Anthony K Webster
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3616683 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Anthony K Webster |
| NOMBRES | Anthony K |
| APELLIDO | Webster |
| FIRMA | WEBSTER A K |
| AFILIACIONES | The University of Texas at Austin |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 48 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 150 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1999 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Playing in the Slipstream
Commentary
Dialogues
The relationship between anthropology and literature has attracted renewed theoretical energy in recent years (Brandel 2020; Debaene 2014; Fassin 2014; Reed 2018; Wulff 2016), developing and deepening connections with, for example, anthropological theories of art (Reed 2011), religion (Furani 2012), subjectivity (Olszewska 2015), and ethics (Bush 2017), as well as with allied fields and traditions, including postcolonial theory (Sadana 2012), Bou…
Whorf, Navajo Poetry, and Ethnopoetic Dialoging
This paper engages something of the legacy of Benjamin Lee Whorf in Americanist anthropology. The first part of the paper critiques Whorf for erasing the dialogue that constituted the epistemological foundations of his ethnographic and linguistic writings. It contrasts that critique by complimenting Whorf’s moral optimism and his desire to pursue cross-cultural and cross-linguistic understanding. The paper then moves to an ethnopoetic dialoging a…
Yukhíti Kóy
Speech play and language ideologies in Navajo terminology development
In this article we combine a concern with speech play and language ideologies to investigate contemporary Navajo terminology development. This article presents some recent cases of lexical elaboration in context, and argues that neologisms in Navajo are often fleeting, shifting, or humorous practices that reflect and recreate individual agency, intimate grammars, and local language ideologies. They also reflect an unexpected continuity in what is…
From Hóyéé to Hajinei
This paper examines the use of co-switching in Navajo written poetry. I look specifically at the use of code-switching from English dominant poems to Navajo. I outline three general semantic domains that are most commonly code-switched from English to Navajo: 1) emotions; 2) mythic characters; and 3) traditional place-names. I suggest that this has to do with a general linguistic ideology that understands these domains as incommensurate with Engl…
On Multiplying Echoes
This article revisits a Navajo poem examined by Blackhorse Mitchell and myself in a previous publication, highlighting the nature, purposes, and importance of punning, echoing, and sonic texture in Navajo poetics, and raising the possibility of a specific political reference in the poem
Reflections on Joel Sherzer (1942-2022)
Reflections on Joel Sherzer (1942–2022): A “Circumstantial” Special Issue Anthony K. Webster The most powerful of my memories are only half true. —Elizabeth Bowen “Out of a Book” (1950:264) I first encountered Joel Sherzer through his writing.1 It was my first year in graduate school at New Mexico State University. I was taking the department seminar that introduced new students to the kinds of things done in the department. Each week a different…
Let Them Know How I Was or Something Like That, You Know
In this article, I present something of the ways that a young Navajo poet, Kay, tells me her lingual life history in an interview I did with her in February 2001. I also place it in conversation with a poem, “The Yards of Darkness,” she read twice at an open mic at Diné College. I then follow the contours of the transcript with Kay as it leads to a moment of confrontation—of my expectations and her life experiences. This gives us a glimpse at a w…
Poetics, Poetry, and Ethnopoetics
This entry considers the history of ethnopoetic exploration in linguistic anthropology over the last hundred years, beginning with Franz Boas. We discuss rhetorical‐poetic structuring devices, aesthetic ideologies, craft and inspiration, linguistic relativity, and methodological considerations including experimental transcription styles. We provide examples from several Indigenous languages, including extended examples from Navajo. Throughout, we…
From Literacy/Literacies to Graphic Pluralism and Inscriptive Practices
This article considers the ongoing importance of studying writing practices within and beyond anthropology. The works included here concentrate on scholarship that has appeared since the productive yet divisive debates that established literacy as a plural phenomenon that is best studied ethnographically. It focuses on research that surveys the multiplicity of graphic forms, the changing notions of literacies, and the ways that literacy is implic…
