Ethnopoetics
Encyclopedia
Ethnopoetics is a poetic movement and subfield in linguistics
, and anthropology
. It was coined as a term by Jerome Rothenberg
in collaboration with George Quasha
in 1968, when Quasha asked Rothenberg to create a term using 'ethnos' and 'poetics' on the model of 'ethnomusicology' for inclusion in his Stony Brook Magazine, where Rothenberg then became Ethnopoetics Editor. The idea of ethnopoetics is based on two interrelated concepts: –
on one hand, it refers to non-Western poetry, often that of indigenous people (although it could apply to the study of all-kind/source folk poetry), and on the other hand, it is poetry showing such influence and written in manner to manifest the qualities of indigeneousity; ethnopoetics also refers to the study within the field of linguistics
of poetic structures particular to specific culture.
These two base ideas and, further, two uses of the term were connected through the work of the poets Jerome Rothenberg
and Dennis Tedlock
, who co-edited the journal Alcheringa
(from the aboriginal
word for Dreamtime
). Tedlock himself defines ethnopoetics as "a decentered poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant others, outside the Western tradition as we know it now." http://www.ubu.com/ethno/discourses/tedlock_ethno.html
(1968). Other writers and poets who made significant or representative contributions to the field include Henry Munn
, Antonin Artaud
, Tristan Tzara
, Gary Snyder
, William Bright
, and Kathleen Stewart.
, and anthropology
, ethnopoetics is a particular method of analyzing the linguistic use and structure in oral literature
such as: poetry
, myths, prose narrative
, folk tales, ceremonial speech and other forms of extended utterances in stylized registers; it is description in a way that pays attention to poetic structures within speech. The development of ethnopoetics as a separate subfield of study was largely pioneered from the middle of the 20th century by anthropologists and linguists such as Dell Hymes
and Dennis Tedlock.
Depending on viewpoint, ethnopoetics can be seen as a subfield either of ethnology
, anthropology
, folkloristics
, stylistics
, linguistics
, or literature
. Because of its subject and methodology ethnopoetics is also an important field within translation studies
.
Ethnopoetics was made popular in the early 1980s with high-profile works such as Dell Hymes’ In Vain I Tried To Tell You (1982) or Dennis Tedlock’s The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (1983) and gathered admiration in a wide interdisciplinary field of anthropologists, folklorists and linguists. Tedlock and Hymes both added volume and sophistication to ethnopoetic analysis, Tedlock with his Finding The Center (1999) and Hymes with Now I Know Only So Much (2003). Both Tedlock and Hymes used ethnopoetic analysis to do justice to the artistic richness of Native American verbal art. In Tedlock’s case, the method served the purpose of rendering the features of spoken artistry visual; for Hymes, it was a method for reviving defunct oral traditions by turning written versions of folk stories in to re-oralizable ones. Hymes and Tedlock have disagreed on analytic detail but not on the fundamental issues and approach.
Hymes’ ethnopoetics revolves around a conception of narrative
s as primarily organized in terms of formal and aesthetic
– ‘poetic’ – patterns, not in terms of content or thematic patterns. Narrative is therefore to be seen as a form of action, of performance, and the meanings it generates are effects of performance. Narratives, seen from this perspective, are organized in lines and in groups of lines (verse
s, stanza
s), and the organization of lines in narratives is a kind of implicit patterning that creates narrative effect: emphasis and insistence, narrative-thematic divisions and so on. Content, in other words, is an effect of the formal organization of a narrative: what there is to be told emerges out of how it is being told. The metric that can be distinguished in narratives is linguistic, but also cultural (indexical) and therefore semantic. This is an old anthropological view – the connections with Whorf
are obvious – and it is influenced by Roman Jakobson
’s (1960) poetic-aesthetic conception of language structure.
