Running Again, Roasting Again, Touching Again: On Repetition, Heightened Affective Expressivity, and the Utility of the Notion of Linguaculture in Navajo and Beyond

Abstract

Abstract This article analyzes a Coyote narrative told by John Watchman to Edward Sapir in Navajo. While it has been widely documented that Navajo curing ways are tightly organized by the use of repetition, there has been far less investigation of repetition in other genres of Navajo verbal art. This article shows that the use of pairing and the semeliterative aspect create a sense of completion in Watchman’s narrative. It is argued that repetition may occur in a variety of Navajo genres of verbal art, but that it may serve differing rhetorical functions there. Ethnopoetic structuring is therefore an expression of linguaculture (the overlapping of language and culture). To return to these texts then allows one to place such narratives within the contexts of the linguaculture of which they are a part.