Let me begin with a bit of a confession. I have found, over the years, Ruth Finnegan’s work to be a model when thinking about issues of poetry and verbal art more generally. In her new book, Where is Language?, she reflects on the implications of much of her research over the years. As such, it is the kind of book you imagine you might someday write and, if you are fortunate, write as well as she.

Finnegan’s book, at its most basic level, is a reflexive set of questions about the nature of language and literature that are informed by decades of her own research and of the work of others (reviewed succinctly and clearly throughout the book). As Finnegan writes in the opening passages of the book:

“I too was once confident of what ‘language’ was, where its boundaries lay, and hence what might count as data for documenting it. But I am no longer sure. Nor am I clear where information about a given language should be found, or how, by and for whom a language should be documented” (1).

Such questions, thanks in large measure to the work of Finnegan and others, have become ever more pressing in both linguistic anthropology and in language documentation work. Let me be clear here though, for Finnegan this is not a discarding of a concern with language—it is not a post-representational argument (that we should eschew anything linguistic)—but rather a rethinking of a view of language as detached from its multimodal surrounds.

It is the multimodal surrounds that most occupy Finnegan in this book. Finnegan makes this point explicit in chapter 2 when she re-interrogates the old (but curiously ever deployable by new generations of technological determinists) debate about orality and literacy:

“My point is rather that getting rid of the over-ambitious claims for ‘language’ in fact allows a clearer perspective on humans’ active use of words—but words now seen, more modestly, as set in the context of, and intermingled with, the array of other communicative modes of which verbal language is only one” (23).

Language, like orality and literacy, are not givens, Finnegan reminds us, but rather ideological—the product of particular historical trajectories. As Finnegan tells us:

“The essence of human-ness is posited as language; and language in its two predestined modes, first oral then written, as unrolling stages of human history. The tale echoes that Enlightenment ideology in which language, and especially written language, is the condition of rationality, civilization and progress, attaining its apotheosis in the alphabetic writing of the West. Music, dance and drama fall out of the picture. So do the gestural, pictorial, sculptural, sonic, tactile, bodily, affective and artefactual dimensions of human life” (18).

Where is Language? is an impassioned corrective against that narrow vision of the place of language in human affairs. Finnegan wants to remind us of the embeddedness of language within broader multimodal practices.

And so, Finnegan’s book takes us through compelling discussions of performance (chapters 3 and 4); a generous reading of Jack Goody’s concern with orality (chapter 5); the relationship between song and language (chapter 6); a somewhat sympathetic rethinking of the notion of competence (chapter 7); the relationship between dreams, language, and imagination (chapter 8); and finally to a principled defense of the term literature (chapter 9). Much of this is ground, for those who are familiar with Finnegan’s large corpus of work, that she has covered throughout her career. What makes it all so engaging is the deeply personal nature of the book. The willingness to say, as she does, that I once believed x, but now have come, over time and reflection, to realize that x is, at best, only a part of the story. Her rethinking of competence, for example, is influenced by her own recent illness and her “inability to give voice to words which I had clearly in my mind” (111). This is a humane work.

For me, chapter 6 is especially illuminating. Finnegan’s concern with the relationship between song and language is insightful and echoes with concerns among ethnomusicologists and linguistic anthropologists about the importance of sound and the materiality and physicality of sound in language—as broadly conceived—studies. As Finnegan writes:

“Thus poetry and song can be seen as shorthand terms for a spectrum of ways that people deploy sonic properties in their vocal presentations—musicalize them, one might say, in diverse and relative ways across a series of overlapping and varying dimensions such as intonation, rhythm, timbre, onomatopoeia and much else, sometimes in conjunction with instrumental sounds and multisensory expression” (96).

To that “much else” I would add that onomatopoeia is only one kind of a broader sound iconic or ideophonic utterance type. The importance of work on ideophony to Finnegan’s project is, however, quite clear.

Chapter 9, the final chapter and another favorite, takes up the challenge of thinking through the ramifications of this multimodal sensibility towards language—language as not merely words, but existing within fields of modalities—and what Finnegan calls literature. Finnegan eschews the etymological fallacy that demands that literature only refer to writing and rather asks us to think of literature more broadly, more inclusively. Finnegan argues:

“I believe we should retain the concept of ‘literature’—this is not an argument for collapsing the study of ‘literature’ into ‘cultural studies’. But I suggest we should envisage ‘literature’ not as definable by reference to Western genres, but as an umbrella notion that can embrace all those display forms and events in which verbal artistry in some ways plays a significant part” (139).

Regardless of which side one might take (I tend to agree with Finnegan), it is still a vital conversation. The book has been building to this point and it is wonderfully argued.

This is a book that asks questions and takes stands. Finnegan has come to see language as needing to be more broadly conceived than as just words (either spoken or on the page or screen), to be at its core a multimodal set of practices. Folklorists, linguistic anthropologists, documentary linguists, and ethnomusicologists will find much in here that they will agree with (and some that they will surely disagree with). It is passionately and thoughtfully argued. Because it is a book that asks provocative questions, I can see this book being quite useful in many an undergraduate class. The result, I imagine, would be to provoke lively conversations about the place of language, song, literature, and performance in our lives and in the lives of those we wish to understand.

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[Review length: 1083 words • Review posted on February 15, 2017]