Ethnopoetics

Ethnopoetics is a cross-disciplinary field within anthropology and literary studies that examines the poetics of oral performance within cultural contexts. It focuses on how speech, voice, rhythm, and ritual timing organize meaning in narrative and song, and on how communities shape and respond to performance. The aim is to document and analyze not only what is said but how it is said, including prosody, pacing, repetition, tonality, and audience interaction.

Methodologically, ethnopoetics combines ethnography with linguistic analysis and poetic transcription. Researchers record performances in situ and render them in transcriptions that preserve lineation, line breaks, and typographic cues intended to evoke cadence, timbre, and affect. Transcriptions may incorporate phonetic detail, transliterations, and notes on performance context, ritual function, and social relations among performers and listeners. This approach seeks to convey the texture of live performance while enabling comparative analysis.

Historically, the term is associated with the work of Dennis Tedlock and others in the late 20th century, building on the Boasian tradition of ethnography and later developments in linguistic and narrative theory. It has been applied to a variety of oral traditions—epic cycles, chants, tales, and ritual speeches—across Indigenous communities in the Americas, as well as in Arctic, Australian, and Oceanic contexts.

Critiques emphasize ethical considerations, the risk of over-formalizing living speech, and the interpretive distance involved in translation. Proponents argue that ethnopoetics helps preserve linguistic and performative richness often underrepresented in written texts and highlights the social functions of language in performance.