of telling stories in speech car” (p. 161). and song. Indeed, by articulating fresh perspec- Later at the airport while waiting to board the tives on ethnopoetics, narrative inequality, and plane, a man came over and started a conversa- voice, this collection asserts a broader relevance tion. He had an accent and told her about his for students of human societies. business and other things. When she said that Grounded in five decades’ worth of scholarly she was tired and wanted to do some reading, publications by Hymes, these contributions re- he smiled and said, “Ah, Susan! . I see you have vive and sustain the Americanist tradition that in you the sociological imagination. Very good, was his milieu, with a clear lineage running very good. You have a lot on your mind. I will through Edward Sapir and others of his ilk back not occupy you.” He then took her hand and to their intellectual progenitor, Franz Boas. The squeezed it very hard, then walked away and geographical focus is on Native North America, evaporated. “It was then,” she writes, “I thought with concentrations in the Southwest and he was a Man in Black,” for he had said “socio- Northwest of the United States, in the West of logical imagination! He was telling me he knew Canada, and in the Arctic region that brought who I was. How often had I read of this, heard Boas into ethnology. These articles delve into it and tape-r ecorded it as folklore?” (p. 162). verbal art traditions in indigenous communities JAF 131_1 text.indd 111 1/5/18 3:20 PM 112 Journal of American Folklore 130 (2017) of this New World sector, but they acquire a Moira Marsh, editor of the Journal of Folklore new allure by coming to grips with contempo- Research (JFR), swooped in to propose a special rary issues and essaying current modes of anal- issue of that journal. Her successor at JFR, Jason ysis that were unknown to Boas and only ad- Jackson, saw this process to its conclusion; in umbrated in the work of Sapir, Melville Jacobs, turn, his successor as JFR editor, Michael Foster, and Boas’ other illustrious students. If these arranged with Indiana University Press to con- worthies were primarily motivated to docu- vert this triple issue of JFR into the first book ment verbal repertoires of western North in a new series with the press, “Encounters: Ex- America as a manifestation of indigenous cul- plorations in Folklore and Ethnomusicology.” tures, the authors in this volume bring other This folklore connection permeates the con- concerns to their labor, including these: to ap- tents of this volume, a welcome recognition of preciate the rhetorical moves of oral perfor- the signal contributions of folkloristics to the mances situated in relationships marked by a field of ethnopoetics. power differential; to assess strategies for rep- The Legacy of Dell Hymes opens with a brief resenting the complexity of these performances introduction by the co- editors, followed by es- through considered techniques of transcription, says grouped into two sections, “Listening for translation, and formatting; to argue for verbal Voices” and “Ethnopoetic Pathways.” The first artistry as a valuable component in language section ends with commentary by Bauman, the revitalization projects; to exalt Native languages second with commentary by Briggs. In their as vehicles for contemporary poetic invention; introduction, the co- editors sound a theme that and to critique the ethnographic practices of will resonate across the pages of the book, foundational figures in this arena, who inevita- Hymes’ argument (articulated in his Ethnogra- bly brought cultural prejudices and stereotypes phy, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward into their work. an Understanding of Voice, Taylor & Francis, Indeed, the man whose work is celebrated in 1996, p. 64) for two kinds of freedom with re- this book, Dell Hymes, is not immune from gard to voice: “a freedom to have one’s voice critical evaluation; the contributors to this vol- heard” and “a freedom to develop a voice worth ume are inspired by Hymes’ research but not hearing.” Hymes’ vision of these interconnected slavishly guided by it. In particular, the pen- freedoms serves as a kind of charter for the es- chant of the later Hymes to encounter in (or says collected in this book. The co-e ditors trace impose upon) the narrative texts he inspected the origins of this interest in poetic forms in a strict patterning of phrases or clauses into Native North America to Boas, but they note units of standard dimensions comes in for that, unlike Boas, who found these texts to be pretty rough treatment. Ironically, this practice “untranslatable,” Hymes made it his project to is compared at a few points in the book under devise ways to accomplish such translation. review to the prescriptive formulas of Noam Translation—whether linguistic, cultural, or Chomsky’s generative grammar, which served situational—remains at the heart of the contri- as the impetus for Hymes and others to venture butions to this volume. out into the world of spoken words for a better There is not sufficient space in this review to sense for how language actually works. The do justice to the many substantial contributions Hymes who is welcomed into the tent con- of the essays gathered in The Legacy of Dell structed here is the scholar- activist who fought Hymes. What I will do instead is bring out for the recognition of marginalized discourses points of saliency in my reading of the assem- and the artists who produce them. bled essays, making mention along the way of This edited volume has its origins in a con- each chapter. Robert Moore’s “Reinventing Eth- versation between the co-e ditors at the annual nopoetics” opens the first section of the book meeting of the American Anthropological As- and offers a useful parsing of ethnopoetics into sociation (AAA) in New Orleans in 2010. This two streams, one that looks at the poetics of chat caused them to organize two panels at the performance, the other at the textual organiza- AAA meeting the next year in Montreal, where tion of oral literature. Moore identifies in the JAF 131_1 text.indd 112 1/5/18 3:20 PM Book Reviews 113 coyote stories of Lucinda Smith (told in the by a commitment to standard Navajo, leading Kiksht language, a Wasco variety spoken in Webster to argue for “intimate grammars” that Central Oregon) a contrapuntal style of code- capture “poetic and aesthetic practices” (p. 125). switching that allows her to do justice to the Webster’s co- editor, Paul Kroskrity, next offers exigencies of both story- plot and conversational his “Discursive Discriminations in the Repre- setting. Moore argues for an ethnopoetics ori- sentation of Western Mono and Yokuts Stories: ented to the ethnographic encounter as “a cul- Confronting Narrative Inequality and Listening tural episode in its own right” (p.