Applied ethnopoetics

Jan Blommaert

Institute of Education, University of London

Ethnopoetics is a form of narrative analysis designed, initially, for the analysis of folk stories and based on an ethnographic performance-based understanding of narrative emphasizing that meaning is an effect of performance. It offers opportunities for analyzing voice. The ways in which speakers themselves organize stories along indexical patterns of emphasis, focus, super- and subordination and so on. As such, it is a potentially very useful tool for tracking local patterns of meaning-making in narrative. I argue that ethnopoetics could be productively applied to data in which different systems of meaning-making meet a condition that defines many important service-providing systems in globalizing contexts. Asylum applications in Western Europe are a case in point, and examples will be used from that domain, but the potential usefulness of such an applied ethnopoetics stretches into many other types of service encounters in which crosscultural storytelling is crucial. (Ethnopoetics, Asylum Seekers, Coherence, Performance, Anthropological Linguistics)

Ethnopoetics made its entre in the early 1980s with high-profile works such as Dell Hymes In Vain I Tried To Tell You (Hymes, 1982) or Dennis Tedlocks The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Tedlock, 1983) and gathered admiration in a wide interdisciplinary field of anthropologists, folklorists and linguists. Tedlock and Hymes both added volume and sophistication to ethnopoetic analysis, Tedlock with his Finding The Center (1999) and Hymes with Now I Know Only So Much (2003). Both Tedlock and Hymes used ethnopoetic analysis to do justice to the artistic richness of Native American verbal art. In Tedlocks case, the method served the purpose of rendering the features of spoken artistry visual; for Hymes, it was a method for reviving defunct oral traditions by turning written versions of folk stories in to re-oralizable ones. Despite its initial acclaim, that is pretty much where ethnopoetics stayed: in the field of Native American folk narrative. What I want to argue here is that it could be used for the analysis of different narratives, especially in so-called applied areas where narratives determine peoples fate, as in police interviews, courtroom hearings,
Requests for further information should be directed to Jan Blommaert, Institute of Education, University of London, School of Culture, Language and Communication, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK. E-mail: j.blommaert@ioe.ac.uk

Narrative Inquiry 16:1 (2006), 181190. issn 13876740 / e-issn 15699935 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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asylum application interviews, social welfare application procedures and so forth. In my discussion, I will mainly draw upon Hymes version of ethnopoetics. Hymes and Tedlock have disagreed on analytic detail but not on the fundamental issues and approach. So let us turn to the basic principles of Hymes ethnopoetics.

Ethnopoetics
Hymes ethnopoetics revolves around a conception of narratives as primarily organized in terms of formal and aesthetic poetic patterns, not in terms of content or thematic patterns. Narrative is therefore to be seen as a form of action, of performance, and the meanings it generates are effects of performance. Narratives, seen from this perspective, are organized in lines and in groups of lines (verses, stanzas), and the organization of lines in narratives is a kind of implicit patterning that creates narrative effect: emphasis and insistence, narrative-thematic divisions and so on (see esp. Hymes, 1998, 1996, pp. 166167). Content, in other words, is an effect of the formal organization of a narrative: What there is to be told emerges out of how it is being told. The metric that can be distinguished in narratives is linguistic, but also cultural (indexical, see Silverstein, 1985, 1997) and therefore semantic. This is an old anthropological view the connections with Whorf are obvious and it is influenced by Jakobsons (1960) poetic-aesthetic conception of language structure. Jakobsons influence becomes clear when we look at how Hymes defines the relations between lines: The relations between lines and groups of lines are based on the general principle of poetic organization called equivalence and [e]quivalence may involve any feature of language (Hymes, 1996, p. 166): prosodic aspects such as stress, pauses, pitch and intonation, syntactic aspects such as similarity or parallelism in grammatical structure, morpho-grammatical aspects such as similarity in verb tense or aspect, phonetic aspects such as alliteration and rhyme and lexico-syntactic aspects such as the use of certain particles or discourse markers. Units thus identified then combine into larger ones, verses and stanzas, and again equivalence is the formal principle that identifies such units: A transition from one unit to another can be marked by a shift in intonation or prosody, a change in the dominant particles used for marking lines, a change in verb tense, a lexical change and so forth. Let us consider an example one that will illustrate, in the same move, the point I want to make in this paper. The example we shall discuss here is a small fragment of the beginning of a long narrative interview, recorded in late 1998 by two students (A and B) with a female refugee from Somalia whom we shall call Habiba (H). What follows is in response to an invitation to introduce herself, and it will become clear that Habiba has only limited command of English: This is a story told with minimal linguistic resources (see Blommaert, 2001).
Im from *Somalia and my name is Habiba Mohammed and I=I have *five childrens and I coming here before the children are coming=when I was euh when I=Im arrive in Belgium I was *alone\ yeah\in sake of the war=the war of Somalia\

