American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Mythography and Dialogue in the Study of Native American Literature The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. By Dennis Tedlock. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. 365 pp. $35.00 Cloth. $14.95 Paper. Arnold Krupat With this book Dennis Tedlock establishes (or perhaps confirms) his position as one of the handful of indispensable commentators on Native American literatures. Not merely honorific, such an estimate means that it would be hard to imagine any important developments in this field, for the immediate future, that did not take account of Tedlock's work for its wide range and for the excellence of its particular parts. The Spoken Word contains four sections, "Translation and Transcription, "Poetics, "Hermeneutics" and "Toward Dialogue, " each of which contains four essays. Such an arrangement would seem both to invoke a widespread Native American pattern number, and a widespread Euroamerican pattern of disciplinary distinctions. The materials of Part 1, for example, are usually considered the province of social scientists; those of Part 2, of literary theorists; of Part 3, the philosophers; and Part 4-? Part 4 precisely calls into question the preceding distinctions as well as, most importantly, the presumptive distinction between the knower and the known that has founded Western anthropology from its inception until well into the twentieth century. Everywhere there are specifically valuable observations on the narrative practice of the southwestern Zuni, and the Quiche Maya of Guatemala, as there are subtle and finely argued observations on what it means to "do" anthropology-to study an-Other culture-in our post-colonial period.