Written Report

Topic: Historical and Biographical Approaches

Submitted by:

Danny Fe B. Masinadiong

BSED-ENGLISH (EDE3A)

Submitted to:

Nelson P. Pastolero, PhD.

Faculty, EL 101 (Language, Culture and Society)

Faculty of Teacher Education

 Studies of Discourse
Many linguistic anthropologists are aware that those native societies in South and Central
America that have remained relatively intact are especially suitable for the study of
ethnopoetics.
What is ethnopoetics?
Ethnopoetics should be concerned with more than simply poetic lines (Moore 2013).
Ethnopoetics has been concerned with individual creativity and the careful attention to linguistic
details (Hymes 1981; Tedlock 1983; Johnstone 1996). As Donald Bahr (1986: 171) notes,
“ethnopoetics should be more than the study of technique … it should include meaning and use.”
As Blommaert (2006:259) writes, “ethnopoetic work is one way of addressing the main issue in
ethnography: to describe and reconstruct languages not in the sense of stable, closed and
internally homogeneous units characterizing mankind … but as ordered complexes of genres,
styles, registers and forms of use.” Such a perspective must
Engage individual poets, but also the languages they use and the connections they make. Related
to that, as Blommaert (2006: 266) adds, “ultimately, what ethnopoetics does is to show voice, to
visualize the particular ways—often deviant from hegemonic norms—in which subjects produce
meaning.” I see the recognition of voice as central to a concern with ethnopoetics (Kroskrity and
Webster 2015).

To be sure, discourse among these people is rarely poetic for the sake of aesthetic effect alone;
the poetic aspects of discourse are almost invariably integrated with ceremonial, ritual, magical,
curative, political or other functions. Sherzer (1986) illustrated the co-occurence of the aesthetic
and pragmatic functions by analyzing a speech made up in 1970 on one of the San Blas island
along the northerneast cost of Panama. The occasion for this particular speech was the
homecoming of Olowitinappi.
Who is Olowitinappi?
Olowitinappi is one of the outstanding Kuna curing specialist in the village of Mulatuppu. On his
return the village community was eager to hear from him what new curing practices he had
learned and how the scholarship money had been spent. His presentation took place in the
centrally located gathering house of the village. Part of his speech was devoted to financial
accounting for the money he had received. In short, the presentation describe in some detail his
experiences during study trip. He knows that verbal art is greatly valued among his people and
that his presentation will be critically evaluated.
Olowitinappi’s Speech
An analysis of Olowitinappi's speech must therefore also take into account the poetic and
rhetorical devices used in its performance. (In Kuna culture, verbal performers are usually men;
women express their artistic talents primarily by making colorful appliquéd blouses.)To begin
with paralinguistic features, need to be considered – Olowitinappi stretched out certain words or
phrases to emphasized important points; made use of rising pitch, vibrating voice, and pausing
for effect, and on several occasions increase or decrease of his volume. Direct quotations of
others as well as of oneself are prominent feature of Kuna discourse, such quotations, identified
by the use of soke or soka occurred throughout Olowitinappi’s speech.
Olowitinappi’s speech consisted of a series of narrative episodes, embellished by the used of
understatement, irony and humor as well as parallelism, allusions, metaphors. (for example,
“golden people” refers to the Kuna, and “encountering vine” refers to being bitten by a snake – a
common Kuna euphemism. As Sherzer noted elsewhere, “There is an intimate relationship
between Kuna culture and verbal aesthetics. Verbal art and verbal play are at the heart of Kuna
culture” (Sherzer 1990:6).
What is the distinction between Verbal play and Verbal art
Verbal play is playful manipulation of any aspect of a language, from the sounds to the sentence
structure to making up playful words (Sherzer & Webster, 2017). Things like puns, riddles,
mnemonics, and even tongue twisters can be considered forms of verbal play.
Verbal art is any art form that contains spoken (or sung) language. The most common example of
verbal art is songs and the study of verbal art is a major part of ethnomusicology.
Ethnomusicology is the interdisciplinary field that studies how human cultures create and use
music. In addition to music, many linguists consider verbal art to also cover things like poetry,
storytelling, and speech play (also called word play) (Fitzgerald, 2017).

References:
Bahr, Donald. 1986. “Pima Swallow Songs.” Cultural Anthropology. 1(2): 171–187.
Blommaert, Jan. 2006. “Ethnopoetics as Functional Reconstruction: Dell Hymesʼ
Narrative View of the World.” Functions of Language 13(2): 255–275.
Fitzgerald, Colleen M. 2017. Motivating the Documentation of the Verbal Arts:
Arguments from Theory and Practice. Language Documentation & Conservation. 11,
114-132.
Hymes, Dell. 1981. In Vain I Tried to Tell You. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Johnstone, Barbara. 1996. The Linguistic Individual: Self-Expression in Language and
Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kroskrity, Paul and Anthony K. Webster (eds.). 2015. The Legacy of Dell Hymes:
Ethnopoetics, Narrative Inequality, and Voice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Moore, Robert. 2013 “Reinventing Ethnopoetics” Journal of Folklore Research. 50 (1-3):
13-39.
Sherzer, Joel & Anthony Webster. 2015. Speech Play, Verbal Art, and Linguistic
Anthropology.
Tedlock, Dennis. 1983. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Webster, Anthony K. 2015. Intimate Grammars: An Ethnography of Navajo Poetry.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press.