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and. I w=Im. Twen=*thirty five years old\ and euh I was working in Somalia ICRC International red Cross () and I was euh office assistant\ So Somalia is starting war *nineteen ninety one .. So until ninety one to ninety five I was in Somalia .. and wa= and I have *four children at that time and euhm.. My husband comes from euh *north Somalia and I *south Somalia is fighting north at=at south is fighting\ So my=my husband and my children have no. *safety for their lives

If we now look at the patterns of equivalence that structure this story, we see that Habiba accomplishes a great deal of narrative structure by the use of just two initial discourse markers: and, and so. In fact, just the use of these two markers in conjunction with pauses allows us to identify lines and to organise them into two larger narrative units:
PART I 1. Im from *Somalia 2. and my name is Habiba Mohammed 3. and I=I have *five childrens 4. and I coming here before the children are coming {clarification}=when I was euh when I=Im arrive in Belgium I was *alone\ yeah\in sake of the war=the war of Somalia\ 6. and. I w=Im. Twen=*thirty five years old\ 7. and euh I was working in Somalia ICRC International red Cross 8. and I was euh office assistant\ PART II 1. So Somalia is starting war *nineteen ninety one 2. so until ninety one to ninety five I was in Somalia 3. and wa= and I have *four children at that time 4. and euhm.. My husband comes from euh *north Somalia 5. and I *south Somalia is fighting north at=at south is fighting\ 6. so my=my husband and my children have no. *safety for their lives

Two main units (stanzas) can be distinguished, marked by the dominant use of the discourse marker and (part I) and so (part II). This shift is formal, but it also marks a major shift in topic organization and speaking position: whereas Habiba herself is the topic of part I, the topic shifts to Somalia in part II. In part II, so alternates with and, and interestingly, this again reveals a narrative structuring pattern, in which lines beginning with so are subordinate to lines beginning with and. The use of just two initial discourse markers (an effect of Habibas limited command of English) nevertheless enables considerable amounts of structure, coherence and transparency. Stories told in simple language need not be simple stories. According to Hymes and others, these structuring patterns in narrative display a cultural (indexical) logic (Silverstein, 1997). They reveal, thus, a form of emic organization which allows analysts to follow the narrators traces in organizing relevance, epistemic and affective stance, desired effects and so forth. Thus, the analysis of these implicit indexical patterns in narratives helps us distinguish more meaning in

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narrative, because like grammar/style and content, ethnopoetic patterns form a distinct layer of meaningful signs in narratives. This theme, that ethnopoetic patterning is a distinct pool of meanings, is what allows Hymes, Tedlock and others to claim that ethnopoetics offers opportunities for reconstructing defunct narratives, reinstate their functions, recapture the performance dynamics that guided their original production, and so on (see Blommaert, 2006, for a discussion).

