among the characters. At Zuni as elsewhere, performers nearly al-
ways quote dialogues directly rather than paraphrasing them.
Sometimes they add a description of the manner or tone in which
a character speaks, much as prose writers do, but more often they
simply enact it, sounding deliberate or hesitant, harsh or gentle,
pained or pleased. In passages without dialogue they often use the
equivalent of a fiction writer's free indirect style, producing a
third-person narrative while at the same time sounding as though
they were thinking a character's thoughts or sharing a character's
experiences.

So it is that a story is composed of a multiplicity of voices, not
only because the characters speak differently from one another
(and on different occasions), but because the narrative itself is car-
ried by more than one voice. In fact it is this multivocality, more
than anything else, that makes stories sound different from pray-
ers, speeches, or poems. The sounds of contrasting voices can be
heard quite clearly even in a language unknown to the listener,
making it easy to guess that the speaker must be telling a story.

All the Zuni stories translated in this book, one of them with
a facing-page Zuni text, are presented in the form of scripts. The
words are scored for changes of loudness and for shifts between
speaking and chanting, and they are divided into lines rather than
paragraphs, with each change of line representing a pause. Tones of
voice and gestures are noted as well--and so, too, occasionally, are
the performer's sighs, laughs, facial expressions, and interactions
with listeners. The stories can be read silently, of course, which
leaves their sounds to the voices inside the reader's head. But a
proper study, like the study of any other script or poem, demands
the use of the vocal organs. That is what "studying" a text origi-
nally meant in English: to read it aloud.

The original performances were tape-recorded in the field, all
but one during a period of ethnographic and linguistic research
that kept me in the field from November 1964 until January 1966.
I carried out this work with the permission of two successive heads
of the Zuni tribal government, Fred Bowannie and Robert Lewis. I
was a graduate student at the time, working on my dissertation in
anthropology under the direction of John L. Fischer of Tulane
University. But it was while I was an undergraduate that I got my

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