Blog Entry 5: Wisdom Sits in Places (Sessions 17-18)
Due Date: Sunday evening, April 5
Suggested Prompt:
For the Western Apache, writes Basso, the landscape is "not merely a physical presence but an omnipresent moral force" (63). How, following Basso and his Apache collaborators, are we to understand the complicated interplay of history, place, and morality? In what sense are we presented with an alternate understanding of "history" itself? What is meant when we are told that place-making "is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history" (7)?
To be sure, the ability to understand the Apache landscape is not easy for Westerners. For one, we mainly name places after people, which offers nothing in terms of history other than that a certain person was influential there. I was taken by the first map in the book (page 9) on which, after reading about how landscape naming was deeply descriptive in the Apache culture, I saw the name of a city called Prescott. I thought of all the Prescotts I knew, their personalities and history, and realized that I knew absolutely nothing about this city. Sure, it was in Arizona and I knew it was rather hot and dry there (Arizona being a slightly more helpful name though a bit too short) but I couldn’t visualize it beyond that. Was there a river? Foul water? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that in our culture, we don’t attempt to know anything about a place from its name. For years in the Renaissance, printmakers in Europe would use the same woodcut to illustrate all the various cities of Europe and there was no outcry because few travelled at the time. If the Apache had printmakers attempting to use the same picture for “Juniper Tree Stands alone” and “Water Lies With Mud In An Open Container” they would be run out of business. It is in this vein that I believe that landscape for the Apache is an omnipresent moral force in the sense that it directs and instructs the people. More specifically, the names are culturally personalized and offer a view of how things were. In that sense, and coupled with Charles’s stories, the names of places are a constant reminder of the struggles of the ancestors and that things are constantly changing. As such, the current generation should act with respect toward the land and each other since they all had ancestors who struggled together.
ReplyDeleteFor the most part, this is indeed a different way of viewing history in that it does affect the present in some abstract way. Of course the West’s history influences its present; after all, if it didn’t, none of our laws would be able to stay in effect. But it is hard for us to remember the story behind everything and so we only remember what is directly in front of us. Unfortunately for the West, very little is left in front of us directly from the past, just buildings and monuments that need expert explication. The Apache, on the other hand, ‘do’ history in such a way as to keep much of the past directly in the present by using names. We are constantly referencing places to go (what is life but a series of movements to different places?) and so by the Apache keeping the names of the past, not only is the past kept alive, but its actuality is kept universally understood. ‘Water Flows Inward Under a Cottonwood Tree” does not need a teacher to explain it as the West needs a building described. In this sense, history is not removed from everyday life and so one does not have to leave this world and find it in books. This way of doing history is not only different but, I believe, contributes to the moral force of history. Western historians need to argue constantly to justify people’s listening to them and while they are persuasive, it’s hard to take moral lessons from people just like us. Here the names are ancient, direct and clear indices of the way things were and the struggle involved. Such directness and age lends a credence that no amount of history degrees can lend and so history can truly be called a moral force, not a mere suggestion. Coupled with the sheer power of the landscape as proof of something, that force can overwhelm.
The complicated interplay of history, place, and morality is perfectly encapsulated by the hunting metaphor for storytelling of the Western Apache. For the Apache, every historical tale is as much about the events it describes as it is about the place in which it is situated (which is always identified in the beginning or closing line). And, as Basso aptly remarks, each tale is also about the “person at whom it is directed.” The people at whom stories are directed are moral transgressors, violators of social norms and well-established Apache customs, and so the stories are “critical and remedial responses” to their offensive actions (55). And this is why historical tales, for the Western Apache, are like arrows – they are used to “shoot” these moral transgressors, these social offenders. They are thus the means by which societal norms and traditions are preserved and perpetuated through the generations.
ReplyDeleteAnd these stories are, just as the word “arrow” suggests, incredibly incisive – i.e., they are mentally penetrating. Basso describes their force as a “sizeable psychological impact”; he further notes that the stories produce “quick and palpable effects” on the behavior of their individual targets, causing them to “modify their social conduct in quite specific ways” (57). But how can they be so effective? How can one simple story, a story that might not even be grounded in truth, permanently alter the actions of an individual who displays a deliberate disregard for societal conventions?
To answer this question, the “unstated message” embedded within each of the stories from the storytellers must first be recognized (55). Historical tales are about individuals who committed analogous offenses in the past, and who were punished or humiliated for their actions. The person at whom the story is aimed is aware of the fact that he or she is the target of the story, and that if he or she continues to behave in the way he or she is behaving, he or she might be punished in a similar manner. This unstated message is just as important as the actual lesson of the story itself; taken together, they provide a compelling motive for “correcting” immoral behavior.