Ethnopoetics applied
Narratives are produced in a myriad of contexts, genres and occasions. While some forms of storytelling are used to entertain, others to invoke tradition and sustain ritual, a large body of narratives are produced in the context of bureaucratic and institutional procedures. They range from job interviews in which applicants are invited to talk about themselves and classroom situations in which children tell stories as a means of displaying their command of linguistic and communicative skills, to bureaucratic encounters such as asylum application procedures, police interviews and court hearings, or service encounters in domains such as welfare, social housing, psychosocial counseling and so forth. Stories elicited there can be long and scripted (as, e.g., in a job interview) or ritualized (as e.g., in court hearings). But apart from such easily recognizable stories, people in such encounters produce a multitude of micro-narratives: short bursts of narrative interactionally embedded in question-answer sequences. The encounters are consequently often complex and layered narrative events in which several stories are produced, often in intricate relations to one another. Such encounters are characterized by inequalities in command over (socio)linguistic, communicative and narrative resources and in capacity to control the contextualized interpretation of the narrative (e.g., Gumperz & Roberts, 1991; Sarangi & Slembrouck, 1996; Briggs, 1997; Barsky, 1994; Maryns, 2006). The issue, of course, is crucial. Narrative involves a deployment of skills and resources against a backdrop of (often ideologically patterned) expectations about such deployments: A suspect in a police interview is expected to provide detail and accuracy about facts relevant to the case; s/he is, in other words, expected to produce a particular kind of narrative, carrying specific features that (iconically) correspond to this expectation. If s/he doesnt, the lack of such features may cause doubt about the validity of the story and may be used as incriminating evidence later. The problem is that, given structural inequalities in societies exacerbated by transnational migration on a world scale, more and more people find themselves in narrative encounters in which the institutional expectations about narrative cannot be matched by their resources. Returning briefly to the example of Habiba above, it is clear, for instance, that limited command of the language in which such encounters develop can have a disastrous effect on the understandability of the story. And in institutional encounters marked by inequality, unclear stories either remain unregistered or quickly become bad stories.

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But our example of Habiba shows us at the same time a possible way out. Ethnopoetics allows us to transcend the typical range of perceived meaningful features of stories by adding another layer of meaningful structure: poetic structure. Difficulties in linguistic structuring (lots of grammatically and lexically awkward features) and pragmatic delivery (a lack of fluency articulated through the use of short and hesitant phrases) were overlaid by a crystal-clear narrative structure in which the bits of information were elegantly organized and ordered in relation to one another. Thus, whereas Habiba displayed problems with some forms of linguistic-communicative competence, she clearly had a well-developed narrative competence. Detecting this narrative competence and exposing it as a dimension of meaningful communicative behavior produces another version of her story told in a different voice: a more accessible, more understandable version. This is a judgment based on implicit, indexical patterns, not on explicit denotational and syntactic ones.

Asylum narratives
Let us now turn to an applied example. What follows is a fragment from an asylum application interview between AS, a young female refugee from Sierra Leone whom we shall call Fatoumata and I, a young female Belgian official from the Immigration Department. (The case is extensively discussed in Maryns, 2006, pp. 268282; this fragment can be found on pp. 274275.)
(1) I: ((writes)) . and . when you were in Guinea urm .. then what (2) (3) (4)

(5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13)

happened they put you on another boat AS: then I saw people (road) they were going inside a big one . I: a big boat . big boat AS: yeah I was crying . shouting for help . there x saw a man .. he asked what is happening I told him there s war in my country I cant go back .. then .I say you have to help .me . flee . for my life to safe .. then .. he said ok . xx I dont xxx like aaa I dont xx how to . call it xxxxxx times .. the people I was with . people that he said ok .. I should go inside .. no problem .. they wont catch me . inside . the boat . they take xxx I dont know I: this man .bought AS= yeah I: the ticket for you AS: yeah I: for the boat AS: yeah and I was inside . I: so . you think he bought the ticket and then you were in the boat AS: yes I was inside the boat .. I: you were . hidden

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(14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22) (23) (24) (25) (26) (27) (28) (29) (30)