Joel Sherzer and the Importance of Staying Discourse-Centered
(Ethno)Poetics and Perspectivism
This essay honors the work of Joel Sherzer by using his discourse-centered approach to language and culture as a way to investigate the place of speech play and verbal art in concerns with interpretative frameworks. An ethnographic and linguistic analysis of a brief poem by Navajo poet Rex Lee Jim is then presented as an example of such an approach. Sherzer's concern with ambiguity is highlighted as a way to contrast a discourse-centered approach…
“So it's got three meanings dil dil
This article engages questions about translation, phonological iconicity, and seductive ideophony. I begin by discussing the work of Paul Friedrich as it relates to questions of linguistic relativity and poetics and the qualities of music and myth that constitute poetry. I then present a poem written in Navajo by Rex Lee Jim and four translations of the poem. Three are from Navajo consultants and one of those translations will be, from a certain …
A Line Will Take Us Hours Maybe
In this article, I think through questions of craft and inspiration in the creation of poetry. My interests are in the ways that languages, individuals, and cultures are intertwined. I take an ethnographic perspective on the question and a comparative approach as well. I juxtapose my work with Navajo poets with work on Afghan poets, Yemeni cassette poets, Israeli poetry workshops, and Bergamasco poets. I attend, where possible, to the views of sp…
"Why Tséhootsooí Does Not Equal "Kit Carson Drive
This article reflects on the controversy in the Navajo Nation of changing the name of Kit Carson Drive to the Navajo place name Tséhootsooí. I outline the structure and use of traditional Navajo place names and then show that Navajo place names have had a renaissance in signage for shopping centers and elsewhere. I then detail the controversy over a proposal to change a street name in Fort Defiance. Place names are not neutral, but fully implicat…
A Holistic Humanities of Speaking
We take up Boas's commitment to the establishment of a large corpus of texts from the indigenous languages and peoples of the Americas, examining what we take to be his fundamental principles: using texts as the philological record from which to document and explore language, culture, and intellectual life on their own terms; training speakers to engage in documentation through the creation and analysis of texts; and a focus on the emergence of p…
The art of failure in translating a Navajo poem
This article engages John Ciardi's famous dictum that translation is ' the art of failure ' by engaging in a thick translation and a creative transposition of a short poem in Navajo by Rex Lee Jim. I begin with reflections on recent discussions in anthropology on translation and voice - both of which will be relevant to the argument advanced in my discussion of Jim's poem. I then work through a transcript of an interview with Jim about his poetry…
Plaza ‘góó and before he can respond
This article suggests that much of the use of the Navajo language in contemporary Navajo written poetry, especially English dominant poetry, serves as an icon of proper Navajo usage. It is a purist view of the Navajo language. Navajo poetry is implicated, even if tacitly, in a discourse of linguistic purism that is tied to an oppositional linguistic ideology that sees Navajo and English as discrete and distinct “objects.” Navajo poetry erases the…
The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry
This article takes seriously Edward Sapir's observation about poetry as an example of linguistic relativity. Taking my cue from Dwight Bolinger's "word affinities," this article reports on the ways sounds of poetry evoke and convoke imaginative possibilities through phonological iconicity. In working with Navajos in translating poetry, I have come to appreciate the sound suggestiveness of that poetry and the imaginative possibilities that are bou…
Everything Got Kinda Strange after a While
Inspired by an inquiry from a Navajo friend about why I had not published on a particular poem by Rex Lee Jim, this paper engages that question through three interconnected themes. First, there will be an analysis of the poem by Jim where I translate the poem but also place it within the context of Navajo concerns with k'é (reciprocity, generosity). Second, I turn to thinking through some of the issues brought out in the translation of the Navajo…
A Note on Albert Gatschet’s Lipan Apache Elicitations
