From performance to print, and back: Ethnopoetics as social practice in Alice Florendo's corrections to “Raccoon and his Grandmother”
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Robert E. Moore
Abstract
In considering Dell Hymes's pioneering work on Native American texts—itself grounded in fieldwork with speakers of Kiksht (Wasco-Wishram dialect of Upper Chinookan) in the 1950s—the article documents an encounter with a Kiksht language teacher, activist, and entrepreneur, an occasion of oral literary history and criticism whose ostensible purpose is to introduce a correction into the printed record. The discourse that results—ranging across specific observations of the text at hand to more general observations about Kiksht storytelling practices and about collaborative work in “salvage” linguistics—incorporates bits and pieces of the story along the way, providing a rich opportunity to revisit a fundamental tension in the ethnopoetic work of Hymes and others: between a view grounded in folkloristic study that sees language forms-in-text as important genre characteristics, and a view (seen also in “the ethnography of communication”) that concentrates on the event-bound functionalities of discursive (and transcribable) linguistic features.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Editorial: Hymes, text and talk
- On Hymes: introduction
- Hymes on speech socialization
- Ethnography and democracy: Hymes's political theory of language
- Breakthrough into action
- From performance to print, and back: Ethnopoetics as social practice in Alice Florendo's corrections to “Raccoon and his Grandmother”
- The place of narrative in human affairs: the implications of Hymes's Amerindian work for understanding text and talk
- Hymes's linguistics and ethnography in education
- Dell Hymes's visions of enquiry
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Editorial: Hymes, text and talk
- On Hymes: introduction
- Hymes on speech socialization
- Ethnography and democracy: Hymes's political theory of language
- Breakthrough into action
- From performance to print, and back: Ethnopoetics as social practice in Alice Florendo's corrections to “Raccoon and his Grandmother”
- The place of narrative in human affairs: the implications of Hymes's Amerindian work for understanding text and talk
- Hymes's linguistics and ethnography in education
- Dell Hymes's visions of enquiry