(31) (32)

AS: x I: you had to hide AS: no I: no at all you dont you was free on the boat= AS: yeah I: you were free on the boat AS: yeah I: yeah .. ((writes down)) and so . that boat took you . to Belgium . yeah AS: I dont know if it was Belgium that time I: uhum AS: but xx I knew it was .. xx it was Belgium I: uhum AS: so .. I: uhum AS: xxx this .. but I dont know it was Belgium I: yeah AS: at that time xxx I see people they put me inside of the boat then I have to come down xxxx when I come down I see a lot of people p people they were (standing) I dont know what . they were waiting for and . I now saw people walk into it .. I xx I was walking again .walking again . I saw them . they stand .. some of them still walking .. I: uhum AS: then I stand .. you know now they still are . urm people coming then people was running inside now they they enter inside too .. there there was coming then people was going out of the bus .. and then . xx inside .. and I have to xxxx but theres no . people inside that place ..xxxxxx so .. it was xxxxxxxxxxx and I have to . stay xx I dont know xxxxxxx so then I sleep xxxxxxxxxx then I saw a xxxxxx

The fragment shows the constraints under which narratives are produced in bureaucratic encounters such as the asylum interview. Stories emerge as micro-narratives, sudden bursts of structured narration encased in the rigorous (and often punitive) question-answer format of the interview. The interviewee is facing the task of producing a coherent and convincing narrative, but does not get the opportunity to do so by means of long and uninterrupted stretches of storytelling. Fatoumata is not a powerful storyteller: She is soft-spoken and hesitant, and clearly has a very limited command of English, the language in which the interview was conducted. The fragment above starts when Fatoumata is asked to tell the story of her escape by boat to Antwerp, Belgium. Prior to that, she had told the interviewer that she had fled from Sierra Leone to Guine; an uncorrected misunderstanding occurred when the interviewer assumed that this journey had been done by a small boat, and this explains her reference to

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another boat in turn (1). It is not the only misunderstanding: in turns (5)(9) the interviewer assumes that someone bought a ticket for Fatoumata; the ship, however, was a cargo ship and no tickets were required. Asylum application interviews are littered with similar kinds of small and big misunderstandings often based on the uneasy match between very different (non-native and strongly accented) varieties of languages and different levels of proficiency. The interviews, of course, are all about factual accuracy and logical consistency, and such misunderstandings often have dramatic consequences. The line of questioning developed by I is, thus, aimed at probing for facts, details, and consistency (or lack thereof) in Fatoumatas story. Fatoumata mostly answers in one-line phrases, quickly followed up by the interviewer with other questions (turns (5)(29)). On two occasions, Fatoumata produces a longer burst of narrative: turns (4), and (30)(32). Taken together, these two micronarratives construct most of the story of her trajectory of escape, it is probably the story Fatoumata wants (and needs) to tell as a coherent story. The long question-and-answer sequence separating both bits of storytelling, however, is an effect of the perceived lack of factual substance in the narrative: Fatoumatas turn (4), like the previous episodes of the interview, is an emotional and confused story which fails to produce the factual details expected by the interviewer. This is where we meet the institutional, and culturally rooted, ideology that dominates such encounters: people are imagined as rational being, stories are meaningful if they mirror such rationality, and interviewers are trained to look for (verifiable) facts and to pay no attention to affect and emotion in the stories (Maryns, 2006, Chapter 4). Fatoumata failed to produce dates, place names, descriptions of people and objects in her story, and consequently her application for asylum was denied because of the lack of factual substance and consistency, all of which, to be sure, is seen in terms of the particular ideology of meaning sketched above. If we replace that ideology by one that recognizes ethnopoetic patterning as implicit, indexical meaning, the issue of facts and substance becomes a different one. Let us take Fatoumatas turns (30) and (32): the episode of her arrival in Belgium. The ship docks in Antwerp harbor and Fatoumata is told to leave the ship. She has no idea where she is, and this is how she narrates the extreme sensory confusion and disorientation that marks that experience: 1. at that time xxx I see people they put me inside of the boat then I have to come down xxxx 2. when I come down I see a lot of people p people they were (standing) I dont know what . they were waiting for and . I now saw people walk into it ..

