Hopi "fourth time"

[Jim Wilce]

Having shown the video Iisaw and used Wiget's performance analysis of that
Hopi Coyote story at least a dozen times in the last six years, I'm amazed
to have noticed something in Wiget's transcript for the first time.  It
seems to go to the heart of some of Whorf's claims, claims that Ekkehart
Malotki has long disputed.  It is an instance of the narrator, Helen
Sekaquaptewa, "counting" a unit of time, or at least counting abstract
"times."  Mrs. Sekaquaptewa alludes to a fourfold repetition of an action
by the birds in the story-- flying up in the air with Iisaw (Coyote).  She
does not detail each of these flights.  But at line 166 (Wiget 1987: 305)
or  about 6 minutes into the taped performance, she says "I MEAN on the
fourth timeŠ"

I had (probably naively) actually presumed that at least some of the
references to time which Malotki documents were an epiphenomenon of his
animus, his interview technique that seemed designed to forcibly elicit
such references.  Forgive me, Ekkehart.  Mrs. Sekaquaptewa seems to have
made this reference-- and just the sort which Whorf said Hopis don't make
(treating times as concretized countable units)--quite naturally.

Two responses seem possible.  One would be to say this is just another of
Whorf getting the facts wrong about Hopi; after all, his analysis was based
on a VERY limited source of data.  Another would be to insist on a
literalism in interpreting Whorf; he did, after all, only deny that Hopi
usage normally counted units of time quite different from "times" or
"repetitions" (viz., "days", etc.).  Days are more abstract than
"recurrences", "events," or "flights."  A third would be to speculate
whether Mrs. Sekaquaptewa's "natural" usage was in fact rather new on the
Hopi discourse scene and that, in fact, times would not have been counted
in the 1930's.

I'll be interested in hearing comments, particularly from those who know
Uto-Aztecan languages.

Jim


Wiget, Andrew
	1987	Telling the tale:  A performance analysis of a Hopi coyote
story. In Recovering the Word:  Essays on Native American Literature. B.
Swann and A. Krupat, eds. Pp.  297-336. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Jim Wilce, Assistant Professor
Anthropology Department
Box 15200
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff AZ 86011-5200

fax 520/523-9135
office ph. 520/523-2729
email jim.wilce at nau.edu
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22/ (includes information on my 1998 book,
Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural
Bangladesh, ISBN 0-19-510687-3)
http://www.nau.edu/asian
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