Jakobson’s influence becomes clear when we look at how Hymes defines the relations between lines: "The relations between lines and groups of lines are based on the general principle of poetic organization called equivalence" and "[e]quivalence may involve any feature of language" : prosodic aspects such as stress, pauses, pitch and intonation, syntactic aspects such as similarity or parallelism
in grammatical structure, morpho-grammatical aspects such as similarity in verb tense or aspect, phonetic
aspects such as alliteration and rhyme and lexico-syntactic aspects such as the use of certain particles or discourse markers. Units thus identified then combine into larger ones, verses and stanzas, and again equivalence is the formal principle that identifies such units: a transition from one unit to another can be marked by a shift in intonation or prosody, a change in the dominant particles used for marking lines, a change in verb tense, a lexical change and so forth.
According to Hymes and others, these structuring patterns in narrative display a cultural (indexical) logic. They reveal, thus, a form of emic organization which allows analysts to follow the narrator’s traces in organizing relevance, epistemic and affective stance, desired effects and so forth. Thus, the analysis of these implicit – indexical – patterns in narratives helps us distinguish more 'meaning' in narrative, because like 'grammar/style' and 'content', ethnopoetic patterns form a distinct layer of meaningful signs in narratives. This theme, that ethnopoetic patterning is a distinct pool of meanings, is what allows Hymes, Tedlock and others to claim that ethnopoetics offers opportunities for reconstructing ‘defunct’ narratives, reinstate their functions, recapture the performance dynamics that guided their original production, and so on.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, and anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
. It was coined as a term by Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...
in collaboration with George Quasha
George Quasha
George Quasha is an artist and poet who works across media, exploring a principle in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound & music, installation, and performance...
in 1968, when Quasha asked Rothenberg to create a term using 'ethnos' and 'poetics' on the model of 'ethnomusicology' for inclusion in his Stony Brook Magazine, where Rothenberg then became Ethnopoetics Editor. The idea of ethnopoetics is based on two interrelated concepts: –
on one hand, it refers to non-Western poetry, often that of indigenous people (although it could apply to the study of all-kind/source folk poetry), and on the other hand, it is poetry showing such influence and written in manner to manifest the qualities of indigeneousity; ethnopoetics also refers to the study within the field of linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
of poetic structures particular to specific culture.
These two base ideas and, further, two uses of the term were connected through the work of the poets Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...
and Dennis Tedlock
Dennis Tedlock
Dennis Tedlock is the McNulty Professor of English and Research Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received his Ph.D. in 1968 from Tulane University...
, who co-edited the journal Alcheringa
Alcheringa (magazine)
Alcheringa was a magazine of ethnopoetics published between 1970 and 1980 It was edited by Dennis Tedlock and by Jerome Rothenberg , proponents of the ethnopoetics movement....
(from the aboriginal
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Aboriginal Indigenous Australians migrated from the Indian continent around 75,000 to 100,000 years ago....
word for Dreamtime
Dreamtime
In the animist framework of Australian Aboriginal mythology, The Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings formed The Creation.-The Dreaming of the Aboriginal times:...
). Tedlock himself defines ethnopoetics as "a decentered poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant others, outside the Western tradition as we know it now." http://www.ubu.com/ethno/discourses/tedlock_ethno.html
Ethnopoetics as an aesthetic movement
Jerome Rothenberg is known for his poetry, essays, and anthology Technicians of the SacredTechnicians of the Sacred
Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania is a book of spiritual writings and poetry collected from around the world. Compiled by Jerome Rothenberg 1969. ISBN 978-0520049123....
(1968). Other writers and poets who made significant or representative contributions to the field include Henry Munn
Henry Munn
Henry Munn is a writer and poet who studied the use of hallucinogenic plants by the Conibo Indians of eastern Peru and also the Mazatec Indians of the mountains of Oaxaca...
, Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
, Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...
, Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
, William Bright
William Bright
William Bright was an American linguist who specialized in Native American and South Asian languages and descriptive linguistics....
, and Kathleen Stewart.
