Volume 29, Issue 3

This article reviews Dell Hymes's formative impact on the study of speech socialization. From the early 1960s on, Hymes addressed issues of language socialization, partly in response to the limitations in Chomsky's powerful theoretical interventions on child language, and partly as an extension of a maturing ethnographic paradigm. Focusing on speech in culture-related behavioral settings, Hymes developed a paradigm that revolved around function and context. While this topic was initially part of the general ethnographic program in Hymes's work, it gave rise to a period of productive research on culture-specific patterns of child language use, the structure of speech repertoires, and functions of speech in socialization, which empirically realized the perspective in Hymes's theoretical discussions.

Dell Hymes's oeuvre was explicitly political, and this paper addresses this often overlooked dimension of his work. The project of ethnography was intended by Hymes to be a counterhegemonic and democratic science, which offered voice to the subjects it studied and so created a critical social-scientific paradigm that destabilized and negated established truths by dialogically engaging with reality. This critical and counterhegemonic paradigmatic dimension of ethnography is first sketched and discussed at some length. Next, we discuss Hymes's ethnopoetic work. In his ethnopoetic work, Hymes's critical concern with voice, democracy, and inequality is articulated most clearly and persuasively. It is by looking at ethnopoetics that we see the blending of a methodological and a political project.

We take as axiomatic from Hymes's work that the linguistic structures of oral narrative should be construed not as abstract and ideal but as artifacts of the human mind in action in society, and that the indissoluble tension between structure and creativity should be moved by analysts in the direction of social justice. The problem we faced in an extended set of action projects aimed at reducing discrimination against Alaska Natives was that problems framed for our attention were often misleading though on the surface clear-cut and reasonable. We began by viewing narrative as a work of social interaction between storyteller and audience in which taboos often dictate indirect statement, and gradually learned to see action as the active punch line. We began to breakthrough into action—acting ourselves in order to learn how people act, what they know and value, how they structure their worlds—using a strategy we now call “nexus analysis.” Taking narrative as the discursive doppelganger of action, we trained educators and medics to perceive and pursue indigenous hunting strategies of carefully surrounding rather than going directly to quarry. We worked through abduction by moving from action to action, becoming directly engaged in processes of social change.

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.

Throughout his long career, Dell Hymes studied and wrote about American Indian languages and cultures, and this work has enduring significance for how we think about relations between text and talk. In providing an account of that significance, the article focuses on Hymes's writing about American Indians and narrative, exploring the close interrelations among the two, then discussing his specific contributions to ethnopoetic theory, illustrating these with reference to a Tolowa (Athabaskan) narrative. Because he trenchantly critiqued received assumptions about the relation between speaking and writing, Hymes's ethnopoetic work has implications for ongoing debates about literacy and society, which is discussed at length. I conclude that his narrative scholarship raises but ultimately leaves unsettled fundamental questions about the relation between text and context.

Education is one of the arenas in which Hymes has brought his scholarship and politics of advocacy to bear in the world, perhaps most visibly through his University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education deanship (1975–1987), but also through the scope and depth of his writings on linguistics and ethnography in education. Language inequality is an enduring theme of Hymes's work, in relation not only to Native American ethnopoetics, narrative analysis, and linguistic socialization, but also to educational linguistics and ethnography in education. Hymes proposed a vision and a set of ways of doing educational linguistics and ethnography in education—from ethnographic monitoring and ethnography of communication to ethnopoetics of oral narrative and ethnography of language policy—that have inspired and informed researchers for a generation and more.

This commentary initially addresses Hymes's uncompromising scrutiny of the institutions of research, ceaselessly setting them alongside the people and processes that academics study. Turning then to the articles in this collection, it links this critical reflexivity to ethnopoetics as a project in the recovery of voices encrypted in the scholarly record, and it notes continuing tensions in the pursuit of equality and rigor. Last, it describes Hymes as a kind of “virtual mentor” for linguistic ethnography outside the United States. In a context where the boundaries between disciplines are often treated lightly, Hymes provides both a map of central currents in contemporary thought and a set of motives and tools for the exploration of local sites—he articulates a view of “social reality as practical activity” that antedates Bourdieu's praxis and Giddens's structuration and pioneers a framework for describing this empirically. In addition, when disciplinary conventions are relativized, and/or practical relevance looms large, there is a route back to first principles in the unflinching mutual interrogation between linguistics and ethnography that runs throughout his work.