Dell H. Hymes (1927-2009)

Dell Hathaway Hymes, a foundational figure in contemporary folkloristics as well as anthropology and linguistics, died November 13, 2009, in Charlottesville, Virginia, of kidney failure and complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was eighty-two years old. His primary area of research specialization was Pacific Northwest Native American languages, an interest he dated to his high school days in Oregon. In the course of his many publications and teaching at Harvard University, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia, he shaped the intellectual projects of all who were concerned with the structure and uses of oral speech. As an undergraduate at Reed College in Portland (with time out for military service in Korea from 1945), he became close friends with Gary Snyder, who as a poet has also attended to and experimented with Native American verbal aesthetics.

Having received his PhD from Indiana University in 1955 (dissertation: "The Language of the Kathlamet Chinook"), he was well positioned to speak in and to all three of his disciplines. His first publication, "Two Wasco Motifs" (1953), appeared in JAF. Within the general field of sociolinguistics, or as he defined it, the ethnography of communication, of which he was a founder, he pioneered specifically the study of ethnopoetics. He focused on a sustained analysis of oral texts from endangered or now-extinct languages, both as collected by an earlier generation of linguists including Edward Sapir and Melville Jacobs and in Hymes's own primary field research and discussions with surviving speakers of Northwest languages. He counted Kenneth Burke as one of his major intellectual influences. Devising a method of analysis to reveal the aesthetic structure and rhetorical power achieved through syntactical symmetries and segmentations in the flow of recorded speech, even in archived transcriptions of spoken language not intended for such analysis, Hymes taught us to listen in new ways. He pioneered the analysis of criteria for social competence embodied in verbal performance, a core concern of performance theory as it developed in folkloristics. In so doing, his goal was never to demonstrate his own analytic virtuosity, but rather to show the aesthetic achievement and essential powers of signification in the verbal expressions of people politically and historically marginalized and thus intellectually dismissed. His intellectual energy was always manifestly driven by an ethical commitment to understanding and demonstrating the artistry and social values of the marginalized. As much as any analytic technique or theory, Dell Hymes taught and modeled the deep embedding of social justice in the study of folklore. In contrast to Noam Chomsky, another highly ethically engaged linguist, whose linguistic theory Hymes criticized for its lack of attention to rules of social appropriateness as part of linguistic competence, Dell Hymes's ethical project was absolutely integrated with his intellectual work.

While Hymes was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, his sense of fairness eventuated in a rift with the Department of Anthropology over its failure to tenure David Sapir, who went on to a distinguished career at the University of Virginia. Invited by Kenneth Goldstein, Hymes moved to Penn's Folklore and Folklife Department in 1970, collaborating in the development of that program with Goldstein, Tristram Coffin, Dan Ben-Amos, John Szwed, and Henry Glassie. In 1975, he was asked to become dean of Penn's Graduate School of Education. He continued in both roles for twelve years, dividing his attention between full-time administration and teaching ethnography of communication to large classes of students from Penn's Folklore and Folklife Department, Graduate School of Education, Annenberg School of Communications, and Department of Anthropology. He was an essential and iconic contributor to the vigorous interdisciplinarity that characterized Penn as an institution in those years.

As dean of the Graduate School of Education at Penn, Hymes took a school on the brink of elimination by decanal decree to a leading position in the anthropology of education, ethnography of literacy, and classroom-based teacher research, empowering and training teachers to become active in research on their own classrooms. Among other expressions of appreciation, School of Education colleagues presented him with a baseball cap with two...