16 February 2020 SAGE Research Methods Foundations: Submission for consideration Section to be filled in by authors: Entry Title Hymes, Dell Hathaway Authors: [list all authors, add more row if needed] 1 Name M. Eleanor Nevins Affiliation, country Middlebury College, USA Lead author email [email protected] SAGE Author ID [office use only] 2 Name Affiliation, country SAGE Author ID [office use only] 3 Name Affiliation, country SAGE Author ID [office use only] All author bio(s) M. Eleanor Nevins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. She is author of Lessons From Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance and contributing editor for Worldmaking Stories: Maidu Language, Landscape and 16 February 2020 Community Renewal. She conducted three years of ethnographic fieldwork with members of the White Mountain Apache Tribe on the Fort Apache reservation. She has also worked as linguistic consultant to language revitalization projects in two different Native American communities: the Ndee Biyáti / Apache Language Project and the Weje-ebis Majdym / Keep Speaking Maidu Language Revitalization Project. A specialist in linguistic anthropology, her work addresses the interplay of language, research ethics, education, religion, globalization and environment. Nevins teaches courses in linguistic anthropology, indigenous studies and environmental studies. Her work has appeared in edited volumes as well as in the journals Language in Society, Language and Communication, Heritage Management, Journal of Folklore Research and Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. Section to be filled in by authors: Discipline(s) [Note: Select 'All' on Disciplines if your entry is broad; otherwise please choose up to five Disciplines.] Anthropology [D5] 16 February 2020 Sociology [D1] Communication and Media Studies [D13] Education [D2] Public Policy and Social Policy [D6] Method Group Qualitative Entry Category [Select on from the dropdown below: those commissioned to write a 10,000 word ‘flagship’ entry, select ‘Flagship’. For a biographical ‘gamechanger’ or ‘pioneer’ entry, choose ‘Pioneer’. For all other contributions, please choose ‘Standard’.] Pioneer Entry Size (approximate 5,000 word count) Key Figures mentioned ]Dell H. Hymes, Franz Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Noam Chomsky, Key Organizations American Anthropological Association, American Folklore mentioned Society, Linguistic Society of America, Language in Society (Journal), Society for Linguistic Anthropology Abstract [For Flagship entries only – max 250 words] For office use only: New identifiers for this case: 16 February 2020 Copyright year 2020 Copyright statement © SAGE Publications Ltd 2020 DOI 10.4135/ URL http://methods.sagepub.com/foundations/ URI Dell Hathaway Hymes (1927-2009) was a discipline builder at the intersection of linguistics and the social sciences. He was the founder and longstanding editor of the journal Language and Society, and played a leading role in establishing linguistic anthropology as well as qualitative sociolinguistics. He served as president of the American Anthropological Association, the Linguistic Society of America, and the American Folklore Society. This entry explores Hymes’s contributions to anthropology, linguistics and other related fields. In particular, the entry examines how he engaged with the work of other influential linguists and social scientists such as Franz Boas, Noam Chomsky, Roman Jakobson, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as his foundational role establishing topics such as ethnography of communication, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, ethnopoetics, communicative relativity communicative competence and speech communities. Hymes is responsible for a major methodological toolkit known as the “ethnography of communication,” which brings the comparative study of vernacular communication patterns into the purview of the social sciences. In his later career, Hymes developed an offshoot of this program identified as “ethnopoetics,” which addressed the comparative structuring of oral genres, especially narrative. This later work trended more to the concerns of humanities than social science. He initially applied ethnopoetics retrospectively to the 120+ year history of ethnolinguistic text collections in Americanist anthropology and linguistics. His stated aim was to recover aspects of speakers’ voices and the rhetorical shape of spoken performance, which were features otherwise obscured by the format of text collections. He and others later expanded application of ethnography of communication and 16 February 2020 ethnopoetics to speech captured in the documentary record more broadly (Blommaert, 2010; Nevins, 2013). Of Hymes’s many contributions, it is the ethnography of communication that has made the largest and most durable impact on social science methods. It combines the analytic precision and formalism of structural linguistics with the comparative and contextual concerns of ethnography within cultural anthropology (Bauman & Sherzer, 1974). Hymes established ethnography of communication as the foundational method of linguistic anthropology and qualitative sociolinguistics. First introduced as “ethnography of speaking,” Hymes would later rename the approach to specify inclusion of language outside the oral-aural channel. This method has become so fundamental to linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and sociology of language that it has become taken for granted in these fields today. Practical applications of the ethnography of communication can also be found in critical reform movements within education (e.g., Villanueva & Smitherman, 2003), workplaces (Drew & Heritage, 1992), and at other interfaces between bureaucratic institutions or professions and the communities they are designed to serve. When applied to historically marginalized groups, ethnographies of communication have replaced “deficit” models with empirically supported models of “difference.” Other applications include communicative language teaching for second language learning, with an emphasis on language use in context (Canale & Swain, 1980). Historiography and Innovation: Renewing the Boasian Legacy Part of being a “change-maker” is in establishing new understandings of the past and of possible futures. Hymes’s historiographic writings cast his own innovations in the social sciences within a long arc of historical development. He defined a unique “Americanist tradition” (Hymes, 1983), which was associated with Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Gladys Reichard, Charles Voegelin, and others. Boas had shaped a unique Americanist tradition by encouraging anthropological fieldworkers to transcribe spoken or sung texts (e.g., stories, songs, autobiographical accounts) in indigenous languages and to 16 February 2020 publish these as ethnolinguistic text collections. Hymes showed how the comparative study of language in culture has always been a defining strength of the Americanist tradition, sharply distinguishing it from French and British anthropology. The other key leitmotif of the Americanist tradition that Hymes elaborated upon was a concern with relativism as a methodological principle. Boas (1911) had defined “linguistic relativity” against prior philological linguists working on Native American languages. These scholars had organized the elements of Native American languages according to conventions established for Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The resulting distortions sometimes consisted in the projection of some features of Greek or Latin or Hebrew where they did not fit, or, alternately, in failing to make adequate provision for distinctions and categories present in some Native American languages that did not have counterparts in the literature on Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. Boas had argued instead that each element of a language should be understood in terms of its relationship to other elements (lexical and grammatical) of the particular language of which it is a part. Boas’s relativism pertained to explanatory adequacy. He argued that valid generalizations or typologies could only rest upon fieldwork with methods tuned and refined to capture patterns specific to the research object, guarding against naïve projection of familiar analogues on the part of researchers and analysts. Hymes brought the Boasian emphasis upon native language spoken texts, and Boas’s commitment to relativity as a principle of explanatory and comparative adequacy, to the ethnography of communication. Hymes argued that differences in conventional norms of communication are often missed by academic and institutional fieldworkers for the same reason that classically trained philologists missed the distinctive patterns of Native American languages. He proposed that just as there are relativities of language structure, there are also relativities in conventional norms of language use (Hymes, 1966). The ethnography of communication is designed to uncover conventional distinctions in language use, or “ways of speaking” operative in the field-site community. Hymes influenced several generations of linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists to document vernacular 16 February 2020 ways of speaking in speech communities in the United States and around the world (e.g., Bauman & Sherzer, 1974; Gumperz & Hymes, 1972). By formalizing the study of vernacular speech styles with respect to social relations, Hymes came to play a leading role in the American Folklore Society, and brought the traditional domain of folklore studies into the social