Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice by Dell Hymes. London, UK and Bristol, PA : Taylor & Francis (Critical Perspectives on Literacy and Education series), 1996. Pp. xiv+258pp.

Abstract

Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice by Dell Hymes. London, UK and Bristol, PA Taylor & Francis (Critical Perspectives on Literacy and Pp. xiv+258pp. Education series), 1996. Reviewed by Olga Solomon University of California, Los Angeles The view of language the as inseparable from it its speakers and from its context has always been present in linguistics, but has not always been popular. When Chomskian revolution (compromised by in the 60's swept away the achievements of the structur- alists their theoretical allegiance with Skinnerian behaviorism), graduate students of child language acquisition were advised against mentioning in their dissertation the child as an active learner, or the family and the community as the people whose language the child was learning. With a vantage point from the present situation in the field, Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality gives a historical perspective on the study of situated language use since the 1970's, reaffirming the theoretical and political value of linguistic studies outside of the generative grammar movement. Dell Hymes takes a strong and original stance, viewing social science as a mediating practice, as activism and intervention, and social scientists as practitioners, as well as researchers. The book is a collection of articles written at different times and for different They are divided into three thematic parts: Part I, Ethnography; Part II, Linguistics; and Part III, Narrative and Inequality. In What is Ethnography (Chap- occasions. ter tal Part I), Hymes contrasts ethnography as a mode of research with experimen- design and quantitative measurement methods. Employing participation and observation, comprehensive ethnography of the early days (1850's) L. H. was used by Morgan to record kinship terminology of the Iroquois Indians. Two aspects of Morgan's work laid the foundation of contemporary ethnography as an essen- tial tool for research: his development of contrastive insight, and his combined to sig- quest for specific information and general interpretation. Comprehensive ethnography and topic-oriented ethnography led nificant advances in the understanding of culture and prepared the way for hy- pothesis-oriented ethnography, which Hymes believes to be the next stage in the evolution of the field. Using this conceptual paradigm Hymes proposes to analyze i.e. schooling in America the way anthropologists have studied kinship systems, is by constructing a typology. His goal are. to determine what kinds of schools there i.e. Such a typology must be useful for a certain purpose, is for research on literacy. cal, As a consequence, constructing such a typology a necessarily dialecti- feedback process. The initial questions may change during the course of Issues in Applied Linguistics ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 7 No. 2 © Regents of the University of California