Ethnopoetic Analysis as a Resource for Endangered-Language Linguistics: The Social Production of an Arapesh Text

The focus of this article is a short narrative text that was recorded during the author’s fieldwork on the endangered Papuan language Arapesh. An explication of the text following the principles of Hymesian verse analysis provides a rich source of evidence about the speaker’s experience of cultural transformation as refracted in the research encounter. This comes across explicitly, through the text’s remarkable content, and indexically through aspects of its form. The analysis helps reveal the subtle and sometimes problematic ways in which fieldworkers as cross-cultural interlocutors shape the encounters that are reified in the documentary objects they produce.