Ethnopoetics within linguistics and folkloristics
Within the fields of linguistics, folkloristicsFolkloristics
Folkloristics is the formal academic study of folklore. The term derives from a nineteenth century German designation of folkloristik to distinguish between folklore as the content and folkloristics as its study, much as language is distinguished from linguistics...
, and anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, ethnopoetics is a particular method of analyzing the linguistic use and structure in oral literature
Oral literature
Oral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. It thus forms a generally more fundamental component of culture, but operates in many ways as one might expect literature to do...
such as: poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, myths, prose narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
, folk tales, ceremonial speech and other forms of extended utterances in stylized registers; it is description in a way that pays attention to poetic structures within speech. The development of ethnopoetics as a separate subfield of study was largely pioneered from the middle of the 20th century by anthropologists and linguists such as Dell Hymes
Dell Hymes
Dell Hathaway Hymes was a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work dealt primarily with languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics"...
and Dennis Tedlock.
Depending on viewpoint, ethnopoetics can be seen as a subfield either of ethnology
Ethnology
Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
, anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, folkloristics
Folkloristics
Folkloristics is the formal academic study of folklore. The term derives from a nineteenth century German designation of folkloristik to distinguish between folklore as the content and folkloristics as its study, much as language is distinguished from linguistics...
, stylistics
Stylistics (linguistics)
Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective. As a discipline it links literary criticism and linguistics, but has no autonomous domain of its own...
, linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, or literature
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
. Because of its subject and methodology ethnopoetics is also an important field within translation studies
Translation studies
Translation studies is an interdiscipline containing elements of social science and the humanities, dealing with the systematic study of the theory, the description and the application of translation, interpreting or both these activities....
.
Ethnopoetics was made popular in the early 1980s with high-profile works such as Dell Hymes’ In Vain I Tried To Tell You (1982) or Dennis Tedlock’s The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (1983) and gathered admiration in a wide interdisciplinary field of anthropologists, folklorists and linguists. Tedlock and Hymes both added volume and sophistication to ethnopoetic analysis, Tedlock with his Finding The Center (1999) and Hymes with Now I Know Only So Much (2003). Both Tedlock and Hymes used ethnopoetic analysis to do justice to the artistic richness of Native American verbal art. In Tedlock’s case, the method served the purpose of rendering the features of spoken artistry visual; for Hymes, it was a method for reviving defunct oral traditions by turning written versions of folk stories in to re-oralizable ones. Hymes and Tedlock have disagreed on analytic detail but not on the fundamental issues and approach.
Hymes’ ethnopoetics revolves around a conception of narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
s as primarily organized in terms of formal and aesthetic
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
– ‘poetic’ – patterns, not in terms of content or thematic patterns. Narrative is therefore to be seen as a form of action, of performance, and the meanings it generates are effects of performance. Narratives, seen from this perspective, are organized in lines and in groups of lines (verse
Verse (poetry)
A verse is formally a single line in a metrical composition, e.g. poetry. However, the word has come to represent any division or grouping of words in such a composition, which traditionally had been referred to as a stanza....
s, stanza
Stanza
In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
s), and the organization of lines in narratives is a kind of implicit patterning that creates narrative effect: emphasis and insistence, narrative-thematic divisions and so on. Content, in other words, is an effect of the formal organization of a narrative: what there is to be told emerges out of how it is being told. The metric that can be distinguished in narratives is linguistic, but also cultural (indexical) and therefore semantic. This is an old anthropological view – the connections with Whorf
Benjamin Whorf
In studying the cause of a fire which had started under the conditions just described, Whorf concluded that it was thinking of the "empty" gasoline drums as "empty" in the meaning described in the first definition above, that is as "inert," which led to a fire he investigated...
are obvious – and it is influenced by Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
’s (1960) poetic-aesthetic conception of language structure.
