I am interested in the way people use language for entertainment, for pleasure, for creating new meanings and reinforcing old ones, and for stimulating social life. Storytellers, singers, songwriters, jokesters, orators, lecturers, etc.: when any such bearers of verbal culture break into performance, the result will transform the reality of those around, if only for an instant.My work seeks to capture the verbal artistry of performers through ethnographic field methods and ethnopoetic interpretation. I collect “oral texts” – linguistic transcriptions, audio recordings, videotapes, film footage, etc. – with the aim of identifying the linguistic and cultural devices, codes, references, signs, and symbols that are appreciated by listeners. I work with performers, linguists, anthropologists, literary critics, musicians, musicologists, filmmakers, and an infinite array of community workers who have that special ear for a good story or song. Through VOVA, my non-profit initiative based in the USA and in France, I am seeking to build the administrative and technological structure for archiving and making available oral poetries from throughout the world. This project holds both humanist and scientific goals as well as a commitment to entertainment as a universal value.Specialties: Linguistics, poetics, anthropology and literary criticism