Language for Throat and Tongue: Elise Paschen’s “Blood Wolf Moon”

“[Elise] Paschen’s writing give new meaning to the term ‘ethnopoetics,’ taking it outside the boundaries of ‘traditional societies,’ ‘the informant,’ and the outsider who goes in to record ‘pre-literate narratives.'”

The focus of anthropologists on fieldwork in oral history over the past century has been successful in its preservationist aspect regarding the narratives of “pre-literate” cultures. Ethnographers have performed sound recordings and transcriptions that collectively have made available a vast corpus of stories of traditional societies around the world, including ones threatened by disappearance or mutation by means of syncretism, documenting both continuity and change. Often, the focus has been on extracting information to be analyzed, to make sense of a societal configuration. Then, the field of ethnopoetics emerged in the 1960s, led in the United States by such figures as Jerome Rothenberg and Dell Hymes, who shifted some of the focus to performance in itself, thus treating indigenous verbal expressions as art. Yet even after this promising and fertile term—ethnopoetics—emerged as a category of analysis, “narrative” continued to be treated more for its storytelling or essay-equivalent signifying aspects than for its poetics proper. To date, there exists no consistently worked out poetic theory, or set of theories, which focus on form in indigenous verbal performance as a thing in itself. In the area most familiar to me, Alison Krögel has been in the vanguard, with her Musuq Illa Quechua poetics project on the harawi song form, adopted by contemporary Peruvian writers, some urban, many mestizo, who are writing contemporary poetry based on an ancient form.

Researchers such as Dennis Tedlock, with sensitive empathy, linguistic mastery of the Quiché language, and the benefit of long stints of fieldwork among that society, translated skillfully into entertainingly readable English such masterpieces of ancient art as the Mayan epic Popol Vuh and, in doing so, tacitly became a literary translator as well as expert ethnographer. Yet even Tedlock, in “Toward an Oral Poetics,” in speaking of more ancient narratives, asserts that “For the most part, the narrators in primary oral cultures do not sing stories but speak them. They do not memorize stories but remember them.” Yet, in truth, there is much song still to be accounted for in such performances.

Dell Hymes, a leading figure in the emergence of ethnopoetics in the 1970s, opened the door a crack to a more aesthetic mode of contemplation, going so far in his essay “Anthropology and Poetry” as to analyze the minority phenomenon of professional ethnographers who also write poetry:

“I can’t say that poets generally need to be ethnographers, though some obviously have ethnographic gifts. I do think it is clear that some kinds of ethnographic work require poetic gifts. There are several respects in which ‘poetry is a continuation of anthropology by other means.”