Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

476 Chapter 17
In some texts, Hymes found recurrent linguistic elements that made the task
easy. Linguists who have worked with precisely recorded texts in Native
American languages have noticed the recurrence of elements like ‘‘Now,’’
‘‘Then,’’ ‘‘Now then,’’ and ‘‘Now again’’ at the beginning of sentences. These
kinds of things often signal the separation of verses. The trick is to recognize
them and the method is to look for ‘‘abstract features that co-occur with the
use of initial particle pairs in the narratives’’ of other speakers who use initial
particle pairs. The method, then, is a form of controlled comparison
(ibid.:439).
In a series of articles and books (1976, 1977, 1980a, 1980b, 1981), Hymes
showed that most Native American texts of narrative performance (going back
to the early texts collected by Boas and his students and continuing in today’s
narrative performance by American Indians as well) are organized into verses
and stanzas that are aggregated into groups of either fives and threes or fours
and twos. Boas and his students organized the narratives of American Indians
into lines.
According to Virginia Hymes, this hid from view ‘‘a vast world of poetry
waiting to be released by those of us with some knowledge of the languages’’
(1987:65). Dell Hymes’s method, according to Virginia Hymes, involves
‘‘working back and forth between content and form, between organization at
the level of the whole narrative and at the level of the details of lines within a
single verse or even words within a line’’ (ibid.:67–68). Gradually, an analysis
emerges that reflects the analyst’s understanding of the larger narrative tradition
and of the particular narrator.
This emergent analysis doesn’t happen miraculously. It is, Virginia Hymes
reminds us, only through close work with many narratives by many narrators
that you develop an understanding of the narrative devices that people use in
a particular language and the many ways they use those little devices (ibid.).
But all this depends on having texts—lots of them, like those that Boas and
his students left us—marked for features like voice quality, loudness, pausing,
intonation, stress, and nonphonemic vowel length (Hymes 1977:452–53).
Dennis Tedlock (1987) showed the exegetical power that linguistic methods
can bring to text analysis. He had translated the Popol Vuh, a 16th-century
Quiché Maya manuscript that had been written out by Francisco Ximénez, a
missionary of the time. The Popol Vuh is one of those big epics, like the Iliad
or Beowulf that were meant to be recited aloud. Is it possible, Tedlock asked,
to analyze the text and figure out how to narrate it today as performers would
have done in ancient times?
In doing his translation of the Popol Vuh, Tedlock had relied on Andrés
Xiloj, a modern speaker of Quiché. Xiloj had not been trained to read Maya,
but he was literate in Spanish and made the transition very quickly. ‘‘When he