Yet more importantly, along with this “unstated message,” it is important to recognize the interplay between historical stories and places (i.e., in the natural landscape). As I noted in the first paragraph, stories are about places. To take this a step further, places are defined by stories. They contain the stories. And this is where the Apache’s alternate understanding of “history” comes in. For the Western Apache, history is not “history” in the sense that Anglo-Americans perceive it – it is not merely an event that occurred in the past, at a definite time. It is alive, imbued within the contours of the present. More specifically, it is preserved within the landscape through stories – which, unlike the storytellers, the shooters of the arrows, is eternal. Through these enduring landscapes, stories stalk people. And the landscapes do not even have to be physically present – they can also be mental images evoked by place names. This constancy, this pervasiveness, is the main reason why stories are so effective at correcting moral deviations.
Moreover, historical stories can be invented. They don’t have to be an accurate reflection of past events; in fact, they cannot be an accurate reflection of past events because the past is not tangibly preserved – it is “unavailable for direct consultation or study” (31). This is why Basso claims that the past is “constructed” through place-making. It is made by the people, and although they are aided by relics, stories, and songs that have survived, it is primarily a product of their imaginations. History is, indeed, “done” – the Apaches are actively involved in creating their own past; it does not simply consist of uncontrollable events that simply happen, that the Apaches passively accept and record. And thus, the place-worlds that the Apaches create are a part of their identity. In a sense, through their stories, the Apaches not only construct the society in which they live (which includes their traditions and moral norms), but also themselves. And their identities, their stories, are preserved forever by the landscape.
The first of these responses struck certain chords with me for very surprisingly obvious reasons. When reading Basso’s book I had been swept up in the storytelling and the idea of place-names in the Apache Southwest that I took everything at face value and forgot to apply what I was reading to myself, to my set of experiences, to my understanding of the place names. Doing so, over the last few minutes, proved an interesting thought-experience that added a level of depth to the text and rekindled a latent indignation at the thought of the name of the town where I went to High School, Carthage.
ReplyDeleteI’m from upstate New York and, in large part due to my mother being a fourth grade teacher and having a general interest in the surprisingly rich local history, I have been immersed in place names and the stories behind them, perhaps in a distinctly western way but with an earnestness that borders more nearly on the Apache interest in place names, since I was very little. This in turn made me think back on the introduction to Basso’s book that struck me as exceedingly interesting to note that he had referenced “novelists and poets with a strong sense of place.” McCarthy and Faulkner come to mind writers about rural America that, though in regions quite distinct you might say, from upstate New York, remind me a great deal of my home and the farm country I grew up in with two cows for every person. But, generally, my knowledge of upstate New York place names reveals something about the psychology behind what we might call Euro-American naming of places. Upstate New York is rife with places like where I went o High School (Carthage), my father grew up in Corinth, there is Syracuse and Utica, even small towns called Copenhagen and townships called Denmark. These for the most part reflect absolutely nothing about the landscape or local history, they offer even less than the places pointed to by the author of the first post who noted Prescott. Local examples of this variety would include Harrisville or Lewis County. But it is interesting to note that Carthage, for example, was founded, a couple hundred years ago, as Long Falls. It was the systemization of the post office in some cases, old-country bible-thumpers in others that caused many of these more descriptive and relevant names to be changed to names of European or biblical provenance.
And yet this is really only the case in more densely populated areas, I, for example, actually grew up in Natural Bridge. This name instantly reminds me of the caverns that undermine the small hamlet and gives it its name. Other examples abound: Sandy Creek, Star Lake, Beaver River, Great Bend, even Lowville immediately reminds me of the fact that as we descend into this village you have to be sure to ride the breaks and turn down the car radio that is sure to quickly turn to static as we enter the fog-ridden valley-town. The same Eurocentrism that the Anthropology community is trying to get away from drove community leaders to give up their places to a foreign history. Yet, thankfully, many still abound from those early settling immigrants that took over the land and in claiming it named it as it was, as it still is, as they witnessed it and it was when these communities reached a certain size, a size that Apache communities, I dare say, never reach, that the place began to mean less to the people who lived there and thought little about its name.
This reminds me of one other instance: The county that I grew up in is called Diana. This in itself would seem rather uninteresting and clearly not saying much about the place it signifies. But that would be a simple-minded and incorrect analysis of the name Diana and one an outsider would necessarily make. Not me though, I have had the story of Joseph Bonaparte told to me a thousand times. Lake Bonaparte is situated a few miles from my house and the former king of Spain is responsible for the county name as well. These lands, my family’s and my neighbors’ properties were Bonaparte’s hunting grounds, Diana is the Roman goddess of the hunt. And when I hear my county’s name all I can think of is how he must have hunted two hundred years ago and how though the technologies have changed, little else has. These are still hunting grounds (my family doesn’t hunt, but), my neighbors fill their freezers with venison each fall. This, in light of Basso, strikes me as a very interesting moment in my own conception of place names and the richness that even a name looking towards Europe and given in honor of a former European monarch can, when attached to the apposite story, say a lot about the place and in interesting ways.
-Liam
I really enjoyed reading Basso's book and found fully it lived up to Sev's praise. Unlike so many historical texts that relate facts and events as they happen on top of, and apart from, the terrain of a place, Basso tells a lyrical narrative sensitive to the Apache peoples and their relationship to the land they live on and the relationship to the greater Southwest. That said, I am slightly wary of the excerpt presented as the prompt for this week's blog posting. Although I recognize the import of the claim and acknowledge that it conflates many of the central concerns addressed by our course thus far, I am concerned that in positing "the landscape is 'not merely a physical presence but an omnipresent moral force'" contradicts some of the conclusions we have made earlier in the semester regarding narrating history, personifying the land and assigning moral value to inanimate objects. In describing the land in emphatically anthropomorphic and cognizant terms, the landscape becomes volitional and agentive, capable of both subjecting its cohabitants and being subjected by them. Despite my enthusiasm for and admiration of his writing, I struggle with Basso text because I am unable to reconcile his compelling account of the relationship between a landscape and its people with the concerns raised earlier in the course regarding constructing subjective narrative from objective historical evidence. As I read "Wisdom Sits in Places," I was quite happily beguiled away by the color and magnetism of the landscape and the beauty of Basso's writing, but now as I reflect on my experience as a reader from a less directly engaged and more detached perspective, I begin to question my initial response to the work. Basso's writing and narrative draw made it easy to forget the perspicacious and judicious mindset with which I apporoached previous readings in the course. Instead of summoning upon the engagement and critical thinking required to respond intelligently and assess appropriately the texts of Henry Lewis Morgan, Francis Bacon and Jose Acosta in addition to the more recent readings on cannibalism, Basso's writing render me a much more passive reader. Perhaps this is a good thing and indicative of the extent to which I accept and subscribe to his mode of relating history. The passivity, or rather compliance, and acquiescence "Wisdom Sits in Places" elicited in me continues to unsettle. Basso's early observation that "place making is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing history," leads me to question my reaction to his writing further. The language Basso employs here excites me, but at the same time worries me. Describing history as something that requires "doing," an unmistakably active and agentive verb, and as something that gets done, so to speak, frames in less dialogic terms than we are used to given the prior interpretive and narrative methods advocated in our course. For me, the term "place making" also recalls just the sort of overly active and constructive narrative practices we questioned earlier in the course. How does "place making" stand in comparison to 'place finding'? If the former is a narrator's term, the latter then is an archaeologists. Both are intrinsically active and require a subjective command of evidence. It is impossible to determine which term or method is preferable, or even more expressive of place's history and people, but perhaps the term 'place making' is more candid in its acknowledgment of the historical preconceptions with which all people approachtheir source material.
ReplyDeleteThe Western Apache view their land as a cultural storybook that goes beyond providing insight into their history, traditions, and morals but actually becomes a physical manifestation of their society. They connect places to their lifestyle ideals both past and present. One ideal that has always been a part of Apache society is that of interdependence. Apache society is built around communal cooperation. Special places, then, have come to possess moral and communal values, meaning that the places themselves are like parables with messages. The land is not just a reminder of cultural ideals but actually bears them. Thus, the land itself has become a part of the people. Because of all this, Apache people have a tradition of tying experiences to their landscape and naming the place accordingly. The connection between experience and place works to highlight the societal values each place contains. Because the landscape has an eternal quality, the interplay of morals, history, and place defies any one time period; it holds a piece of every age. The names of places provide a sense of unity within and across generations and are a manifestation of important moral and communal values.
ReplyDeleteFor example, Basso tells of an older sister, Lola Machuse, using the experience behind the name of a place to provide her brother with a lesson. She recounted the traditional tale of what happened at Line of White Rocks Extends Up and Out. “Long ago,” she begins, “a girl lived alone with her maternal grandmother” (94). Her grandmother used to always send the young girl out to collect firewood. The girl would take a shortcut that saved time, but her grandmother always advised her to take a different route because the quick path housed many snakes. One day, it was very hot, and the girl did not want to have to carry her heavy load any further than necessary. She decided to take the shortcut down the rock canyon. She slipped and fell, loosing all the wood she had gathered. Then, as she re-gathered her bounty, a snake bit her hand. Luckily, the girl was able to make it back to her home and was healed in a curing ceremony. The young girl learned an important lesson from her experience, and she knew how she would live the rest of her life: carefully and respectfully, listening to others (94). Lola Machuse only had to point to the site to suggest the narrative because the two are so intertwined, as are the stories and certain values, of which she was trying to remind her brother. The place, the story, and the values espoused become interchangeable. Moreover, the place that elicits the experience (or visa versa), which reveals the moral principles of communal life become something more, something ubiquitous and empowering.
