An Ethnographic Perspective Author(s): Dell Hymes Reviewed work(s): Source: New Literary History, Vol. 5, No. 1, What Is Literature?

(Autumn, 1973), pp. 187-201 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468416 . Accessed: 20/12/2011 22:49
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An Ethnographic Perspective Dell Hymes

HESE CONTRIBUTIONS are linked by the question "Is there a universal basis for the notion of literature?" In varying degree, they suggest strategies for answering the question. These issues are in principle part of a general inquiry into the nature and organization of the means of speech in human communities, and their meanings to those who use them, an inquiry being pursued with increasing vigor by participants of many disciplines.' The ethnographic approach on which I shall draw is not as rich in known content as literary criticism, but it has an indispensable place, as I shall try to show. At the end I shall argue that literary criticism has in turn an indispensable place in ethnography. I shall begin and end with articles in alphabetical order of their authors' names, because, as it happens, these give me the frame within which I can consider the rest.

I
The relevance of Blake as a symbolist would seem to lie in the implication that Blake dealt with the primal source of literature. Through him one would find an implicit definition of the nature and role of literature. Not only would Blake be seen "as a more complete symbolist than those who have gone under the 'symboliste' banner, if one means by symbolist a poet who regards literature as a 'symbolic form' of experience, in the sense that has become common since Cassirer," but literature would be seen as one of the cardinal activities constitutive of human culture, even though Cassirer himself did not accord it a clear place.2 Literature, mythology, and ultimately language, however, become intertwined in Adams' interpretation of Blake and his implicit
Cf. my "Editorial Introduction," Language in Society, I Not in his three volumes on the philosophy of symbolic Man, nor indeed in The Logic of the Humanities (New language, art, and religion are the categories ready to hand I
2

(1972), 1-14. forms or his Essay on Haven, 1961), where (e.g., pp. 173-74).

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recommendation to critical theory. We have to do with two modes of use of language, one a human energy that is artistic shaping, and in which metaphor is constitutive, an unremitting source of symbolic forms, the other an externalization and devouring in which metaphor, if present, is a mere device. Adams' approach has many ramifications for a philosophy and sociology of culture, but it is hard to see where we are left with regard to literature itself. If we grant to Adams, and Blake, a fundamental insight relevant to the nature of literature, still we need more than a reference to Cassirer. We need indeed a critique and contemporary reconstruction of Cassirer's project. Adams avoids the "trap" of temporal priority for "myth" (as a mode of use of language), wisely enough. No simple universal developmental or evolutionary scheme can encompass the complex record of human cultural histories.3 But the kind of evidence that comparative ethnology can provide remains relevant, and some modes of evolutionary interpretation are not impossible. The crux is in the descriptive, or analytic, foundations, as to what is compared. Cassirer sketched developmental processes, which retain partial validity; but he treated the organization, or underlying functions, of human culture as if given in a few conventional categories, e.g., language, mythology, art, science. This will not do. It leaves the categories at the mercy of conventional notions and disciplines, and is ad hoc and a priori in relation to the distinctions and configurations of symbolic forms to be found in actual cultures. The organization of cultural forms is not given, but to be validated. It is not that generalization, and a universal basis, are impossible, but that a philosophy of symbolic forms must be interdependent with ethnography and ethnology of symbolic forms. We need to consider more scrupulously what count as the defining features and relations of aesthetically and imaginatively shaped activity in a sufficient range of cultures. This is an old, perhaps familiar, lesson of modern anthropology, but one to which new point is given by the renewed interest among anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists in study of these matters. To give one example: much myth that has been presented as prose can be shown to be structured internally in lines in a way that answers to a general definition of poetry.4 Given an adequately based theory of symbolic forms, the human
3 Brought home to me in my first effort at scholarship, A Critique of Christopher Caudwell's "Illusion and Reality" (Reed College dissertation, i950). 4 See Dennis Tedlock, Finding the Center (New York, 1972); cf. Hymes, "ObUgric Metrics" (review of a book by R. Austerlitz), Anthropos, 55 (196I), 574-76, and "Louis Simpson's 'The deserted boy,' " Poetics (in press).

