Dell Hymes

From Philosopedia

Dell H. Hymes (7 June 1927 - 13 November 2009)

Hymes, who became known in anthropology and linguistics as a scholar of the "ethnography of communication," was born in Portland, Oregon.

At Reed College in 1950, he earned a bachelor's degree in literature and anthropology, and in 1955 he earned a Ph. D. in linguistics from Indiana University.

At his death, he was the Commonwealth professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of Virginia, where he had taught from 1987 until his retirement in 1998. Of his large number of specializations, he wrote:

I still know something about the history of anthropology and of linguistics, and ethnography of speaking, but am actively concerned mostly with verbal traditions and languages of Oregon and Washington. (Other cases come up, as recently Wintu (Loon Woman), Mohave (Kroeber's texts), Saami ('Lapp'), and characteristics of oral epic (because of gatherings at Turku)).

Of his interests, he wrote:

I never know what to say when someone asks what I have done and do. So much of it has depended and depends on circumstances. I have never done anything I would myself describe as theoretical or ethnographic (in a strict sense of either term), although I have often written about ideas, and spent a fair amount of time hanging around Indians. I am interested in what is done in the study of the use of language, oral narrative and poetry, the history of anthropology and linguistics, Native Americans, theology.

Increasingly I have been focussing on the analysis of oral narratives, bringing out what turns out to be organization in terms of lines and groups of lines, verses and stanzas, in effect, not paragraphs. The entry for 'Poetry' in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9(1-2): 191-3 (2000) addresses this. Such interpretation has proven valuable to members of Native American communities from which such texts have come. But I have also provided a new introduction, somewhat autobiographical, for Reinventing Anthropology, recently reprinted.

Hymes, known as having taken a contrarian position in the late 1950s, urged his colleagues not to see a barricade between anthropology and linguistics. Noam Chomsky in 1957 turned the anthropologists' focus toward biology rather than linguistics, teaching that the aim of linguists should be to describe a speaker's inborn predisposition for language using abstract, quasi-mathematical algorithms. Hymes, as described by Margalit Fox, "preferred speakers of flesh and blood. To him and like-minded scholars, the Chomskyan approach disregarded the question of how people actually use language in everyday life. With his colleague John J. Gumperz, he developed the notion of 'communicative competence' as a bigger, alternative quarry for scholars of language."

At the age of 82, Hymes died in Charlottesville, Virginia. According to his son, Robert, the cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease.

Selected Works

2003 - Now I know only so far. Essays in Ethnopoetics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press

1997 - Ethnography, Linguistics, Inequality: Essays in Education, 1978-1994. London: Taylor & Francis (now Routledge).

1984 - Vers la competence de communication. (Translated by France Mugler). Paris: Hatier-Credif.

1983 - Studies in the History of Linguistic Anthropology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

1981 - In Vain I Tried To Tell You. Essays in Native American Ethno-poetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

1974 - Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

[Folklore study is] the study of communicative behavior with an esthetic, expressive, or stylistic dimension.

1972 - Language in Society (founder). Cambridge University Press.

1972 - Reinventing Anthropology. (Editor). New York: Pantheon.

1964 - Language in Culture and Society. New York: Harper and Row.

1964 - The Ethnography of Communication. American Anthropologist 66:6, Part 2 (with J. Gumperz, eds.).