To the Western Apache, the land is a presence in itself. They talk about the land “stalking” or “going to work” on different people. This is more than a saying—it is a belief. Basso provides us with Nick Thompson’s account:
This is what we know about our stories. They go to work on your mind and make you think about your life. Maybe you’ve not been acting right. Maybe you’ve been stingy. Maybe you’ve been chasing after women. Maybe you’ve been trying to act like a whiteman. People don’t like it! So someone goes hunting for you—maybe your grandmother, your grandfather, your uncle. It doesn’t matter Anyone can do it.
So someone stalks you and tells a story about what happened long ago. It doesn’t matter if other people are around—you’re going to know he’s aiming that story at you. All of a sudden it hits you! It’s like an arrow, they say. (58)
It is clear that everyone in the community only has to draw attention to a place in order to suggest the naming narrative, or conversely, a person must only recite the traditional narrative in order to suggest the place. One will draw the other into mind. This hunting with stories is a tradition draws on communal values to put a member of the tribe back into an interdependent mindset. It reconnects a person with their tribal identity. A person who is hunted with stories is forced to think about his or her life because they are made to recognize the fact that people have been watching and discussing him or her, and the community does not like his or her current behavior. This ritual allows for the functioning of an interdependent community. It emphasizes the importance of others and the opinions of others because in order to live right, everyone must live together without hurting one another.
Nick Thompson ends with a very compelling statement: “Even if we go far away from here to some big city, places around here keep stalking us. If you live wrong, you will hear the names and see the places in your mind” (59). The internalization of ideals physically represented in the landscape promotes communal well being and personal morality.
These unique connections made by the Apache demonstrate that there is not one real environment that transcends the particularities of culture. Just as there is no one strain of history that defines us all, landscapes too are subjective; they mean different things to different societies. Place names for the Apache give us information about their culture, linguistics, history, morals, values, and ideals. It has been state that in order “To have knowledge of things, one must first give them a name.” Since most every culture has different names for different places, every culture must then have a different understanding of these places.
Caitlin Stachon
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ReplyDeleteBasso and his Apache collaborators detail the interplay of history, place and morality by explaining how, and giving example of, the features of a giving place may have just as much, if not more, of an effect on historical events which in turn shape the morality of, in this case, the Western Apache. There is then a relationship between the people and the landscape in which the landscape helps shape the imagination of the people, while the people form, or a imagine, the landscape---as one changes so does the other.
ReplyDeleteIn order to understand history you must have wisdom. Wisdom in this text is described as igoya’i “the heightened mental capacity that facilitates avoidance of harmful events by detecting threatening circumstances when none are apparent” (130). Knowledge of landscape is essential in attaining igoya’i because one must know the land in order to develop this mental capacity and not just the physical layout but the historical events that have occurred on the landscape and the moral lessons that resulted from these events.
-D. Omavi Harshaw
Basso stresses the significance of studying place-making ethnographically, demonstrating the interactions that occur between the societal, the individual, and ‘place.’ The making of ‘place,’ therefore, is a reflection on culture, while, simultaneously, becoming a part of individual identity. Basso shows this interplay between the individual, the societal, and the ‘place’ in “Wisdom Sits in Places,” an ethnography of the Apache, specifically looking at the role of “place-names” and stories. This interplay manifests itself in the specific interplay existing between history, morality, and ‘place.’ Indeed, the physical and mental interaction with the landscape presents an alternate perception of ‘history,’ in which it, paradoxically, has no authority while attempting to impose an authority of what “ can (and should be)” within the community of Cibecue.
ReplyDeleteThe Apache practice of place-naming presents a manner by which to examine the development of the Apache social life, and its role within the interplay between the individual and ‘place.’ Nevertheless, place-names themselves are not the focus of this interplay; rather, it is storytelling (which includes place-names) that Nick Thompson emphasizes to show Basso its importance for the Apache. Place-names are associated with stories, such as the ‘Shades of Shit’ story. In referring to this specific place, from the Apache perspective, the story of the place itself represents a sort of guide for social order. This social order, existing within boundaries, is determined by the morality of individuals. Therefore, stories, such as ‘Shades of Shit’ (which stresses the importance of sharing among kin for survival), as Basso writes, “allude to historical events that illuminate the consequences of wrongful social conduct.” In this manner, then, the ‘correct’ manner of conduct is demonstrated.