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energy that is artistic shaping for Blake and Adams will likely be found not to define any one category at the level at which "literature" is usually found, but to be a fundamental function, or quality, recurrently pervasive. It seems inescapable that much which will have to be classified as literature will be poor or lacking in it. If we are to have a serious comparative literature, one which corresponds to a world society by encompassing the world's cultures, then all sonnets, say, good and bad, will have to be qualified as literature, and so on. If a sonnet is not literature, what is it? Surely not unshaped, not a sonata or a statue. This is of course an old issue. It would seem to me that we have to abandon struggles over the honorific use of terms for symbolic forms, and genres, and settle for descriptive uses. Are not "good" and "bad" clear enough, when that is what one wants to say? How can we place literature among symbolic forms, if what counts as literature, or poetry, or the like, changes with the years and the critics? (See Roberts on this question.) All this may appear to put me in disagreement with Butler, where description is argued to be inadequate, and evaluative concerns essential. On one plausible reading of the contrast, as exemplified in some of the notions passed in review, I would indeed have to object. Thus, I do not see a difference on logical grounds between a theory in literature, biology, or any other field. Nothing would deserve to be called a theory of literature that could not be clear enough about its domain to make possible its application, and, in principle, its falsification (there are of course fuzzy borders in the sciences as well as in the humanities). Many of the criteria reviewed would seem to have in common a desire to withhold the name of "literature" from other than a small set of most highly valued works. But Butler himself indicates the difficulties involved, and I think that he is profoundly right in concluding that recognition of a work as literary involves a conventional relationship to the values of an audience. The terms description and evaluation are seen to take on a different character. By "description" is meant description of texts in isolation; by "evaluation" is meant the evaluation of acceptance by an audience (community, society). Here we are far from a priori insistence on specific qualities. An ethnographic and ethnological perspective is again implied, in which one must discover the defining qualities of "literature" in the given case. This is description of texts, not in isolation, but in context." The perspective includes the dimensions or qualities in terms of which some part of "literature," so defined, is preferred. We have two distinct
5 Cf. Towards New Perspectives in Folklore, ed. Americo Paredes and Richard Bauman (Austin, 1971), and James Peacock, Rites of Modernization (Chicago, 1968).

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senses of evaluation: counting as literature at all, and ranking within that category. The first sense is in important part a cognitive one, in the sense of work to discover the cultural classifications of experience in a community.6 One might very well recognize something as an instance of a category, while disliking it. It is this first and fundamental sense of evaluation, as classification, which I take Butler to address. What we have, then, as starting point, is the assumption that in every community language will be found to be used in ways that show features identifiable as literary. The task is to discover, within the range of functions served by language in a community, within the repertoire of verbal means, the varieties of language, styles of speech, genres, and events, in which these features occur, their relationships, and their status in the community. The various qualities reviewed by Butler, and others, will be found to be selected and grouped together in various ways, e.g., the balance between mimetic and autonomic (on which point Butler is clearly right in a comparative perspective), or the place of originality and uniqueness. In specific communities and periods, certainly, the question of a theory of what is and is not an instance of the community's institutionalization of the literary will be answerable. The difficulty in answering the question within our own society may be a specific and illuminating fact about it. What is likely to prove universal is not a specific selection or configuration of literary features, but the presence, variously organized, of most or all of the relevant features themselves, including the existence of some institutional context in which some features at least are somewhat valued and ability in them encouraged or rewarded. Even originality and uniqueness, thought perhaps to be absent from "tribal" or "primitive" societies, are to be found there. The variability of traditions among neighboring communities, and indeed, among families and family members on occasion, is evidence of this.7 There is no public claim to originality; one's own knowledge is traced to those from whom one has learned it. But in selection of incident and emphasis, and in expressive features, one can discern, if one has authentic materials and looks for it, personal reflection and shaping. The tradi6 Cf. Harold Conklin, Folk Classification (New Haven, 1972), a comprehensive bibliography. 7 For example, at Yakima Reservation, Washington, in 1905, when Louis Simpson had told the Coyote myth cycle to Edward Sapir, Louis Simpson's brother, Tom, insisted that one myth had a different ending, and told it. This version is in fact one I recorded myself about 50 years later from Hiram Smith, of the Warm Springs Reservation, Oregon.

