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Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and
Social Context. Ruth Finnegan. London: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1977. xiii + 299 pp.
$15.95 (cloth).
Dennis Tedlock
Boston University
In this, her third book, Ruth Finnegan
samples oral poetry, past and present, urban
and rural, from around the world and gives
critical review to all the major issues and
theories current in both the anthropological and
literary study of oral poetry (structuralism ex-
cepted). She is the first to attempt a general
survey of the field named by her main title. In
its thrust, her work stands within an emerging
transatlantic anthropology that is dialectical
rather than dualistic, phenomenological rather
than structuralist. In place of “over-arching”
and “monolithic” theories (pp. x, 86, 133, 260)
which would see oral literature as mere “reflec-
tion” of society (pp. 262-268) or as “the blind
result of superorganic laws . . . which pre-
determine people’s activities” (p. 273), she pro-
poses an attention to “the actual practice of oral
literature” (p. 214). to “what people do” (p.
270). When oral literature is seen as “social ac-
tion” rather than as sociocultural reflex, change
and creativity appear as the normal exercise of
human capacities rather than as disobedience to
the governing rules of a static system (pp.
268-271).
Finnegan favors “detailed studies’’ of local
oral literatures (p. 261), respects “local theories”
as to the “purpose and meaning of poetry’’ (pp.
235-41), and acknowledges the importance of
“local classifications” (p. 26). But she assumes
that “local classifications” will provide no basis
for comparative study (p. 27) and therefore
defines the subject of her book in terms of a tax-
onomy that first divides “oral literature” into
“oral prose” and “oral poetry,” and then divides
“oral poetry” into “epic,” “ballad.” “panegyric
ode,’’ “lyric poetry,’’ and so on (pp. 9-17), as if
this familiar English-language classification
were not merely “local” but somehow ultimate
for mankind. She remarks that “in our own
culture, the handiest rule of thumb for deciding
whether something is poetry or pro& is to look
at how it is written out” (p. 25), and that is ex-
actly what she has done in selecting “poetry”
from the published sources on oral literature.
When she observes that “sung delivery is the
most common characteristic of oral poetry” (p.
13), that is merely an artifact of her method of
selection: the collectors she relies on usually
publish sung texts in a poetic format and
[80. 19781
relegate other texts to a prose format. Given
that she disclaims in advance any competence in
“musicological analysis” (p xii, fn.), while at the
same time claiming great importance for mode
of perjlormance as opposed to the mere wording
of texfs (pp. 28, 75, 108. 119, 133), it is doubly
ironic that she should have centered this book
on song texts.
Finnegan’s work comes at a turning point in
the study of oral poetry: it carries with it all the
weight of the grand old theories and stereotypes
it seeks to dismiss (such arguments take up half
the book); meanwhile, the corpus of newer,
performance-oriented work is not yet extensive
enough to provide the sole basis of a broad
survey. At the end, she asserts that oral poetry
“is not the passive repetition of externally deter-
mined words . . . but people actively moulding
the world around them” (p. 274). For the mo-
ment, this is more a prophecy than a well
developed view; perhaps the conclusion of this
book will one day serve as the preface to
another.
Social Networks: A Developing Paradigm.
Samuel Leinhardt, ed. New York: Academic.
1977. xxxiv + 465 pp. $17.50/f12.40 (cloth).
William G. Davis
University of California, Davis
This volume is a collection of essays assem-
bled on the grounds that they address a com-
mon problem by means of a common analytical
“paradigm.” The problem raised is the nature
of social structure and the consequences that
structure has for social behavior. The shared
analytical framework, of course, is the notion of
the social network as a method for opera-
tionalizing the idea of structure. There are 24
essays presented, two of which (both coauthored
by the editor) are original.
The papers are organized into four overlap-
ping categories. The first two parts are arranged
in an ascending scale of relationships incor-
porated by network analysis and demonstrate
that the ideas involved may be applied fruitfully
at both interpersonal and interassociational
levels of organization. Part 3 consists of more
substantive papers, and part 4 is devoted to con-
siderations of appropriate methods. However,
the majority of papers throughout the collection
evidence deep concern for method and especial-
ly for mathematical treatments of data, in ac-
cord with the editor’s explicit view that effective
explanation cannot be built on metaphoric uses
of network ideas, and that quantitative treat-
ment is a necessity. This is particularly likely to