The construction of the stories are based upon the perceptions of individuals, and, yet, it serves to indicate the manner that individuals “should be” acting in order to maintain societal order. In this manner, stories “stalk” or “hunt” individual transgressors. The stories, and the place-names, therefore, take varying forms according to individuals and time. This type of place-making through stories presents an alternative form of ‘history’: “It is a history constructed in spurts, in sudden bursts of imaginative activity, and it takes the form of stories delivered in spoken Apache…” (32). In this perspective, history is not “authoritative” and it is dependent on moments and the imagination exiting within individual consciousness.
Yet, this type of history, manifested as storytelling, shows a historical consciousness that has a purpose of, to an extent, attempting to impose authority in order to maintain the social order. It is a form of expounding the morally acceptable within Apache society, thus, at times, stories “stalk” or “hunt” individuals that have acted against society. The stories become guides for both leaders and individuals in attaining and acting with “wisdom.” Basso presents the observation that place-names and stories continue to play a significant role in Apache society and will continue to do so through the development of Apache society. “And no one living in Cibecue doubts for a moment that this is as it should be,” Basso writes in the Epilogue. Initially, this statement seemed to be generalizing to a great extent. I think that transgression and conflict is present within all societies. Nevertheless, I realize that he is referring to the presence place-names and stories, that is, the historical consciousness that they produce, that exists within individuals. I still think, however, that there is the possibility for doubt, even though it may not be prevalent, and even though it may not alter the social fabric.
It is fascinating to look at the composition of the morally acceptable, that is, the right “social conduct” because the physical environment plays a significant role. Indeed, reciprocity is stressed as a means for survival. Basso draws from this, making the claim that further studies of place-making will provide insight for the study of the development and fabric of the “local” instead of perceiving it as that which is “natural” and seen only in comparison to the “other.”
-Michelle Rosales
I strongly agree with Basso’s notion that place-making "is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history" (7). Were I to rewrite this quote, however, I would put the emphasis on the word venerable – place-making is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history. My removal of the emphasis on “doing” has a fairly straightforward reason, yet my emphasis on “venerable” stems from my own hometown. First, I do not believe that human history is something that has been done, or rather, what has been done is not what makes the landscape on which it has been done meaningful. A landscape has a history, a present, and a future; emphasis on its history provides a mere 1/3 of the landscape’s significance. When thought of a place is constantly dedicated to its past, some is found and much is lost. The landscape must be cherished for what it is now, for it will never return to the state in which it was, but should still be appreciated for the beauty, shelter, and solace it provides to the humans who enjoy it. The future of the landscape is critical as well, for if the land is not taken care of, it will not serve later generations. Creating a place does not only construct a past – it constructs a present and a future, a means of doing human life perpetually, with equal significance given to all three blocks of time. The past does not provide the whole story that the landscape has to tell, but the past, present, and future together provide the entire tale.
ReplyDeleteI choose to emphasize the notion that place-making is venerable in the human experience in part for reasons expressed by Basso and in part because of the greater respect I have for my hometown due to the names of places within it. Basso explains that the landscape is "not merely a physical presence but an omnipresent moral force" (63). It drives its inhabitants to remember and act certain ways due to events that happened on the landscape. For example, “Shades of Shit” teaches the people of this territory not to be stingy, to always remember others in need and help when able. My hometown, Mamaroneck, has an Indian name, as an Englishman purchased it in 1661 from a Native American chief. Much of my town (in Western Apache tradition, coincidentally) includes place names similar to what the places actual contain. For example, Boston Post Road runs through Mamaroneck and was originally the road connecting mail delivery between Boston and New York. My street address, Rockingstone Ave., has a huge rock in the middle of the road dating back to the Ice Age. Since I was young I have appreciated the connection of the street names to their specific historic uses or nature, especially after moving from the Bronx in which the streets were merely numbered. Emphasizing what makes a place unique is, in my opinion, venerable to that place.
-Hadas Margulies
The Apache concept of place making is a concept shared with many cultures around the world. What stands out with the Apache people,
ReplyDeleteis the great value they hold in their native landmarks. In America there are many historical land marks that Americans cherish as the foundation
of our nation, but few that serve as constant reminders as to how we should live our lives. There are few landmarks that our American elders will continuously bring up to their children as direction to how they should behave an eventually gain wisdom. With the Apache people who dwell in Cibecue, the mentioning of places as method to make one think about their actions and how to live in the shadows of wisdom is commonplace.