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tional materialsare a mode of personalas well as collectiveexpression.8 Here Kellogg is certainlyright in urging the relevanceof oral literature to fundamentalquestions. The one fault in his argumentis that the bardic tradition is not sufficientlyrepresentative(as the western American Indian traditions on which I draw also are not). It is widely reported (and known to me from field experience) that specific versions, and types of performance,may be associated with specific persons, and their versions evaluated, not in terms of approximation to an ideally completeversion,but in terms of the selectionthey make, and their ability to make their version "come alive." There is indeed a communityknowledge of incident and detail that goes beyond any one performance;just this makes possible the effects of selection. A performancewhich included it all might be judged as tedious. Not everything need be said or explained. (It is sometimes a mark of versionstold in English that explanationsare given.) There is indeed a threshold of completenessbelow which a performanceshould not fall, but given this, point and dramatizationare what count. This is not to say that such narratorscan be consideredauthors in the usual in sense; they are not originators, their own eyes or in the eyes of others. They are, however, shapers, selecting, combining, reorienting,freshly motivating the materialswith which they work.9 But all this is only in to agree with Kellogg that oral literatureopens up new possibilities of the consideration such a conceptas author.
8 Thus, with regard to narratives from Anna Nelson Harry, of the Eyak of Alaska, recorded in 1932, and again in the 196os, After being widowed and re-marrying amongst the Tlingits, Anna's stories of intermarriage and displacement become much more meaningful. The groundhog man and wolf woman are extremely poignant, taking on several more layers of meaning .... As I have thought and thought in recent years about the way she tells these stories, I come to an even greater appreciation of the artistic and philosophical merit of Anna's storytelling, of her own personal tragedy, and her understanding of the tragedy of the Eyak people, and of the nature of human history, as only an Eyak (or maybe an Irishman) could see it. [Michael Krauss, personal communication, 30 August I973] Cf. also my "The 'Wife' Who 'Goes Out' Like a Man: Reinterpretation of a Clackamas Chinook Myth," Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition, ed. P. and E. Maranda (Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 49-80. 9 It may be that much of what is written in our own society, for magazines and audiences of known or presumed preferences, is not "authored" in the sense of striking origination, but is to be understood as personal shaping of material essentially commonly known. The apparatus of novelty (titles, names of characters, locales) may be a difference of degree, and not of kind, from the nature of tradition and performance in a society such as that of the Wasco Chinook (originally living on the Columbia River in the vicinity of what is now The Dalles).

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II
In analysis of the nature of literature, conceptions of language, including conceptions held by linguists, inevitably play a part. Both Fish and Ricoeur take linguistic conceptions for a starting point, and seek to extend them. Ricoeur seeks to extend by analogy, taking certain linguistic conceptions for granted; Fish criticizes certain conceptions as inadequate to the nature of language. Fish seems to be close to agreement with Butler in concluding that literature is characterized by an attitude toward properties that belong by constitutive right to language. This conception implies the necessity of determining the institutional relations that affect the judgment. And Fish gives important content to the implication by Adams that literary theory requires a sufficiently complex conception of language at its base. I would only qualify that it is not always as easy as his conclusion suggests to decide that something belongs in the literary category. Most important, Fish is entirely right in the form of his analysis of deficiencies in concepts of language, but incomplete in his suggested enrichment. The form of his argument-that a gap between ordinary and literary language leaves both impoverished, and that much that is essential and meaningful is missed or distorted as a consequence-is precisely the form of argument employed some ten years ago to justify an approach called the "ethnography of speaking."'01 Fish makes original points, and I have profited from his analysis. But it should be noted that the issues in linguistic theory today are not only as to the status of semantics, but also as to the status of stylistic organization and features. In brief, I would argue that modern linguistics has been dominated by an implicit definition of language in terms of the "referential" (or, in a narrow sense, "semantic") function, whereas language is organized in terms of two elementary functions, the other being "expressive" or "stylistic."11It is important that value and intention be brought within the scope of language, but in this respect, it is not only kinds of semantic content that have been missed. So also have features and modes of organization essential to the expression of value and intention. These "stylistic" aspects of the design of language are necessary to the linguist's own intention of capturing generalizaio Cf. Hymes, "The Ethnography of Speaking," Anthropology and Human Behavior, ed. T. Gladwin and W. C. Sturtevant (Washington, D. C., I962), pp. 13-53; Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. R. Bauman and J. F. Sherzer (Cambridge, forthcoming in I974). I See Hymes, "Ways of Speaking," Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking.

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tions and universals,12 and they are an essential part of what makes utterance recognizable as aesthetically shaped. At the same time, not everything that is required can be packed into an enriched conception of language. Some of what is required exists in the form of norms of interpretation and interaction that are not specific to language, but govern verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication jointly, or that are directly features of social relationships and situations, not of sentences. There is a tendency in linguistics to import every newly recognized relevancy into an underlying syntactic or semantic structure, as if linguists, no matter how mentalist in principle, were loath to ascribe to the mind anything that could not be imputed to language. Linguists, committed to going behind surface structure within language, seem reluctant to recognize that language itself is partly a "surface structure" to some of the aspects of social meaning and interaction with which they now wish to deal. The development of conversational postulates is valuable in this regard, but so far woefully inadequate and ethnocentric. A conversation in accord with those now invoked would be tedious and indeed unlikely. When any interesting exchange of speech, especially with indications of aesthetic play and shaping, must be marked as deviant, it is clear that the conception of conversation that requires the marking is too narrow for literature or ethnography. I very much agree with Ricoeur's goal of finding common interpretative principles for texts and meaningful action, but the present argument seems to me not the way to reach them, apart from the valuable discussion stemming from his own knowledge of interpretation (in the section "from understanding to explanation"). For one thing, there is a direct way to see the connection in ethnography, and that stems from the necessity of interpreting much meaningful action through documents of the ethnographer's own making (see below in IV). With regard to the arguments drawn from a conception of language and linguistics, first, it is mistaken to accept the conventional structuralist dichotomy between language and discourse as basis for methodological argument. That dichotomy is being overcome, and can now be seen as an ideological expression of the nascent discipline of linguistics, wishing to secure for itself a privileged domain of structure.13Linguists are finding organization beyond the sentence, and ethnographers and
I2 Cf. Hymes, "Linguistic Theory and the Functions of Speech," Foundations of Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach (Philadelphia, forthcoming in 1974), Ch. viii. 13 Cf. Hymes, "The Ethnography of Speaking," and Part II in Foundations of Sociolinguistics.

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linguists are finding organization of linguistic means in styles and speech events that transcends the old dichotomy. Second, writing does not fix the meaning of speech, but only a portion of it; nor is it self-interpreting any more than action; both are mute. In general, it is not difference of material vehicle that is decisive, but modes of cultural institutionalization of discourse, oral or written. In traditional India essential discourses, such as the grammatical sutras, were not committed to writing, because paper, a material thing, is easily destroyed. They were committed to memory, and transmitted (and glossed and elaborated) orally for centuries. Again, what a discourse means may not at all be the same thing as what a speaker means, if the speaker is medium for a spirit, or another person, or instrument of ritual speech or prayer. Further, not only texts but also oral discourses may project a Welt, as in myth narratives. And it is just not the case that "virtually every piece of writing" is addressed to who ever knows how to read, as the Pentagon Papers remind us. In sum, each channel of language use has been variously exploited in various cultures. One must approach these questions, and all questions concerning the functioning of language, as problematic within an ethnographic and ethnological frame of reference. In the particular case, writing, speaking, singing, drumming, horn-calling, whistling are part of the organization of communicative means in a society, and generalizations have to be based on analyzed cases. The period in which a priori speculation on linguistic functions was possible is past. Literary scholars and interpretive philosophers particularly should not be a priori technological determinists, reasoning from the supposedly necessary natures of speech, writing, and print, rather than from evidence. Third, the dogma that "merely distinctive entities within finite sets of such units defines the notion of structure in linguistics" is false. Chess pieces must not only differ but also be recognizable. Pike has long insisted on the identificational as well as contrastive nature of linguistic features, and current concern with phonetic specification and natural classes of sounds implies general recognition of the principle.14 Ricoeur himself makes just this kind of argument when he points out that the oppositions mediated in myths are themselves meaningful. And fourth, the sentence is not the last kind of unit taken into account in linguistics (as noted with regard to Fish). Finally, the wisdom of Ricoeur's final remarks is nevertheless incomplete. In interpreting a myth it may be essential to situate the
14 Cf. Hymes, "Linguistic Models in Archeology," Archaeologie et calculateurs: problames semiologiques et mathematiques (Paris, 1970), pp. 91-1 18.

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source, and the enlarging of the horizon of the text may be better understood, not as atemporalization, but as bi- or even multi-temporalization. The Kathlamet Chinook "Myth of the Sun," for example, can be seen to speak of a traditional cultural world, its values, and the consequences therein of a chief's hubris in insisting on possessing a power proper to the Sun, bringing destruction on all his kin as a result. It can be seen to speak of the world of its narrator, Charles Cultee, last fluent user of the language, conveying the myth with the supplemental aid of Chinook Jargon to the ethnographer, Franz Boas, who had sought him out, and reflecting, one cannot but sense, on his proud people's initial acceptance of the marvels of the whites, and subsequent destruction through diseases brought by whites. It can be seen to speak for us, perhaps, of a world in which the harnessed power of the sun, so eagerly sought, may yet be our own destruction. It is important to develop a common descriptive and interpretative frame of reference for language, and uses of language, among other communicative modalities and symbolic forms. But the direct strategy would be to analyze, not language, then meaningful action, but language (speech) as part of meaningful action.

III
I have argued for an ethnographic and ethnological basis for answering the question "What is literature?" on grounds of adequacy of scope. Ethnologically, there is the comparative, cross-cultural dimension, a matter of range of cases; ethnographically, there is the descriptive dimension, having to do with the frame of reference (especially as regards language) with which any case is approached. The argument finds me seeking to defend and generalize the concept "literature," to find for it a truly universal basis. This is in the tradition of the contributions to analysis of language and culture generally of Boas, Sapir, and Kroeber earlier in this century. In that tradition one wants, like Kernan and Roberts, to expose the historical and social limitations of a received category in one's own culture, but one also wants to bring within the pale of attention and acceptance other cultures and peoples. Thus the apparent irony of a literary scholar attacking, and an anthropologist defending, the universality of "literature." Let me say a little more on the anthropological concern, and then deal with the irony. Recognition of the value of other literatures is one of the oldest themes of an anthropological orientation, from at least the time of

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Blake in the work of Herder on Hebraic and Greek literature. (Herder stood as a known precedent for Boas, Sapir, Kroeber, and others, all versed in the Germanic cultural tradition.) I feel some warmth on this point, for it has still to be fully accepted. A few years ago I sent a paper to a very distinguished colleague in English; a little later he somewhat apologetically explained that he had sent it on to another colleague concerned with folklore. My reason for sending analyses and fresh translations of Kwakiutl and Haida poems had been that their nature as works of art was newly disclosed, and so, I thought, of interest to someone professionally concerned with literature. But no; American Indian ==folklore, not literature. This sort of response is probably less frequent now, with the growth of interest among poets in just such poetry, as reflected in the journal Alcheringa, and in the surge of interest in courses in native American literature. Use of "literature" as equivalent to "ours" (vs. "theirs") may be fading. Reasons for narrow definition in practice may be inertia and specialization, not principle. In any case, it is necessary to insist on the universality of the concerns and abilities that give rise to what we call "literature," and it seems strange that it should still be a difficulty. Consider sculpture. There seems no difficulty in recognizing African, Northwest Coast Indian (pre- and post-Columbian), or New Guinean shaping of material objects all as instances of "sculpture." Why should the case be different with African, Northwest Coast, New Guinean shaping of words? Levi-Strauss once observed that when an object came to Paris, it would be sent to the Louvre, if the code were known, and if not, to the Mus6e de I'Homme. Perhaps then, in the degree that the code is not known, we will have literature in anthropology and folklore and linguistics, as well as in departments of English and other major languages. But the difference is in our understanding, not in kind, and American Indian poetry, like Old English poetry, can become accessible. Again, there seems to be no special difficulty in categorizing as sculpture works which are great, routine, or amateurishly bad. It is not customary to say that something is not an opera on the ground that it is not great or good. Indeed, of what else except an "opera" could it be a bad instance? There is no evident reason to be different with regard to "literature." One can (I) recognize all instances as belonging to the category, and (2) still be free to evaluate them as great, good, ordinary, or bad. The alternative would be to leave "literature" something ethnocentric and arbitrarily subjective. Those of us who work with communities other than those that form the usual audience for literary criticism cannot accept this, nor can those communities. We simply do need a general, intelligible term for the verbal

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expressions of aesthetic and imaginative impulse that occur in these communities. There is really no other term in English than literature, and we will have to use it. We could perhaps agree always to use it with a minuscule 1, leaving the majuscule for any who think we should have no right to the term. What I have said is in agreement with Kernan, despite a nominal difference. To claim universality for "literature" is not to dispute his analysis of "Literature" as a Western category. I would only add that this latter category is two steps removed from the universal one; toward the end of his incisive essay, Kernan himself comments on the interdependence between "fine" and "popular" literature. Recognition of these two strands must qualify the earlier characterization of Literature as in adversary relationship to society. Throughout the period there has of course been a stream of novels, stories, and poems, considered and considering itself as literature, that has supported the mainstream of the culture and implemented its values. Kernan's concluding speculation-also to be found in many of the other essays-suggests that universal foundations have importance to the health of our own society. To identify the present international literary community, as Roberts proposes, can be seen as an implementation of Butler's point about institutionalization, with regard to a portion of our own society, and, if pursued historically, of clarifying the social basis of the phenomenon analyzed by Kernan. At the end Roberts envisages enlargement of the community, but it is not clear that enlargement of the notion of "Literature" is intended as well. For anthropologists, folklorists, and linguists, such as myself, there is a related task, worth mentioning here. Having made much of the literature of peoples of the world part of our scholarly domain, we must help to make it available to the larger scholarly and public world concerned with literature, and we must help to make it available again to the communities from which it came. The first task receives more attention than the second. In this regard, I don't know if Seem is right about Proust, but his appeal to a Dionysian principle seems of little use in understanding literature in most communities in the world, wherein some satisfaction in recurrence is still possible. The cry seems a sign of the degree to which apparent order and rationality have been preempted by bureaucratic structures, leading to an impulse to deny them altogether, to identify order, rationality, continuity, etc., with the status quo. He appears to ask would-be revolutionaries to do the work of the status quo, which indeed wishes to be understood as having a monopoly of rationality and order. Perhaps Seem's (and Foucault's) impulse is akin to that of Adams (and Blake), or akin to that which motivated Sapir

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in his last years to a "psychiatric" view of culture, and a desire to recast the usual categories of grammar in terms of "living speech." 15 If so, one doesn't need a frenetic style to make the point, and one's task is not endlessly to exhibit difference, but to discover pattern and regularity in speech from new vantage points, as a partial lever in the transformation of society.

IV
For some, the argument at the beginning of III amounts to flogging a dead horse. Having flogged, I should admit that there is fault on the other side as well. Many students of the literature of minor traditions have themselves perpetuated a dichotomy, calling their subject by another name, such as "folklore" or verbal art. Some have even maintained that their subject was of value because it did not show features, such as personal creativity and aesthetic shaping, that are valued in literature. They were wrong. As indicated, such features are present. But because they have not been much sought, our understanding of them is very limited. I myself have been guilty in this regard, in that for some years I would refer materials to a purely collective entity, a tribal name such as "Wasco" (or "Wishram"). Having discovered the factor of personal and situational shaping of narrative performance and consequent text to be so important, I hope never to commit that error again.16 Let me admit further that much of the material available under the auspices of anthropology, folklore, and linguistics is marred by a failure to take adequately into account the second sense of evaluation. There are of course good and bad performances, strong and weak poems and narratives, etc. Those who study such material do so in large part because it is rewarding, just as students of fine English literature find it (we trust) rewarding. Characterizations, expressive details, imaginative worlds become part of our sense of the world. But it is clear that some of the material we have does not represent true performance, does not have the qualities we value. Sometimes intimacy and motivation can be such that a field-worker can be audience appropriate enough to elicit true performance, but when this is not the case, what is collected is not the literature, but a derivative of it. (This is the sense in which Kel15 Cf. Hymes, "Linguistic Method of Ethnography," Method and Theory in Linguistics, ed. P. L. Garvin (The Hague, 1970), p. 265. 16 Hence "Louis Simpson's 'The deserted boy,' " not "The Deserted Boy: A Wishram Myth," or the like, in n. 4.

