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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 , 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 end of the contin- The Legacy of : , uum, where we find the valuable processes of 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 , 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 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 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 asserts a broader relevance tion. He had an accent and told her about his for students of human . 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 and others of his ilk back not occupy you.” He then took her hand and to their intellectual progenitor, . 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 , 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 . These articles delve into it and tape-r­ ecorded it as ?” (p. 162). verbal art traditions in indigenous communities

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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 .” 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, , 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 , 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-ac­ tivist 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 . Moore identifies in the

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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 ” 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. 32); in the to Indigenous Voices in Central California,” process, he seeks to redeem the “ethno-­” prefix with its stiff challenge to ethnographic and in- as a gathering point for an intellectual, political, terpretive methods that inadvertently preserve and poetic project. colonialist and ethnocentric biases. Kroskrity Next up is “The Patterning of Style: Indices argues that the work of earlier scholars in these of Performance through Ethnopoetic Analysis California communities is readily seen as con- of Century-­Old Wax Cylinders” by Alexander tributing to “a racializing project,” and that our King, who analyzes two Koryak narratives re- contemporary ethnopoetics, with its fixation on corded in the winter of 1900–1901 on wax cyl- linguistic purity and tidy texts, might be playing inders by members of the Jesup expedition to to “a that merely reproduces the circumpolar Arctic. Remarkably, King is many of the problems for indigenous languages able to use Hymes’ methods of text-p­ arsing to that can be found in assimilationist practices of detect the likely presence of bodily gestures in the past” (p. 157). For Kroskrity, the way out of the original performance, and he proposes that this dilemma is to follow Hymes in embracing we attend to “a somatic index” operative in all the “mediative” rather than the “extractive” ap- narrative performance. King’s piece is followed proach to ethnopoetic resources. This first sec- by M. Eleanor Nevins’ “‘Grow with That,W alk tion concludes with Bauman’s “Discovery and with That’: Hymes, Dialogicality, and Text Col- Dialogue in Ethnopoetics,” in which he notes lections,” in which the author identifies an the multiple semantic layering in the term Apache speech genre, bá’hadziih, that purports “voice” and advises that we keep in mind what to describe Apache lives but that, on close in- he calls “the radical insight of the spection, seeks to introduce an ethical dimen- of speaking—that speakers use their voices to sion to the ethnographic encounter, awakening accomplish things in the world” (p. 177). us to “the strategies employed by anthropolog- The second section, “Ethnopoetic Pathways,” ical consultants” (p. 102). If I may be permitted is the shorter of the book’s two sections, con- a personal reference, I was reminded, in reading taining only three essays and the Briggs com- Nevins’ chapter, of my conversation with Mari- mentary. In “The Poetics of Language Revital- ano Chicunque, a Kamsá storyteller, who re-­ ization: Text, Performance, and Change,” centered our discussion of his Andean Gerald Carr and Barbra Meek examine lan- by stating: “So wise were our elders . . . they guage revitalization projects in the Yukon Ter- understood even though they weren’t baptized.” ritory of Canada. They argue that the freedom Following the contribution by Nevins is An- and joy found in vernacular genres of verbal thony Webster’s “‘The Validity of Navajo Is in artistry need to be brought into these projects Its Sounds’: On Hymes, Navajo , Pun- so that they can “inspire budding performers ning, and the Recognition of Voice.” Webster rather than leave their aspirations languishing draws on Hymes’ discussion (in the 1979 issue in the margins of Western inscription” (p. 198). of the International Journal of Linguistics) of Interestingly, in reference to Yukon storytelling, talking like a bear in Takelma to isolate an ex- Carr and Meek found that theatrical perfor- pressive phoneme, the velar fricative /x/, which, mances of traditional tales were most effective in a Navajo poem by Rex Lee Jim, signifies a in communicating excitement about learning story protagonist, badger, being out of control. the language. This feature, vital to the force of the poem, Sean Patrick O’Neill’s “Translating Oral Lit- would be edited out in a transcription shaped erature in Indigenous Societies: Ethnic Aes-

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thetic Performances in Multicultural and Mul- etics of Circulation.” Briggs interrogates theo- tilingual Settings” revisits a zone in ries on the movement of culture, and northwestern California to reassess the received impediments to such mobility, in the light of notion, certified by previous scholars, that the persisting colonialist habits of thought. He there share a common culture in spite of draws attention to the contrast between “object-­ the fact that three different native languages centered and process-­centered models of cir- prevail in the region. In working with native culation” (p. 278) and warns against “shallow, speakers of Hupa on their traditional tales, he monologic models” that have caused scholars finds that they give great importance to appar- “to miss—or even sometimes to suppress—the ently minor differences between Hupa versions diversity of practices” that people bring to the and those of their Yurok and Karuk neighbors, task of expressing themselves. so much so that they resist translating these As this somewhat rushed survey of the con- tales into Hupa without making the needed cor- tents of The Legacy of Dell Hymes will hopefully rections. O’Neill comes to see the idea of cul- convey, this book contains riches for students tural convergence in the region as an illusion of expressive culture. Folklorists in particular and he sees storytelling as “a performance of will find these essays intriguing for several rea- identity” wherein “a major shift in meaning” sons. They establish the materials we study as can occur with “only a minor change in the central to doing ethnopoetics, and they high- value or status of the characters” (p. 218). light the key contributions of folkloristics to O’Neill argues that since storytelling is sensitive ethnopoetic research. It is especially interesting to these situational factors, our translations to see how these scholars—who are, for the need to move beyond what he calls the “fidelity most part, not folklorists—interact with the ideology” to encompass the artistic vision of kind of vernacular discourse that attracts our narrative performers. own attention. And, by digging into the salvage David Samuels’ “Ethnopoetics and Ideolo- ethnology of our Americanist forebears, these gies of Poetic Truth” is the final essay in this essays creatively revisit one of our field’s most second set. Samuels juxtaposes a sermon deliv- influential sources. The contributors to this vol- ered in English by a Lutheran pastor to the San ume have not only revivified ethnopoetics as a Carlos Apache congregation with a subsequent research project in the contemporary moment; translation of this sermon into Apache by one they have also pointed the way to fruitful lines of the Apache congregants. He finds a differen- of folkloristic research and collaboration in the tial poetics operating in the two texts, though future, lines founded on the importance of mea- each strives to be an ethical discourse. The book sured and allusive speech and that build on Dell closes with Briggs’ commentary, titled “Con- Hymes’ commitment to the voices of marginal- tested Mobilities: On the Politics and Ethnopo- ized .

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