Wisdom sits in the places where their ancestors once dwelled, and in order to understand the Apache culture you must look to the places in which
they inhabit.
Basso references an idea that "place making involves multiple acts of remembering and imagining which inform each other in complex ways". The complexity of place making is what makes this Apache tradition somewhat confusing for the western scholar to fully comprehend, at least initially and without native guidance. If one was to listen to an Apache conversation in which place making is taking place, it would sound more like a list of landmarks than a historical account or lesson. This is because the historical subtext behind these places are ones that the most Apache people know so well, there is no need to engage in a dialogue, they engage the story within their own minds. With that in mind Basso references another key idea about place making; he states that "every developed place world manifests itself as a possible state of affairs, and whenever these constructions are accepted by other people as credible
and convincing-or plausible and provocative, arresting or intriguing-they enrich the common stock on which everyone can draw to muse on past events, interpret their significance, and imagine them anew". The idea of place-making is to remember the past events that took place at that particular location, and use these stories to help find direction and wisdom, and these stories can apply to many circumstances.
-Michael Davenport
While I do have a firm attachment to the various forms of written and dated history, I have a great appreciation for what Basso terms place-making. When reading Wisdom Sits In Places I was at first unable to see the merit of place-making. I could not understand how “constructing history itself, of inventing it, of fashioning novel versions of ‘what happened here,’”(6) would be a veritable way of recording history. I thought that if understanding history was merely a process of imagining, then that history could change easily at any time. However, then I realized that imagining history was not the same as making up history. The stories created surrounding certain places are in fact based on true events, and the power to enforce morality vested within them is humbling.
ReplyDeleteWith the use of place-making as a tool for recording history, the social and cultural impact of history is much greater than when it is simply written down and dated. With place-making, the whole group recognizes and feels the deep emotional impact of a place and its corresponding stories. This, I believe is the point of remembering history; to learn from the past, to understand what was right and wrong about it, and apply those lessons to present troubles. The problem with modern conceptions of history is that too many people do not even recognize historical references, and are especially not emotionally impacted by them. People have entrusted the remembrance and interpretation of history to a select group of people, and thus feel free to forget it themselves. Our history is also not a part of our cultural identity. History lies solely within academia and is not readily available to the public.
I believe that the perfect way of remembering and interpreting history would contain a mixture of place-making and oral history as well as written history. History should be a part of our everyday lives and when one looks upon a landscape they should be able to imagine the history that took place there. Remembering history is a way of not only learning from the past, but a way of retaining and celebrating culture as well. With this modern sense of history (or rather a lack thereof), culture has become a novelty as the world adapts to the practice of historical ignorance and becomes homogenized. Instead of history and culture being celebrated and remembered, it has become a commodity to be bought and sold in airport gift shops.
Leah Sikora
The Western Apache live in their bible. Instead of stories recorded in writings, their stories are etched into the mountains and playas of their physical environment. The three major Western religions article their stories in writing and deem them ‘holy.’ They pass on the stories to each generation, as they believe the stories to be of the utmost importance in teaching the community’s morals and obligations. The dedicated spend hours studying these stories, analyzing the intricacies and extracting any hidden commentary on the best way to reflect upon actions and conduct lives. Thusly, the histories and stories become imbedded with important rules and ideas perceived as guides for life. Similarly, the Western Apache has stories to help teach their people rules and ideas for life. In contrast with the Western religions, however, their stories take shape in the places where they live, instead of on ancient and buried scrolls. The people are constantly reminded of their stories because they live inside of them; a clearing could be a place where a boy was killed for not listening to his elders, an outlying of rocks could be a place where a girl found lots of resources because she prayed to the gods. And the people who live today around these places will forever remember the deeds enacted there.
ReplyDeleteBasso helps explain the association the Apache make between the stories and the places in which they live by explaining how names of places first came into being. The Apache made sure that the names of places served a function to inform about the location. The first sites were named with depicters; streams with moss in a clearing of tall trees would be named as such. These names served as the first discoveries they were making about their environment, they served as place markers in their new homes. Later, the Apache would name the locations by tribe, logically attaching the site to the group of people living there. Lastly, the Apache started naming places with the aide of stories, and thus the Apache tangibly intertwine the places with their lives by personifying their environment and giving it almost an active character in the stories; setting plays a much more important role.
