Books by Anthony K. Webster
The accomplishments and enduring influence of renowned anthropologist Dell Hymes are showcased in... more The accomplishments and enduring influence of renowned anthropologist Dell Hymes are showcased in these essays by leading practitioners in the field. Hymes (1927–2009) is arguably best known for his pioneering work in ethnopoetics, a studied approach to Native verbal art that elucidates cultural significance and aesthetic form. As these essays amply demonstrate, nearly six decades later ethnopoetics and Hymes’s focus on narrative inequality and voice provide a still valuable critical lens for current research in anthropology and folklore. Through ethnopoetics, so much can be understood in diverse cultural settings and situations: gleaning the voices of individual Koryak storytellers and aesthetic sensibilities from century-old wax cylinder recordings; understanding the similarities and differences between Apache life stories told 58 years apart; how Navajo punning and an expressive device illuminate the work of a Navajo poet; decolonizing Western Mono and Yokuts stories by bringing to the surface the performances behind the texts written down by scholars long ago; and keenly appreciating the potency of language revitalization projects among First Nations communities in the Yukon and northwestern California. Fascinating and topical, these essays not only honor a legacy but also point the way forward.
Papers by Anthony K. Webster
Anthropological Linguistics
Argues for linguistic relativity with an attitude.
Abstract. In this article, I think through questions of craft and inspiration in the creation of ... more Abstract. In this article, I think through questions of craft and inspiration in the creation of poetry. My interests are in the ways that languages, individuals, and cultures are intertwined. I take an ethnographic perspective on the question and a comparative approach as well. I juxtapose my work with Navajo poets with work on Afghan poets, Yemeni cassette poets, Israeli poetry workshops, and Bergamasco poets. I attend, where possible, to the views of specific poets on the relationship between craft and inspiration. With Navajo poets, I try and provide enough background to place their views in a context of a Navajo framework of meaning and moral responsibility. The goal is to begin to understand the creating of poetry as social practice. The conclusion places this work within a broader concern of a humanities of speaking approach.
Résumé. Cet article s’appuie sur les notions de « métier » et d’inspiration dans la création poétique et s’intéresse à la façon dont langues, individus et cultures interfèrent. L’auteur associe une perspective ethnographique à une approche comparative. Ses travaux sur les poètes Navajo sont juxtaposés à des études sur des poètes afghans, yéménites (qui composent pour être enregistrés sur cassettes), les ateliers poétiques israéliens, et les poètes bergamasques. Autant que possible, il examine les vues de poètes spécifiques sur la relation entre travail de composition et inspiration. Pour les poètes navajos, il restitue dans une certaine mesure l’arrière-plan anthropologique pour replacer leurs vues dans le contexte des conceptions locales sur le sens et la responsabilité. Le but est de tenter de comprendre la création poétique comme une pratique sociale. La conclusion ouvre sur une perspective plus large liée aux humanités langagières.
Keywords: Poetry, Navajo, Creativity, Verbal life, Inspiration, Craft, Ambiguity, Humanities of Speaking
Mots-clefs : poésie, Navajos, créativité, vie du langage, inspiration, métier, ambiguïté, humanités langagières.
We take up Boas’s commitment to the establishment of a large corpus of texts from the indigenous ... more We take up Boas’s commitment to the establishment of a large corpus of texts from the indigenous languages and peoples of the Americas, examining what we take to be his fundamental principles: using texts as the philological record from which to document and explore language, culture, and intellectual life on their own terms; training speakers to engage in documentation through the creation and analysis of texts; and a focus on the emergence of patterns and interrelationships. We then outline what we see as his influence up to now, both directly through the kinds of projects he promoted and indirectly through a broader application of Boasian principles that has animated a series of later movements. Finally, we discuss the prospects for a more comprehensive text- and documentation-centered approach to language and culture that welds together these themes and movements, and which we envision as a holistic humanities of speaking.
Abstract: This article engages John Ciardi’s famous dictum that translation is “the art of failur... more Abstract: This article engages John Ciardi’s famous dictum that translation is “the art of failure” by engaging in a thick translation and a creative transposition of a short poem in Navajo by Rex Lee Jim. I begin with reflections on recent discussions in anthropology on translation and voice—both of which will be relevant to the argument advanced in my discussion of Jim’s poem. I then work through a transcript of an interview with Jim about his poetry. I then engage in a creative transposition, or more precisely a failure, of the poem, and engage in a bit of exegesis and philology about the poem. The goal is to bring a concern with voice into dialogue with a concern with theorizations of translation. Mostly, though, this article is a contemplative exercise in the art of failure and in attending to the value of such an intellectual and aesthetic endeavor.
