REED HOME
Feature Story Winter 2008 |
|
table of contents>Ways We Speak | < Back|1|2|3|4|Next > |
Another sociolinguistic concept developed by Hymes has become the foundation for a wide range of pedagogical approaches in language education: the notion of “communicative competence.” Hymes developed it to broaden Chomsky’s narrowly grammatical notion of linguistic competence, which he said failed to account for the full range of what is involved in “knowing” a language: “We learn when it is appropriate to speak, when not, what to talk about with whom and in what manner,” Hymes explained. In other words, a person needs to know not only what is grammatically correct but also what is appropriate. Dell Hymes camping it up in the Frenches’ study in the 1950s In the early 1970s, John Szwed, Erving Goffman, and Hymes founded the Center for Urban Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. Szwed recalls that Goffman, a renowned sociologist, was famously critical and acerbic in his judgments, but Hymes was never the victim of his coruscating tongue. One day, Szwed asked Goffman why. Goffman’s reply: “That’s because he’s a principled man and principled people are dangerous.” Meanwhile, Hymes was writing poems. Szwed says Hymes often repeated a question posed by Sapir, who had also written poetry: “If you wrote a sonnet and put it in a drawer, was that culture?” Hymes often wrote poems he didn’t intend anyone to read—personal poems, written for one person. And because he believed narrative and story should be given more credit as forms of knowledge, he included poems and personal narratives in his own academic writing. One of Hymes’ notable legacies, colleagues say, is his role as a galvanizer and fomenter of politically engaged scholarship. It is shown to maximum effect in the essay collection Reinventing Anthropology,a call to anthropologists to acknowledge that they are not engaged in a process of objective, value-free inquiry and to recognize the obligations they incur to the often marginalized communities where they do their work. In his editor’s introduction, Hymes wrote: “This book is for people for whom ‘the way things are’ is not reason enough for the way things are.” Two Poems by Dell HymesRemembering Lewis & ClarkThat summer my father went to camp Originally published in Windfall, Spring 2005 A Poem to Erving Goffman“I should like to close with a short poem. It is not On First Looking into a Manuscript by Goffman* Many speak of speaking, who were dumb Now, all allow, even the most dogmatic, Itself one strategic modality, GOFFMAN, so much of such seeing we owe, we know, *Subtitled “Some problems in the ethnography of |
table of contents>Ways We Speak | < Back|1|2|3|4|Next > |
Winter 2008 |