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3. I xx I was walking again . walking again . I saw them . they stand .. some of them still walking 4. then I stand .. you know now they still are . urm people coming then people was running inside now they they enter inside too .. there there was coming then people was going out of the bus .. and then . xx inside ..

5. and I have to xxxx but theres no . people inside that place ..xxxxxx so .. it was xxxxxxxxxxx 6. and I have to . stay xx I dont know xxxxxxx so then I sleep xxxxxxxxxx 7.. then I saw a xxxxxx

We see seven verses of unequal length and structure. Verse (1) is the framing event: she is told to leave the ship by the people who took her on board. Verses (2), (3) and (4) provide an account of the extreme confusion she experiences when she gets off board. Verses (5), (6) and (7) provide microscopic accounts of subsequent events, and note the structural parallelism between (5) and (6) (three lines, starting which and, ending with so and with a complication in the middle line). Verses (2)(4) are the most interesting ones because they provide iconic and almost filmic accounts of Fatoumatas first impressions. In verse (2), she describes herself coming down from the ship. She sees people the term is always used generically here who are standing and walking: rudimentary categories of motion and body position. The same frame standing and walking is carried over in verse (3). Fatoumata herself is now walking around, and again she only perceives the vaguest of activities around her. The sequence of verses (2)(4) is constructed out of parallelisms (marked by arrows in the transcript), suggesting the circularity and iterativity of

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the event. But then she stops and looks she stands (verse (4)) and gradually we see that her perceptions become more detailed. Motion is now described by means of more specific terms: coming, running, enter, going out. At the same time, we again see parallelisms: now-then-now-then-then. Iconically and by means of ethnopoetic patterning, Fatoumata describes the gradual getting used to an environment which is totally unfamiliar to her. She describes the refugee experience in an amazingly accurate and factual way, and she does so within severe linguistic and communicative constraints. In spite of that, the confusing, chaotic and utterly disorienting experiences of escape, hiding, and arriving in an unknown land are here narrated not in explicitly denotational words, but in ethnopoetic, implicit and indexical, structures in her narrative. This is a different kind of factuality, one that locates her in a place and a time-frame: She has undoubtedly gone through experiences of dislocation and displacement, and these experiences were traumatic.

Conclusion
This is what applied ethnopoetics can do. By attending to implicit, indexical patterns in narratives it creates different criteria for assessing the validity of stories, because it reconstructs a different voice: An experiential, emotive voice that is deployed in poetic patterns in narratives. Denying such voices and allowing only one factual voice in narratives, is an act of power which defines many contemporary cross-cultural bureaucratic encounters. Offering forms of analysis that destabilize such institutional inequalities are therefore a pressing matter.

References
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Hymes, D. (2003). Now I know only so much. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Jakobson, R. (1960). Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In T.A. Sebeok (Ed.), Style in Language (pp. 350377). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Maryns, K. (2006). The asylum speaker: Language in the Belgian asylum procedure. Manchester: St. Jerome. Sarangi, S., & Slembrouck, S. (1996). Language, bureaucracy and social control. London: Longman. Silverstein, M. (1985). The pragmatic poetry of prose: Parallelism, repetition, and cohesive structure in the time course of dyadic conversation. In D. Schiffrin (Ed.), Meaning, form, and use in context (pp. 181199). Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Silverstein, M. (1997). The improvisational performance of culture in realtime discursive practice. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), Creativity in performance (pp. 265312). Greenwich, CT: Ablex. Tedlock, D. (1983). The spoken word and the work of interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tedlock, D. (1999). Finding the center: The art of the Zuni storyteller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.