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logg's notion of an ideal norm is universallypertinent; the relevant dimension is not so much completeness,as fullness of performance.) We have to realizehow much of what we have is an outline, an explanation, a resume,a sketch of how a story goes, but not a doing of the for narrativewith the takingof full responsibility its quality.17 do not understand me as arguing simply that the Finally, please usual study of Literatureneeds an ethnographicand ethnologicalfoundation. It does, but ethnographyand ethnologyalso need contributions from literary study. Such contributionshave in fact occurred individually (in my case, and that of some others, particularlythrough the influenceof Kenneth Burke); but there is a general relation,much in need of attention. in Much of the work of ethnographers interpretation, the sense in is is which interpretation discussedwith regardto literaryand otherworks of in our own culturaltradition. The joint underpinnings ethnography have been sporadically noted in anthropology(A. L. and interpretation Kroeber, for example, remained consciousof Dilthey and Rickert in his conceptionsof historyand culture.); but in a context in which the typical activitywas assumedto be continuingethnography,such queswere slighted. We are now in a period in which tions understandably much of the materialaccumulatedin ethnographymust be understood as referringto cultures, or stages of cultures, now irretrievablygone. If anthropology abandons these materials, in pursuit of perpetual ethnographic youth, it betrays its own hard-won heritage. Other of disciplines,especiallyhistory,may take up the interpretation some of these materials,and descendantsof the communitiesfrom which they come may wish to repossessthem, but in both respects anthropology has a mediating role to play. Indeed, this role is being taken up by a fair number of scholars,and part of anthropologyis becoming, in the old, broadsenseof the term, philology. The anthropologist, ethnographer, an interpreterof documents as is and his own. Field notes, even when the documentsare contemporary and photographs films,texts do not speakunivocally.18 face literaryquestionsin presentingfindings. What Anthropologists makes an account of ethnographicfact convincing? The impersonality of tone? The selectivemarshalingof incident? The rhetoricof statistics and tables? An accepted terminology? Again, how much of the
17 Cf. Hymes, "Breakthrough into Performance," Folklore: Communication and Performance, ed. D. Ben Amos and K. Goldstein (The Hague, forthcoming in 1974). 18 On these issues, see Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), Ch. i.

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effective sense anthropologists have of the ethnographic world is based on personal anecdotes, narratives transmitted in conversation? And what are we to make of the increasingly frequent phenomenon of ethnographers publishing one book, to satisfy their scientific obligation, and then a second book, to satisfy themselves, to tell what the experience underlying the first book was really like? What I wish to suggest is that in evaluating ethnographies we are influenced by considerations that influence our interpretation of works of literature; that when ethnographic accounts lack some of the qualities to be found in novels, readers may miss them, and, even more instructive, the writers may miss them. There is an inescapable tension in ethnography between the forms, the rhetorical and literary forms, considered necessary for presentation (and persuasion of colleagues), and the narrative form natural to the experience of the work, and natural to the meaningful report of it in other than monographic contexts. I would even suggest that the scientific styles often imposed on ethnographic writing may produce, not objectivity, but distortion. This is an old problem-I was told of a Berkeley ethnographer in the I930s who said, data in hand, "Now all I have to do is to take the life out of it." It is a current problem too. A man writing his doctoral dissertation last year wrote me that he was being instructed to omit all reference to himself-"I am sure that your readers want to know about the people of X, not about you." He pointed out that his own assessment of the validity of his information depended crucially on the circumstances under which it was obtained, including his relation to those circumstances. By suppressing his presence, he was suppressing an opportunity for anyone else to evaluate the validity of his report. Moreover, there were aspects of the material from which he could hardly be excised. When an election was held to send a representative somewhere, the community in which he worked elected him. In sum, I am suggesting that an ethnographic account is partly to be assessed in terms of attributes properly investigated in literature and that a frankly narrative presentation, drawing upon literary skills, is in some cases the most accurate, or even the only way to convey essential qualities of communities and events. This is not to reduce ethnography to literary creation. The ethnographer has other means available for some purposes (statistics, questionnaires, etc.-though, now, novelists are making use of any and all paraphernalia too) and is not free to invent incident, however apt it might be. But ethnography and literature do have an inescapable common element, such that some contributions to literature (in terms of their institutional audience) are valuable contributions to ethnography in their accomplishment, and that some

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ethnographies are the worse for their literary inadequacies, some the better, scientifically, for their literary skills.19 There is, then, a mutual contribution of literary study and ethnography to each other, both as to the interpretation and the production of the kinds of works with which each is principally concerned.

V
It should be clear that the point of view I have expressed, here as elsewhere, is essentially in accord with Todorov's penetrating analysis, and proposal for a typology of discourses. I have held to the term literature as a justification for attention and acceptance with regard to Native American literature and the like, and because I anticipate that empirical and comparative studies will justify it as designation for a major part, or set of dimensions and features, of such a typology. I think that our present critical, dissolving stage will lead eventually to a stage of synthesis.
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

19 Nothing of what I say here is new, except perhaps the effort to bring these matters to focus in this way. I am deeply indebted to John Szwed for numerous conversations in this regard.