‘Poetics’ has two different—if related—meanings for anthropologists: first the long-established meaning of the study of patterns in literary texts, traditionally carried out in the context of literary analysis; and second the approach to analysing the genres of anthropological writing itself which became popular in the 1980s.
Poetics in the first sense broadly covers both general issues such as the study of genres or the principles underlying literary formulation, and specific analyses of the stylistic and structuring properties in particular works or genres. Such questions are relevant in a general way to any anthropologist encountering examples of verbal or literary art as part of the *culture being studied, whether under the label of ‘myth’, ‘tale’, ‘life history’, ‘lament’, ‘song’ or whatever. They are also central for anthropologists with a specialist interest in, for example, *aesthetics, literary forms, verbal art, or the ‘ethnography of speaking’. In this context anthropologists often focus on performed genres (under headings like *oral literature, verbal art, *myth or *folklore); detailed analyses have been undertaken particularly by the ‘performance oriented’ American anthropologists and folklorists such as Dell Hymes, Joel Sherzer, Steven Feld and Dennis Tedlock. There is also work in narratology, a development from the structuralist analyses pioneered by †Propp and other *formalist writers. Topics include the differentiation of genres (more multi-faceted than once supposed); the analysis of stylistic and structural features such as rhythm, rhyme, parallelism and other prosodic properties; narrative themes; the interplay of different voices; figurative language, allegory and allusion; openings and closings; the structuring of episodes and themes.
For anthropologists the scope of such poetics has moved beyond merely the verbal elements of ‘texts’, to encompass paralinguistic features and wider patterns of communication and action: the ‘communicative event’, the role of audience and context, multiple voices, †dialogic meanings, the political setting, and the deeper emotive implications. The concept of ‘text’ as a bounded verbal unit for analysis is under challenge by anthropologists (and others) partly for being culture-bound, partly because even in print-based cultures it may be too simple to regard ‘the text’ as an autonomous and context-free entity. Such challenges have been reinforced by interdisciplinary †poststructuralist approaches and analyses of †intertextuality. Anthropologists now regard the performance features as part of poetics, for instance in Sherzer’s analysis of the poetics of Kuna verbal art which ‘requires attention to the interplay of linguistic and sociolinguistic structures and processes along with such aspects of the dramatization of the voice as pause, intonation, volume, and musicality’ (Sherzer 1990:16). Such poetics necessarily include consideration of *music, *dance and visual communication. The approach known as ‘ethnopoetics’ (Hymes 1981, Tedlock 1983) parallels and overlaps these developments, emphasizing particularly the poetic voices of non-Western peoples and the creative aspects of performance.
The second sense of poetics draws, similarly, on the interaction between literary and anthropological theory, analysing the conventions through which texts are constructed and interpreted. But, following Clifford and Marcus’s influential Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), it was the writings of anthropologists themselves that became the subject for analysis. Far from being objective and scientifically-neutral reports, *ethnographies are– like any poetic or narrative texts—shaped by rhetorical conventions. So it was appropriate to engage in narratological analysis of the varied ‘voices’ in such texts, and in critical assessment of the implicit claims to authority or the political contexts in which they were formulated as ‘persuasive fictions’. Similarly the sub-genres of ethnographic writing were scrutinized, as for example in Van Maanen’s account (1988) of the types of ‘tales of the field’: ‘realist’; ‘confessional’; and ‘impressionist’. This approach also often carried political and ethical overtones: anthropological writing should not only be self-critical but also convey a plurality of viewpoints rather than the single would-be authoritative voice of the researcher.
The early 1990s have seen a reaction against the extreme versions of this approach as– arguably—concerned more with navel-gazing than with attempting to communicate a responsible and valid account of the conditions and findings of anthropological research. A common middle position is to insist on the importance of being explicitly aware of the politics and poetics of one’s writing and certainly no longer to take the author’s authority for granted as the only objective word on the topic—but all the same not to give up writing monographs.
Despite the different slants on ‘poetics’, there has been some convergence. In the 1980s and 1990s anthropologists have more generally recognized that the conventions of communication—whether in oral performances encountered in the field, acclaimed art-texts of their own culture, or anthropologists’ own academic writings—are, indeed, conventions rather than ‘natural’, and thus worth ethnographic and critical analysis in the context of the cultural and political settings in which they are produced and interpreted. Similarly anthropologists are increasingly aware of the poetic and plural qualities of communication: that ambiguity, figurative language, poetry, communicative context, contested meanings, the exercise of power or a multiplicity of voices may be as significant as ‘straightforward’ information-transfer—and that, furthermore, this kind of ‘poetics’ may apply to their own varied performances (written or other) as well as to those of the cultures they study.
Atkinson, P. (1990) The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality, London: Routledge
Brady, I. (ed.) (1991) Anthropological Poetics, Savage MD: Rowman and Littlefield
Clifford, J. and G.E.Marcus (eds) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press
Feld, S. (1982) Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (new edn 1990)
Finnegan, R. (1992) Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts. A Guide to Research Practices, ASA Research Methods Series, London: Routledge
Hymes, D.H. (1981) ‘In Vain I Tried to Tell You’: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Sanjek, R.(1991) ‘The Ethnographic Present’, Man 26: 609–28
Sherzer, J. (1990) Verbal Art in San Blas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Spencer, J. (1989) ‘Anthropology as a Kind of Writing’, Man 24:145–64
Tedlock, D. (1983) The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press
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