The Dall Sheep Dinner Guest is quite different from the many ethnographic collections of “first culture” or indigenous narratives that are currently found in print. The most noticeable and refreshing difference in this text is the prefacing of the narratives themselves with a succinct but thorough discussion section that focuses on the socio-historical contexts, variations in contexts of situation within the overall cultural setting, strategies employed by the storytellers, the link between narrative and the sense of cultural self, and the modes of storytelling that occur in this particular culture. In particular it is the content and organizational structure of this initial section that are the standout facets. The author-compiler of these narratives also explores and explains a range of archetextual, intertextual, and transtextual elements that underpin these texts, as well as highlights specific elements such as gender, first-hand accounts of narrative categories, and familial links. The reader at this point appears to be well prepared to actually enter the narratives, having been provided with an unusually well-grounded understanding. However, it is at this juncture that the links amongst and between the text divisions break down.

The narratives themselves are divided into the notions of “Old Stories” and “Legends,” but the distinction between these two categories is seemingly left as a taken-for-granted understanding. There is no discussion of why this division has been made nor is there textual segue to link the cultural to these textual forms. However, the narratives are a fascinating and extensive set of texts that provide insight into the mode continuum of oral history, with a potential to further enlarge on the socio-cultural definition of this group of people. However, once again there is no textual meaning-making follow-on provided. I personally found that I was left with a range of questions after reading these stories that were often focussed on what does this mean for the current members of this culture and what is the embedded symbolic meaning? These questions also begin to arise from within the text organization itself, as the methodological initial section finishes with a subsection entitled “Contemporary Contexts of Storytelling” but the complete story in regard to this aspect is never told. Thus the narratives themselves remain interesting but for my part the reader is left in a form of semiotic limbo. While editorial space and publication costs bind every text, in this case an additional section that gave extra insight into the individual and collective meanings of these narratives would have lifted this book from the interesting into the realm of outstanding. Even an autoethnographical unpacking by the author would have provided a much weightier and engaging element and provided a perfect paratextual bookend for a text that had a great deal of potential.

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[Review length: 453 words • Review posted on January 16, 2008]