An analysis of the Albert Gatschet's Lipan Apache notebook concerning color terms reveals something about the linguistic elicitation session between Gatschet and Apache John. In revealing something of that interaction, this note is a small contribution to a linguistically informed ethnohistory of communication
Dif' G'one'and Semiotic Calquing A Signography of the Linguistic Landscape of the Navajo Nation
In this article, I discuss the linguistic landscape of officially sanctioned street name signage on the Navajo Nation. Given the Navajo Nation’s Enhanced 9-1-1 and Rural Addressing Initiative, this is a moment of transition for such signage. First I describe, in broad strokes, the linguistic landscape of the Navajo Nation. I then look at street name signs that are ostensibly written in Navajo in Ft. Defiance, AZ. These signs show “spectacular typ…
We Will Dance Our Truth
Book Review| July 01 2013 We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances. By David Delgado Shorter. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Pp. Anthony K. Webster Anthony K. Webster Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2013) 126 (501): 338–340. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.126.501.0338 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon…
Who reads Navajo poetry and what are they reading? Exploring the semiotic functions of contemporary written Navajo
This paper analyzes contemporary written Navajo in public signs, newspapers, and poetry. While the number of public space displays of written Navajo has increased in recent years, this has not met with an increase in either Navajo literacy or in the number of Navajo speakers. This paper argues that much written Navajo is read not for semantico-referential content, but either as icons and indexes of Navajo spaces and identity or as icons and index…
A Holistic Humanities of Speaking
We take up Boas's commitment to the establishment of a large corpus of texts from the indigenous languages and peoples of the Americas, examining what we take to be his fundamental principles: using texts as the philological record from which to document and explore language, culture, and intellectual life on their own terms; training speakers to engage in documentation through the creation and analysis of texts; and a focus on the emergence of p…
To all the former cats and stomps of the Navajo Nation
This article is concerned with understanding and analyzing the role of the individual in Navajo poetry performances, in particular, three performances of putatively the same poem by the Navajo poet Laura Tohe. One performance is the written orthographic poem, and the other two are oral performances that have been recorded and analyzed. It is argued that a focus on the individual performer and on multiple performances can provide insight into the …
We Don't Know What We Become
We offer an ethnopoetic interpretation of an expressive feature- insertion of a velar fricative after the stem-initial consonant-that aids in indicating a "lack of control" in a poem written in Navajo by the poet Rex Lee Jim. We focus on how this expressive device is used to indicate an affective stance; the affinity in sound between the optional consonant cluster -chx- in this poem and the chx- found in the Navajo verb stem -chxǫ' 'ugly, disorde…
On Intimate Grammars With Examples From Navajo English, Navlish, and Navajo
This article investigates the ways that individuals engage with languages. Building on the work of Elizabeth Povinelli (2006) and Michael Herzfeld (1997), this article argues for the importance of understanding intimate grammars. Intimate grammars are an emotionally saturated use of language that runs the risk of negative evaluation by outsiders (or non-outsiders) but are deeply and expressively feelingful for individuals. Intimate grammars are i…
The Mouse That Sucked
Single Algonkin words are like tiny imagist poems. Edward Sapir, Language In the final chapter of his 1921 classic book Language, Edward Sapir makes the oft-quoted statement that serves as my epigraph. Earlier in that same chapter on language and literature, Sapir offered what I take to be a caution to erstwhile translators: "Every language is itself a collective art of expression. There is concealed in it a particular set of esthetic factors—pho…
(Ethno)Poetics and Perspectivism
This essay honors the work of Joel Sherzer by using his discourse-centered approach to language and culture as a way to investigate the place of speech play and verbal art in concerns with interpretative frameworks. An ethnographic and linguistic analysis of a brief poem by Navajo poet Rex Lee Jim is then presented as an example of such an approach. Sherzer's concern with ambiguity is highlighted as a way to contrast a discourse-centered approach…