Keywords: Navajo, poetry, translation, sound, voice, failure
This article engages questions about translation, phonological iconicity, and seductive ideophony... more This article engages questions about translation, phonological iconicity, and seductive ideophony. I begin by discussing the work of Paul Friedrich (1979, 1986) as it relates to questions of linguistic relativity and poetics and the qualities of music and myth that constitute poetry. I then present a poem written in Navajo by Rex Lee Jim and four translations of the poem. Three will be from Navajo consultants and one of those translations will be, from a certain perspective, rather surprising. Namely, why does one consultant translate this poem as if it is composed of ideophones? The fourth translation is mine. I follow this by working through the morphology of the poem in Navajo and saying something more about the translators and the process of translation. I then provide a transcript of a conversation I had with Blackhorse Mitchell about this poem. I use this to take up questions of phonological iconicity (punning) and the seductive quality of ideophony (the pole of " music "). I also place this poem within a context of the stick game in Navajo philosophy (the pole of " myth "). This leads, in the conclusion, to reflections about linguistic relativity, misunderstandings, sound, and poetics.
to appear in Semiotica
This article takes seriously Edward Sapir’s observation about poetry as an example of linguistic ... more This article takes seriously Edward Sapir’s observation about poetry as an example of linguistic relativity. Taking my cue from Dwight Bolinger’s “word affinities,” this article reports on the ways sounds of poetry evoke and convoke imaginative possibilities through phonological iconicity. In working with Navajos in translating poetry, I have come to appreciate the sound suggestiveness of that poetry and the imaginative possibilities that are bound up in the sounds of Navajo. It seems that just such sound suggestiveness via phonological iconicity and the ways they orient our imaginations are a crucial locus for thinking through linguistic relativities.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2015
Oxford Handbooks Online in Linguistics, New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming
This article engages with the place of speech play in the concerns of linguistics, sociolinguisti... more This article engages with the place of speech play in the concerns of linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and other language-in-use oriented disciplines. Taking a discourse-centered approach to speech play, we argue that speech play is a crucial site in understanding the complex language, grammar, culture, and individual nexus. Speech play challenges the boundaries of languages and also acts as an engine of language change. Often, those features most associated with speech play (sound symbolism, punning, reduplication, and the like) are considered marginal to the pursuit of linguistics. We argue, instead, that they are crucial in promoting an openness to different ways of conceiving of languages and recognizing the role of aesthetics in language use. Such a perspective has broader import in how we document and describe languages.
Keywords: speech play, discourse-centered approach to language, sound symbolism,
punning, heteroglossia, aesthetics
Oxford Handbooks Online in Linguistics, New York: Oxford University Press
This article argues for the continuing importance of ethnopoetics/cultural poetics in the work of... more This article argues for the continuing importance of ethnopoetics/cultural poetics in the work of linguists and anthropologists. A heuristic definition of ethnopoetics (or cultural poetics) as the various traditions of such recurrent patternings of linguistic forms (and the thwarting of such expectations of such patternings) is given. The continuing relevance of a Hymesian inspired anthropological philology is noted and exemplified. After framing the discussion of poetry and poetics as both linguistic and ethnographic questions, this article engages questions of linguistic relativity and its relationship to poetics as well as broader concerns with poetry and poetics as social practices. Examples of parallelism and metaphor are given and discussed both in relation to their poetic form and to their social work. A final extended illustration is given concerning Navajo poetry as an example of what a cultural poetics informed by both linguistics and anthropology might look like. In the end, it is argued that research on cultural poetics/ethnopoetics encourages patience and reflection.
Keywords: cultural poetics, ethnopoetics, poetry, parallelism, metaphor, ideophony, linguistic relativity, aesthetics.
In this article, I discuss the linguistic landscape of offi cially sanctioned street name signage... more In this article, I discuss the linguistic landscape of offi cially sanctioned street name signage on the Navajo Nation. Given the Navajo Nation's Enhanced 9-1-1 and Rural Addressing Initiative, this is a moment of transition for such signage. First I describe, in broad strokes, the linguistic landscape of the Navajo Nation. I then look at street name signs that are ostensibly written in Navajo in Ft. Defi ance, AZ. These signs show "spectacular typos" that suggest a lack of familiarity with written or spoken Navajo. In the conclusion, following work in linguistic landscaping, I take up the issues of what kinds of audience these signs select and what kinds of imagined community these signs create.
