Question: C144 Native American Languages and Cultures-Study Guide #5 AIL PART IV, Ch. 5, pp. 122-48.
1. What are some of the cultural features of California Indian storytelling? Consider what you learn about Setting, Participants, Ends,ÉA, K, I, N, G?
2. What responsibilities do audience members assume?
3. How would you describe Dell Hymes's analysis of "Bungling Host, Benevolent Host"? What kinds of structures does he see as part of their composition?
4. What are vocables and name a genre that uses them.
5. What do the authors mean by "power of the word"?
6. How does Kuna chief's language differ from the everday language of regular Kuna speakers?
7. What do the authors mean by parallelism and why is it important to recognize?
Tedlock, Dennis. 1972. Finding the Center. NYC: Dial [Reprinted by U Nebraska Press]. (Introduction and "The White Shumeekuli").
Note: Dennis Tedlock, currently a Professor of Anthropology and English at the State University ofNew York, Buffalo. He along with Dell Hymes, is credited with creating the Ethnopoetics movement in which scholars focused on how to represent the verbal art ofpeople from oral traditions. In this very early work, Tedlock is more concerned with translation than with representing the Zuni text. To better understand the story, read the explanatory notes about the curing society and their ritual. This is the kind of story that is meant to caution young people that ceremonies are a powerful form of connection with supernatural forces that can be dangerous. Put another way, this is a scary story meant to contribute to the sense of awe that surrounds aspects ofPueblo Indian ritual activity especially those that involve "masked dances" in which spirit forces are channeled by ritual performers.
1. Clearly the strategy here is to use certain poetic conventions-line breaks, font size and form, use of CAPS, repeated vowels and many others-to indicate some of the qualities of oral performance. See if you can match every convention used by Tedlock to some prosodic (volume, rhythm, stress placement) or voice quality feature of performance.
2. His translations were meant to read aloud so try to read at least a portion of this as if you were an actor performing the story as a brief play. Is this effective in making you see Tedlock's point about one of the key ways their artistry needs to be appreciated?
3. This story is a narrative but Tedlock writes it like an e. e. cummungs poem in "projective verse" -a non-rhyming type of verse that is nevertheless poetic because of its dramatic delivery. What does the oral tradition have that is missing in written literature? (More a thought question for you than something DT deals with explicitly).
Wiget, Andrew. l987. Telling the tale: A Performance analysis of a Hopi Coyote Story. In B. Swann and A. Krupat (eds.) Recovering the Word, 297- 336. Berkeley: U C Press.
Note: the author used the video shown in class and some transcription provided by a Hopi speaker to do this analysis. I think he is a Professor of literature rather than anthropology.
1. What are the linguistic features of Hopi storytelling?
2. What are the properties of the Hopi genre tutuwutsi?
3. What kinds of gestures does the author recognize in Hopi storytelling?
4. How does Wiget define performance-how is this similar to and different than how performance has been understand by linguistic anthropologists since Bauman's classic article in 1975?
5. What role do songs play in these stories?
6. What is the importance of Hopi yaw?
VIDEO: Iishaw: Hopi Coyote Stories (shown in class).
Note: This video was made with the assistance ofProfessor Emory Sekaquaptewa, a Professor of Anthropology, Law, and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, who died recently. Larry Evers, a Professor ofEnglish at ASU tried to create a series of videos on Native American topics including verbal art. It is one of very few recorded stories that were performed in front ofNative audiences. The very genre of storytelling is a family practice done in the home and is difficult to combine with obtrusive film-making techniques, especially those of the 1980s when this video was made. There is a book about the life ofHelen Sekaquaptewa entitled Me and Mine.
Hymes, Dell H. 1981. The "Wife" Who "Goes Out" Like a Man: Reinterpretation of a Clackamas Chinook Myth. (Chapter 8 of In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, 274-309. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania Press.
Note: Though probably the most influential linguistic anthropologist of the 20C., Hymes did very little ethnographically based research. Most of his influential articles are syntheses of others' work and reflected his broad knowledge and sense of history for the language sciences. The one exception to this pattern is in his original work on the "ethnopoetics" of Native American song and storytelling traditions with special emphasis on the Northwest Coast especially his own native Oregon. Hymes was trained at Indiana University under the direction of Carl Voegelin, who had studied with Kroeber, Boas, and Sapir, before taking up a position at Indiana University-the second greatest center for training students of Native American languages in the 20th C. This particular study shows Hymes attempting to blend the formal interests of linguistics with the humanistic interpretation of myths.
1. How does Hymes argue for the need to reexamine myths that have been previously analyzed?
2. What is the basic synopsis of the myth?
3. What is the first (Melville Jacobs's) interpretation of the myth?
4. What is the second interpretation preferred by Hymes and how do they differ?
5. What does Hymes see as the role of women in the myth?
6. Why does Hymes feel that it is important to observe that Victoria Howard, the narrator, was a woman?
Kroskrity, Paul V. 2012. "Growing with Stories: Ideologies of Storytelling and the Narrative Reproduction of Arizona Tewa Identities" pp. 152-183 in Telling Stories in the Face ofDanger: Language Renewal in Native American Communities. Norman: U Oklahoma Press.
Note: The author, like Hymes, Bunte, and Black, was also trained in Linguistic Anthropology at Indiana University under the direction of Carl Voegelin. I was in fact Carl's last student. I did my dissertation research from 1973 -1977 and earned a Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology writing a dissertation "Aspects of
Arizona Tewa Language Structure and Language Use ". Many of those chapters were rewritten in my 1993 book Language, History, and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa. I worked for 20 consecutive summers on Arizona Tewa but interruptedfield research there in the later 1990's after the death of my co-author and key consultant, Dewey Healing (Tewa). Since 2007 I have resumed research in the community after being asked to return to help with documentation pertinent to language revitalization. After getting my Ph.D in 1978, my first and only full time job was here at UCLA in Anthropology.
1. What is the relationship between storytelling and morality that is suggested by the author?
2. In what ways has the Arizona Tewa language been important for its speakers to maintain their group identity?
3. How are traditional stories a kind of preparation for Tewa language ideologies that are most intensely represented in kiva speech-the religious language of the group?
4. What is narrative efficacy and what are some Tewa ideologies about it?
5. What are the criteria of evaluation that Arizona Tewa use to judge and produce
stories?
6. What is the "authoritative word" and why is this a concept useful in attempting to understand Tewa storytelling ideologies.
7. What kinds of struggles regarding storytelling now exist in the Arizona Tewa community?
8. What does the author mean by "generic regimentation"?
9. What does the author mean by "discursive discrimination"?
Gossen, Gary H. 1974. ."To Speak With a Heated Heart: Chamula Canons of Style and Good Performance. In R. Bauman and J. Sherzer (eds.) Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. New York: Cambridge, 389-413.
Note: Gary Gossen is a retired professor ofAnthropology from the State University ofNew York, Albany. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and did extensive field research in the Chiapas region ofMexico with Tzotzil Mayan communities.
1. What are the basic religious beliefs concerning the importance of the sun in this Mayan community?
2. What are the three basic kinds of speech in Tzotzil metalanguage and how is heat used metaphorically? What kinds of qualifications or gradations in either form, content, or setting are related to these metaphors?
3. Two idea questions here:
1) whose metalanguage is this? And
2) do you think that all cultural groups have such elaborate and consistent ways of talking about talk?