Ethnopoetics is a poetic movement and subfield in
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
, and
anthropologyAnthropology is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time....
. It was coined as a term by
Jerome RothenbergJerome 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 QuashaGeorge Quasha is an artist and poet who works across media, exploring a principle in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, 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
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
of poetic structures particular to specific culture.
Ethnopoetics is a poetic movement and subfield in
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
, and
anthropologyAnthropology is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time....
. It was coined as a term by
Jerome RothenbergJerome 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 QuashaGeorge Quasha is an artist and poet who works across media, exploring a principle in common within language, sculpture, drawing, video, sound, 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
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
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 RothenbergJerome 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 TedlockDennis 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. 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: 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 MunnHenry 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 ArtaudAntoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
,
Tristan TzaraTristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist...
,
Gary SnyderGary 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 BrightWilliam 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 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
anthropologyAnthropology is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time....
, ethnopoetics is a particular method of analyzing the linguistic use and structure in
oral literatureOral 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:
poetryPoetry 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
narrativeA narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events...
, 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 HymesDell Hathaway Hymes is a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work has dealt primarily with languages of the Pacific Northwest...
and Dennis Tedlock.
Depending on viewpoint, ethnopoetics can be seen as a subfield either of
ethnologyEthnology 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...
,
anthropologyAnthropology is the study of human beings, everywhere and throughout time....
,
folkloristicsFolkloristics 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...
,
stylisticsStylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in context, and tries to establish principles capable of accounting for the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language. A variety, in this sense, is a situationally...
,
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
, or
literatureLiterary criticism is the study, discussion, 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 studiesTranslation 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 made its entrée 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
narrativeA narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events...
s as primarily organized in terms of formal and
aestheticAesthetics is commonly known 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 (
verseA 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,
stanzaIn 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
WhorfBenjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist. Whorf is widely known for his ideas about linguistic relativity, the hypothesis that language influences thought...
are obvious – and it is influenced by
Roman JakobsonRoman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary critic, associated with the Formalist school...
’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
parallelismParallelism means to give 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 to give...
in grammatical structure, morpho-grammatical aspects such as similarity in verb tense or aspect,
phoneticPhonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds , and their physiological production, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status.Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in...
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
- Ghinnawa
Ghinnawas 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 BedouinThe Bedouin, , are a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group found throughout most of the desert belt extending from the Atlantic coast of the Sahara via the Western Desert, Sinai, and Negev to the Arabian Desert...
- Hainteny
Hainteny 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...
of the MerinaThe Merina is an ethnic group in Madagascar. They speak a Malayo-Polynesian language and are concentrated in the central highlands.Their ancestors, the Austronesians, migrated from the Borneo in the Malay archipelago around the beginning of the common era...
- Pantun
The 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
- Akyn
Akyns 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 KypchakThe 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.-Linguistic features:...
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, manifesto
A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. However, manifestos relating to religious belief are rather referred to as credo. 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