Inspired by an inquiry from a Navajo friend about why I had not published on a particular poem by... more Inspired by an inquiry from a Navajo friend about why I had not published on a particular poem by Rex Lee Jim, this paper engages that question through three interconnected themes. First, there will be an analysis of the poem by Jim where I translate the poem but also place it within the context of Navajo concerns with k'é (reciprocity, generosity). Second, I turn to thinking through some of the issues brought out in the translation of the Navajo word ajik'eed as "one fucks." This leads to questions about the ways that indigenous languages and their speakers are imagined and represented. Finally, I take up the foregoing issues as I reflect on my own translation practices.
Journal of Folklore Research, 2013
In this article we combine a concern with speech play and language ideologies to investigate cont... more In this article we combine a concern with speech play and language ideologies to investigate contemporary Navajo terminology development. This article presents some recent cases of lexical elaboration in context, and argues that neologisms in Navajo are often fleeting, shifting, or humorous practices that reflect and recreate individual agency, intimate grammars, and local language ideologies. They also reflect an unexpected continuity in what is considered to be a context of rapid language shift. Such practices are one form of resistance to English and should be seen as a sociocultural, rather than purely referential, phenomenon.
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Books by Anthony K. Webster
Papers by Anthony K. Webster
Résumé. Cet article s’appuie sur les notions de « métier » et d’inspiration dans la création poétique et s’intéresse à la façon dont langues, individus et cultures interfèrent. L’auteur associe une perspective ethnographique à une approche comparative. Ses travaux sur les poètes Navajo sont juxtaposés à des études sur des poètes afghans, yéménites (qui composent pour être enregistrés sur cassettes), les ateliers poétiques israéliens, et les poètes bergamasques. Autant que possible, il examine les vues de poètes spécifiques sur la relation entre travail de composition et inspiration. Pour les poètes navajos, il restitue dans une certaine mesure l’arrière-plan anthropologique pour replacer leurs vues dans le contexte des conceptions locales sur le sens et la responsabilité. Le but est de tenter de comprendre la création poétique comme une pratique sociale. La conclusion ouvre sur une perspective plus large liée aux humanités langagières.
Keywords: Poetry, Navajo, Creativity, Verbal life, Inspiration, Craft, Ambiguity, Humanities of Speaking
Mots-clefs : poésie, Navajos, créativité, vie du langage, inspiration, métier, ambiguïté, humanités langagières.
Keywords: Navajo, poetry, translation, sound, voice, failure
Keywords: speech play, discourse-centered approach to language, sound symbolism,
punning, heteroglossia, aesthetics
Keywords: cultural poetics, ethnopoetics, poetry, parallelism, metaphor, ideophony, linguistic relativity, aesthetics.
Résumé. Cet article s’appuie sur les notions de « métier » et d’inspiration dans la création poétique et s’intéresse à la façon dont langues, individus et cultures interfèrent. L’auteur associe une perspective ethnographique à une approche comparative. Ses travaux sur les poètes Navajo sont juxtaposés à des études sur des poètes afghans, yéménites (qui composent pour être enregistrés sur cassettes), les ateliers poétiques israéliens, et les poètes bergamasques. Autant que possible, il examine les vues de poètes spécifiques sur la relation entre travail de composition et inspiration. Pour les poètes navajos, il restitue dans une certaine mesure l’arrière-plan anthropologique pour replacer leurs vues dans le contexte des conceptions locales sur le sens et la responsabilité. Le but est de tenter de comprendre la création poétique comme une pratique sociale. La conclusion ouvre sur une perspective plus large liée aux humanités langagières.
Keywords: Poetry, Navajo, Creativity, Verbal life, Inspiration, Craft, Ambiguity, Humanities of Speaking
Mots-clefs : poésie, Navajos, créativité, vie du langage, inspiration, métier, ambiguïté, humanités langagières.
Keywords: Navajo, poetry, translation, sound, voice, failure
Keywords: speech play, discourse-centered approach to language, sound symbolism,
punning, heteroglossia, aesthetics
Keywords: cultural poetics, ethnopoetics, poetry, parallelism, metaphor, ideophony, linguistic relativity, aesthetics.