The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry
This article takes seriously Edward Sapir's observation about poetry as an example of linguistic relativity. Taking my cue from Dwight Bolinger's "word affinities," this article reports on the ways sounds of poetry evoke and convoke imaginative possibilities through phonological iconicity. In working with Navajos in translating poetry, I have come to appreciate the sound suggestiveness of that poetry and the imaginative possibilities that are bou…
Dif' G'one'and Semiotic Calquing A Signography of the Linguistic Landscape of the Navajo Nation
In this article, I discuss the linguistic landscape of officially sanctioned street name signage on the Navajo Nation. Given the Navajo Nation’s Enhanced 9-1-1 and Rural Addressing Initiative, this is a moment of transition for such signage. First I describe, in broad strokes, the linguistic landscape of the Navajo Nation. I then look at street name signs that are ostensibly written in Navajo in Ft. Defiance, AZ. These signs show “spectacular typ…
Running Again, Roasting Again, Touching Again
This article analyzes a Coyote narrative told by John Watchman to Edward Sapir in Navajo. While it has been widely documented that Navajo curing ways are tightly organized by the use of repetition, there has been far less investigation of repetition in other genres of Navajo verbal art. This article shows that the use of pairing and the semeliterative aspect create a sense of completion in Watchman's narrative. It is argued that repetition may oc…
From Literacy/Literacies to Graphic Pluralism and Inscriptive Practices
This article considers the ongoing importance of studying writing practices within and beyond anthropology. The works included here concentrate on scholarship that has appeared since the productive yet divisive debates that established literacy as a plural phenomenon that is best studied ethnographically. It focuses on research that surveys the multiplicity of graphic forms, the changing notions of literacies, and the ways that literacy is implic…
The art of failure in translating a Navajo poem
This article engages John Ciardi's famous dictum that translation is ' the art of failure ' by engaging in a thick translation and a creative transposition of a short poem in Navajo by Rex Lee Jim. I begin with reflections on recent discussions in anthropology on translation and voice - both of which will be relevant to the argument advanced in my discussion of Jim's poem. I then work through a transcript of an interview with Jim about his poetry…
Plaza ‘góó and before he can respond
This article suggests that much of the use of the Navajo language in contemporary Navajo written poetry, especially English dominant poetry, serves as an icon of proper Navajo usage. It is a purist view of the Navajo language. Navajo poetry is implicated, even if tacitly, in a discourse of linguistic purism that is tied to an oppositional linguistic ideology that sees Navajo and English as discrete and distinct “objects.” Navajo poetry erases the…
Don't Talk About It
This article follows the theme of this JAR special issue—from self-suppression to expressive genres—as a way to investigate Navajo poets’ ordeals with languages. If ordeals of languages arise from languages as objects of scrutiny, then intimate grammars can be seen as the use of expressive genres in the face of such ordeals of language. I look first at the ways in which Navajo is an object of scrutiny and how, as objects of scrutiny, Navajos have…
Imagining Navajo in the Boarding School
In this article I investigate Navajo poet Laura Tohe's uses of metapragmatic terms in three literary works found in her bookNo Parole Today. Tohe's book focuses on the boarding school experience and is especially concerned with issues of language use. I argue that Tohe uses metadiscourses that both dramatize language use but also create affectively potent relations between speakers and the languages they use. These metadiscourses are implicit met…
The poetics and politics of Navajo ideophony in contemporary Navajo poetry
To give an imagination to the listeners
Ideophony is a neglected aspect of investigations of world poetic traditions. This article looks at the use of ideophony in a variety of Navajo poetic genres. Examples are given from Navajo place-names, narratives, and songs. A final example involves the use of ideophony in contemporary written Navajo poetry. Using the work of Woodbury, Friedrich, and Becker it is argued that ideophones are an example of form-dependent expression, poetic indeterm…
Let Them Know How I Was or Something Like That, You Know