Jakobson’s influence becomes clear when we look at how Hymes defines the relations between lines: "The relations between lines and groups of lines are based on the general principle of poetic organization called equivalence" and "[e]quivalence may involve any feature of language" : prosodic aspects such as stress, pauses, pitch and intonation, syntactic aspects such as similarity or parallelism
Parallelism (rhetoric)
Parallelism means giving two or more parts of the sentences a similar form so as to give the whole a definite pattern.Parallelisms of various sorts are the chief rhetorical device of Biblical poetry in Hebrew. In fact, Robert Lowth coined the term "parallelismus membrorum Parallelism means giving...
in grammatical structure, morpho-grammatical aspects such as similarity in verb tense or aspect, phonetic
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
aspects such as alliteration and rhyme and lexico-syntactic aspects such as the use of certain particles or discourse markers. Units thus identified then combine into larger ones, verses and stanzas, and again equivalence is the formal principle that identifies such units: a transition from one unit to another can be marked by a shift in intonation or prosody, a change in the dominant particles used for marking lines, a change in verb tense, a lexical change and so forth.
According to Hymes and others, these structuring patterns in narrative display a cultural (indexical) logic. They reveal, thus, a form of emic organization which allows analysts to follow the narrator’s traces in organizing relevance, epistemic and affective stance, desired effects and so forth. Thus, the analysis of these implicit – indexical – patterns in narratives helps us distinguish more 'meaning' in narrative, because like 'grammar/style' and 'content', ethnopoetic patterns form a distinct layer of meaningful signs in narratives. This theme, that ethnopoetic patterning is a distinct pool of meanings, is what allows Hymes, Tedlock and others to claim that ethnopoetics offers opportunities for reconstructing ‘defunct’ narratives, reinstate their functions, recapture the performance dynamics that guided their original production, and so on.
Folk poetries by region
- GhinnawaGhinnawaGhinnawas are short, two line emotional lyric poems written by the Bedouins of Egypt, in a fashion similar to haikus, but similar in content to the American blues. Ghinnawas typically talk of deep, personal feelings and are often an outlet for personal emotions which might not be otherwise...
of the BedouinBedouinThe Bedouin are a part of a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group traditionally divided into tribes or clans, known in Arabic as ..-Etymology:... - HaintenyHaintenyHainteny is a traditional form of Malagasy oral literature and poetry, involving heavy use of metaphor. It is associated primarily with the Merina people of Madagascar. In its use of metaphor and allusion it resembles another type of poetry, the Malay pantun, and Fox suggests "it seems likely the...
of the MerinaMerinaThe Merina are an ethnic group from Madagascar. The Merina are concentrated in the Highlands and speak the official dialect of the Malagasy language, which is a branch of the Malayo-Polynesian language group derived from the Barito languages, spoken in southern Borneo. Their ancestors, the... - PantunPantunThe pantun is a Malay poetic form. The pantun originated as a traditional oral form of expression. The first examples to be recorded appear in the 15th century in the Malay Annals and the Hikayat Hang Tuah. The most common theme is love....
of the Malay - AkynAkynAkyns or aqyns are improvising poets and singers in the Kazakh and Kyrgyz cultures. Akyns differs from the so-called zhiraus, who are epic storytellers and a song performers. Akyns improvise in the form of a song-like recitative to the accompaniment of a dombra or a qomuz...
of the KypchakKypchak languagesThe Kypchak languages , are a major branch of the Turkic language family spoken by more than 12 million people in an area spanning from Lithuania to China....
peoples
External links
- Ethnopoetics, Prof. Dennis Tedlock
- Ethnopoetics at the millennium, Jerome Rothenberg, 5 May 1999
- Selections from Alcheringa, pdf format
- Ubuweb, a comprehensive, rather useful online anthology of poets, poems, manifestoManifestoA manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as creeds. Manifestos may also be life stance-related.-Etymology:...
s, writings, materials, and enything related to Ethnopoetics. - Jerome Rothenberg class on ethnopoetics and performance, mp3u
- ethnopoetics new and old