Western religions do not afford the locations of their stories as much importance as the Apache do. Instead, they emphasize an evolution of time, explain the growth of families and lineage as bearing the morality of any story. They recount different families and various leaders, and the obstacles which these people had to overcome. Everlasting tangible or pictorial reminders of the lessons are then lost in time, and can only be remembered in scrolls, writings, imaginations and pictures. The Apache do not emphasize time as much as place, thus allowing them to see their lessons of morality everyday. Instead of emphasizing the growth of the families, and the progress of the people, they emphasize individual stories almost as fables that can serve people through all the ages. Both religions try to remind their people of lessons, try to encourage their members to reflect on their actions and better their character. The records of their histories differ though. One group’s record is in minds and on paper, while the other group’s record is in minds and on places.
Ashley Ellenson
By engaging in the art of place-making, one imbues the present and future with a past. In Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith H. Basso describes the intense associations—with the past landscape or with past events—that various place-names and their stories evoke for the Western Apache. He acknowledges that making these connections is an individual process based not only on general information about a place but also on one’s experiences and thought processes.
ReplyDeleteWhile place-names carry messages for all of Western Apache society, Basso notes that “senses of place, while always informed by bodies of local knowledge, are finally the possessions of particular individuals” (xv). A physical place and its corresponding name and stories provide a gateway through which an individual can travel in order to develop a unique observation of his surroundings. Such an approach to place-making is observed when Charles tells his enhanced version of the story of Shades Of Shit. Basso writes, “He tells his grandfather’s story again, fleshing it out at length and constructing for us an astonishing world” (25). Charles combines the place, its name, and its corresponding tale in order to form a concept of Shades Of Shit that makes sense to him. He accepts what is known about the site but does not accept that that is all there is to know. Before Charles re-tells the tale, Basso writes, “He says that he wonders what really happened here: it couldn’t have been as simple as the story suggests” (24). Charles understands that place-making is not complete for an individual until he adds his own interpretations to the body of established information.
Place-making provides a framework for individuals in the present and future. Places, place-names, and their associated stories act as guides for individuals who seek to understand the interplay of environment, history, and values in their societies. For the Western Apache, place-making is vital to creating narratives.
Sarah Sommer
What I found the most interesting about Wisdom Sits in Places was the fact that Keith Basso never uses dates when he gives examples of place-names. Unlike our own history books and tales, these stories are not limited by time or date. They aren’t even limited by space. Although they are all tied down by their names to certain areas, they are meant to apply to more than just the region in which they originally occurred. Elders tell their children these stories to teach them lessons of conduct, lessons of moral reasoning, lessons of community and family no matter the time in which they originally occurred.
ReplyDeleteThis, of course, is done purposefully. These stories, because of the lessons they are meant to teach, transgress time. They are meant to apply at all times. But, we all know that moral values and ideals slowly change over time due to alterations in circumstance, political organization, family structure, etc. So how do these place-names and the stories they are attached to stay so applicable over time? Like soft clay, because these stories are orally maintained, they can be bent and shaped to apply to different time periods where context may be different. The people that pass them on through spoken words have usually grown up and evolved with them. Therefore, whether it be conscious or unconscious, when they themselves pass them down, these stories are colored by their own lives and experiences in some way or another. The same basic moral ideas and storyline do not change, but the little details do. In this way, these stories have the freedom to adapt and therefore stay mainstream over many generations of people. They are not sent in stone and this is what makes them so strong in the minds of the people that hear them.
An example of this is the place-name story ‘Big Cotton Wood Trees Stand Here and There.’ Though this story was probably originally meant to restrain mothers-in-law from getting involved in their daughter’s marriage after a year of being officially wed, over time it evolved into a more general lesson on respecting tradition, customs, and rules on a more universal basis. So even if this custom among the Apache had changed over time, the story itself still maintained its important moral message: something bad will happen to you if you do not respect the rules. Whether or not the actual custom for a mother-in-law not to get involved in her daughter’s life after a year of marriage stayed true over time, the message became universal and a means for moral and social law. Lessons of the past serve as moral rules and guidelines of the future.
Though this type of history seems so “unscientific” compared to ours, we use very much the same kind of lesson giving in our own societies. For example, Jean de la Fontaine, a French author, wrote lots of fables for children. These stories, unlike place-names, were written and published within the target audience’s own culture. People bought them and read them to their children. But over time, they became part of the French oral tradition. Even people that did not own the books began telling them to their children from oral memory. In my own family, my mother would tell me Jean de la Fontaine tales but change them just enough for me to relate to them in my own childhood context. Hidden within these stories were deep moral lessons about friendship, sharing, family, rules, etc. De la Fontaine also used animals in most of his fables so these tales also transgressed time. We usually view the animal kingdom as historically unchanging therefore when the characters are animals, these moral lessons are immortalized through time and space. Once again, lessons of the past – the ones that inspire these animal tales – serve as guidelines for the future.