In this article, I present something of the ways that a young Navajo poet, Kay, tells me her lingual life history in an interview I did with her in February 2001. I also place it in conversation with a poem, “The Yards of Darkness,” she read twice at an open mic at Diné College. I then follow the contours of the transcript with Kay as it leads to a moment of confrontation—of my expectations and her life experiences. This gives us a glimpse at a w…
Joel Sherzer and the Importance of Staying Discourse-Centered
Sam Kenoi's Coyote Stories
INTRODUCTION\nMy goal in this paper is to present some of the rhetorical-poetic devices employed by Samuel E. Kenoi, a Chiricahua Apache, who told eight Coyote narratives in his Native language to Harry Hoijer in the early 1930s. This paper adds to the growing body of literature analyzing Native American discourse as highly structured. Such structures include shared, culturally constituted, rhetorical-poetic devices, individual strategies, and th…
"Why Tséhootsooí Does Not Equal "Kit Carson Drive
This article reflects on the controversy in the Navajo Nation of changing the name of Kit Carson Drive to the Navajo place name Tséhootsooí. I outline the structure and use of traditional Navajo place names and then show that Navajo place names have had a renaissance in signage for shopping centers and elsewhere. I then detail the controversy over a proposal to change a street name in Fort Defiance. Place names are not neutral, but fully implicat…
Who reads Navajo poetry and what are they reading? Exploring the semiotic functions of contemporary written Navajo
This paper analyzes contemporary written Navajo in public signs, newspapers, and poetry. While the number of public space displays of written Navajo has increased in recent years, this has not met with an increase in either Navajo literacy or in the number of Navajo speakers. This paper argues that much written Navajo is read not for semantico-referential content, but either as icons and indexes of Navajo spaces and identity or as icons and index…
A Note On Navajo Interlingual Puns
Sapir (1932) early on noted the use of intralingual puns in Navajo. This note de-scribes six interlingual puns among Navajos. Four of the puns are from English into Navajo and two concern Navajo into English puns. Such interlingual puns are then com-pared to interlingual puns found in Nakota and Western Apache. It is argued that inter-lingual puns are one way for Native Americans to engage in subtle forms of social commentary about and critique o…
Lipan Apache Placenames of Augustina Zuazua
This paper presents twenty-two Lipan Apache placenames as used by Augustina Zuazua in a narrative to Harry Hoijer concerning Lipan history. Lipan Apache is now considered by most linguists to be largely an extinct language. However these placenames provide a glimpse into the place-naming practices of the Lipan as well as reveal how placenames were discursively used. I analyze the placenames based on the semantic and morphological components of th…
Being in Being
Being in Being: The Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay. Robert Bringhurst. ed. and trans. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. 397 pp
Morris Edward Opler (1907-1996)
Sam Kenoi's Coyote Stories
INTRODUCTION\nMy goal in this paper is to present some of the rhetorical-poetic devices employed by Samuel E. Kenoi, a Chiricahua Apache, who told eight Coyote narratives in his Native language to Harry Hoijer in the early 1930s. This paper adds to the growing body of literature analyzing Native American discourse as highly structured. Such structures include shared, culturally constituted, rhetorical-poetic devices, individual strategies, and th…
Morris Edward Opler (1907-1996)
Being in Being
Being in Being: The Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay. Robert Bringhurst. ed. and trans. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. 397 pp
Coyote Poems
We are in constant rapport with an intelligence in which all experiences remote and proximate, “trivial” and “important,” are held like waving reeds in the sensitive transparency of a brook.\n—Edward Sapir, Left-Handed, Son of Old Man Hat\nMuch has been written from ethnographic, linguistic, and ethnopoetic perspectives concerning Native American oral poetry. Far less, however, has been written from these perspectives concerning written or “ortho…
The Mouse That Sucked
Single Algonkin words are like tiny imagist poems. Edward Sapir, Language In the final chapter of his 1921 classic book Language, Edward Sapir makes the oft-quoted statement that serves as my epigraph. Earlier in that same chapter on language and literature, Sapir offered what I take to be a caution to erstwhile translators: "Every language is itself a collective art of expression. There is concealed in it a particular set of esthetic factors—pho…
