The Ethnography of RhythmWinner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the devicecore ideas of modern literary theorywere all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant