Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics (review)

This collection of Hymes’s articles is an excellent example of a work that crosses boundaries and draws on four scholarly fields, resulting in what is referred to as ethnopoetics. In the author’s words, ‘This book … grows out of my own intellectual ancestry, a mingling of anthropology, folklore, linguistics, and literature’ (vii).

The book consists of sixteen chapters, four of which were first published in the 1980s, nine in the 1990s, and three more recently. This is the second collection of ethnopoetic essays by H; the first, ‘In vain I tried to tell you’: Essays in Native American ethnopoetics, was published in 1981 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). In his introduction to the present work H acknowledges that over the years he has come to more fully understand traditional narratives, Native American ones in particular, but he also points out how much more is still to be learned. This admission is reflected in the title of the book, which is taken from the sentence with which Victoria Howard occasionally concluded her traditional Clackamas tales—told to Melville Jacobs back in 1929 and 1930—‘Now I know only this far’ (xi).

The author’s acquaintance with the many sources from which he has drawn his material for analysis or commentaries is impressive. He refers to languages of no less than fourteen Native (North) American language families, and in addition to data from his own fieldwork makes use of materials recorded in both Native American languages and translations, some from as early as 1891 (by Franz Boas).

In his analyses or commentaries on the works of others H goes into such detail that here even a highly abbreviated account of his approach is out of the question. However, it is possible to summarize some of the main points: Myths and other traditional narratives are ways in which members of a society make sense of the world; it appears that narratives of (probably) all communities have definite recurrent patterns, usually (not always) clearly marked; more specifically, these patterns are represented by lines (in some languages each predicate phrase is a line); lines are in patterned relations to one another; these relations allow variation that may take the form of elaboration and intensification; patterns may be identified even in traditional narratives collected in English, but unabbreviated field records in the original language are preferable (a good phonetic transcription would suffice).

Because the essays of this collection span almost two decades and have originally appeared in a variety of sources, some duplication has been inevitable. The products of H’s fertile mind may remind the reader of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s transformational relationships, but H’s procedures are more easily replicable. As the starting point of ethnopoetic analysis, H advocates ‘practical’ structuralism, referring to ‘the elementary task of discovering the relevant features and relationships of a language and its texts’ (123).

The essays are supplemented by copious notes (441–71) and a bibliography (473–94).