The Comanche Code Talkers of World War II
David W. Samuels , Putting a song on top of it
David W. Samuels, Putting a song on top of it: Expression and identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. Pp. x, 324. Hb. $39.95.David W. Samuels's Putting a song on top of it is at once an explication of current Western Apache practices and a study of how Western Apaches imagine and evoke “history” through music. Samuels's purpose is to describe and at times explain the multifaceted ways Western Apac…
Lipan Apache Placenames of Augustina Zuazua
This paper presents twenty-two Lipan Apache placenames as used by Augustina Zuazua in a narrative to Harry Hoijer concerning Lipan history. Lipan Apache is now considered by most linguists to be largely an extinct language. However these placenames provide a glimpse into the place-naming practices of the Lipan as well as reveal how placenames were discursively used. I analyze the placenames based on the semantic and morphological components of th…
Reading William Bittle and Charles Brant
This article analyzes the writings of William Bittle and Charles Brant concerning “contemporary” Plains Apaches in the 1960s. Specifically, it examines how Bittle (1962) argues for agency among the Plains Apache through his discussion of the Manatidie dance and how Brant (1969) denies agency to the Plains Apache through his introduction to Jim Whitewolf’s life-story. For Brant (1964), the Plains Apache were “disintegrating.” For Bittle, the Plain…
A Note on Plains Apache Warpath Vocabulary
This note looks at a Plains Apache anatomical term found in Bross (1971). The form is considered an “old word” by Bross’s consultants. However, when the former is compared to a similar word from Opler and Hoijer’s (1940) account of the Chiricahua Apache warpath language, it appears that this form may be evidence of the much attested (Bittle 1979), but little documented, Plains Apache warpath vocabulary
To give an imagination to the listeners
Ideophony is a neglected aspect of investigations of world poetic traditions. This article looks at the use of ideophony in a variety of Navajo poetic genres. Examples are given from Navajo place-names, narratives, and songs. A final example involves the use of ideophony in contemporary written Navajo poetry. Using the work of Woodbury, Friedrich, and Becker it is argued that ideophones are an example of form-dependent expression, poetic indeterm…
To all the former cats and stomps of the Navajo Nation
This article is concerned with understanding and analyzing the role of the individual in Navajo poetry performances, in particular, three performances of putatively the same poem by the Navajo poet Laura Tohe. One performance is the written orthographic poem, and the other two are oral performances that have been recorded and analyzed. It is argued that a focus on the individual performer and on multiple performances can provide insight into the …
Running Again, Roasting Again, Touching Again
This article analyzes a Coyote narrative told by John Watchman to Edward Sapir in Navajo. While it has been widely documented that Navajo curing ways are tightly organized by the use of repetition, there has been far less investigation of repetition in other genres of Navajo verbal art. This article shows that the use of pairing and the semeliterative aspect create a sense of completion in Watchman's narrative. It is argued that repetition may oc…
The poetics and politics of Navajo ideophony in contemporary Navajo poetry
Tséyi' first, because Navajo language was here before contact”
This article analyzes portions of an intercultural performance by Navajo poet Laura Tohe to a non-Navajo audience in rural Illinois. By analyzing Tohe's metalinguistic commentaries about the use of Navajo, as well as her actual uses of Navajo in her performance, it is argued that Tohe presents a metasemiotic stereotype of Navajo language users. In performing such stereotypic displays, Tohe also indexes her own Navajo identity and becomes iconic o…
A Note On Navajo Interlingual Puns
Sapir (1932) early on noted the use of intralingual puns in Navajo. This note de-scribes six interlingual puns among Navajos. Four of the puns are from English into Navajo and two concern Navajo into English puns. Such interlingual puns are then com-pared to interlingual puns found in Nakota and Western Apache. It is argued that inter-lingual puns are one way for Native Americans to engage in subtle forms of social commentary about and critique o…
On Intimate Grammars With Examples From Navajo English, Navlish, and Navajo
This article investigates the ways that individuals engage with languages. Building on the work of Elizabeth Povinelli (2006) and Michael Herzfeld (1997), this article argues for the importance of understanding intimate grammars. Intimate grammars are an emotionally saturated use of language that runs the risk of negative evaluation by outsiders (or non-outsiders) but are deeply and expressively feelingful for individuals. Intimate grammars are i…
Imagining Navajo in the Boarding School
In this article I investigate Navajo poet Laura Tohe's uses of metapragmatic terms in three literary works found in her bookNo Parole Today. Tohe's book focuses on the boarding school experience and is especially concerned with issues of language use. I argue that Tohe uses metadiscourses that both dramatize language use but also create affectively potent relations between speakers and the languages they use. These metadiscourses are implicit met…
Still, she didn't see what I was trying to say
This paper outlines the ways that Navajo poetry was framed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as "unsophisticated" and non-literary by the introductory materials written by non-Native Americans for collections of Native American poetry. At issue was a view that saw the use of Navajo English, a distinctive vernacular dialect, as a deficient form of language use and the ways this was iconically read as an exemplar of the "inarticulate" Indian stere…
We Don't Know What We Become
We offer an ethnopoetic interpretation of an expressive feature- insertion of a velar fricative after the stem-initial consonant-that aids in indicating a "lack of control" in a poem written in Navajo by the poet Rex Lee Jim. We focus on how this expressive device is used to indicate an affective stance; the affinity in sound between the optional consonant cluster -chx- in this poem and the chx- found in the Navajo verb stem -chxǫ' 'ugly, disorde…
Who reads Navajo poetry and what are they reading? Exploring the semiotic functions of contemporary written Navajo
This paper analyzes contemporary written Navajo in public signs, newspapers, and poetry. While the number of public space displays of written Navajo has increased in recent years, this has not met with an increase in either Navajo literacy or in the number of Navajo speakers. This paper argues that much written Navajo is read not for semantico-referential content, but either as icons and indexes of Navajo spaces and identity or as icons and index…
Blackhorse Mitchell's Beauty of Navajoland
Why do some Navajo poets write poetry that describes “ugliness” on the Navajo Nation and what do they believe they are doing by writing that poetry? I examine those questions by focusing on Blackhorse Mitchell's poem “Beauty of Navajoland.” I first discuss a performance of this poem to a Navajo and non-Navajo audience at Swarthmore College. I turn to discussions I had with Mitchell about his poetry and this poem. Contrary to an injunction on the …
Don't Talk About It
This article follows the theme of this JAR special issue—from self-suppression to expressive genres—as a way to investigate Navajo poets’ ordeals with languages. If ordeals of languages arise from languages as objects of scrutiny, then intimate grammars can be seen as the use of expressive genres in the face of such ordeals of language. I look first at the ways in which Navajo is an object of scrutiny and how, as objects of scrutiny, Navajos have…
Ordeals of Language
In this introductory piece we discuss Ellen Basso’s critical insight concerning ordeals of language as the framework for the papers of this special issue. An ordeal of language occurs when one’s voice is affected by powerful others. The papers included here deal with this and other issues that have driven Basso’s career. Here we take inspiration not only from her theoretical innovation but also her ethnographic journey between North America and A…
We Will Dance Our Truth
Book Review| July 01 2013 We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances. By David Delgado Shorter. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Pp. Anthony K. Webster Anthony K. Webster Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2013) 126 (501): 338–340. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.126.501.0338 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon…
Linguistics (32 obras) · Philosophy (32 obras) · History (28 obras) · Navajo (28 obras) · Art (24 obras) · Sociology (24 obras) · Multilingual Education and Policy (19 obras) · Literature (18 obras) · Poetry (18 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (17 obras)