These French stories, one example of “European” oral storytelling among hundreds, are not attached to geographic places like those of the Apache. However, they are similar because they too transgress time. They do not use dates and their characters are animals that can apply to any social context. Both have been used to teach people, no matter age or social standing, universal moral lessons. I found “Wisdom Sits in Places” very interesting (and entertaining) because in many ways it showed me that on some level there is a “universal people’s culture” where no matter background and context, all people share common moral beliefs – do not transgress rules, respect family, help those in need, etc. The next thing I would like to find out – though I doubt I ever will – is what is the seed to these universal ideas of morality. Is it biological? Is it related to the individual social contracts every society implicitly follows? Is it religious? And if so, is this some sort of proof that there may in deed be one God or higher figure that gives all people certain moral ideas no matter their origins or cultures? Or can we draw a tree diagram of moral thought? One in which all people eventually have the same moral rules within their individual lives and societies regardless of space and time?
Basso, in his book Wisdom Sits in Places, describes the alternative conception of history offered by the Western Apache. Instead of the perhaps traditionally American way of thinking of history as existing in textbooks, as general information to be memorized and on which to be tested, the Apache use history selectively, to impact people on an individual basis. History serves the present in a very personal way, as specific stories are told to people for whom the story will have particular meaning. The Apache people use history as narrative, stories to tell each other about each other.
ReplyDeleteBasso outlines four categories of speech: ordinary talk, prayer, narrative, and story. In turn, four different types of narratives are described: history, myth, saga, and gossip. History is conceptualized as a distinct category of narrative - a very interesting concept. Historical events are therefore defined as truth, but stories nonetheless, complete with plots, characters, and importantly, a moral lesson. This conception of history allows its usage as a medium to teach people about themselves and to incite reflection. It can be thought, perhaps, that history is a living organism, constantly being molded and added to since the people to whom the stories are told, who must rethink their own actions, become absorbed into the narrative and the place on which the narrative is based.
Just as naming archeological sites with empirical, technical terms is impersonal and unmemorable, the characteristically Apache way of using history would not be possible without naming places based on important events or if events were defined and thus spoken about by the specific date at which they occurred. Apache historical narratives would perhaps lose the captivating, personal and cultural connection to the person at whom the story is aimed, thus weakening the Apache historical system.
The Apache conception of history, though used to improve upon and understand the present on a personal level, also requires a very shared sense of purpose. History is based on the landscape, yet because physical maps are not used, and because of the tradition of orally telling the stories imbedded within each place to those who must hear them, the Apache operate in a world that has a very ephemeral culture, a system that requires lots of cooperation and a united goal and purpose.
-Mollie Lobl
During our class discussion on this book, Sev read my favorite passage out loud; the one which claimed that unlike a European approach to history, Apache history is without authority, where a variety of stories are considered valid. I was thinking about this passage in the class previous to that discussion, when we were debating the various versions of cultural ladders, trees, bar graphs, and Sev’s alternative model… I replayed that passage in my mind, which scorned the one-veined authoritarian approach to a group’s history. I understand why these models are useful for anthropological comparisons, but isn’t this an imaginary and construed utility? None of those models account for the various versions of history that are within the same culture. Shortly after that passage, Basso follows with “[ Anglo-American history] appears to be in search of final historical truths, of which Apaches believe there are very few indeed.. it strikes Apache audience as dense, turgid, and lacking in utility..” (34)… I suppose various groups have different conceptions of how history is useful; I don’t know very much about anthropology, but these historical truths do seem useful, at least for comparison purposes. However in a very defeatist sense, in our culture, it is widely accepted that “learning from the past” is difficult; historical atrocities are on one hand seen as mutations from a time past, or inevitably cyclical and unfortunately bound to reoccur. The Anglo-American presentation of the past is not very functional as moral lessons.
ReplyDeleteThe act of place-making addresses this problem by placing the historical authority on a force which is larger than people; we place boundaries on our history by being temporally obsessed. Place-obsession immediately brings history to the present, therefore the lessons to be drawn from it are a lot more potent. I do not mean to qualitatively compare the two methods of documenting history; I think that they serve different ends. However the closer a connection you feel to history, the harder it is to assert its alterity and the easier it is draw moral lessons from it that are relevant to your situation. I think that the concept of “doing history” is interesting, because it admits that there isn’t one truth that exists that we are destined to uncover, but instead that history is very a much an approach that we choose to take towards events that happened in the past. It doesn’t deny that we are creating, and not purely excavating. There is authority in the Apache approach towards history, but it is an authority which declares and admits the active role the present plays in forming the past; it is not just the past which shapes the present.
In Basso’s book, history is presented through the lens of places that were historically significant. For Basso, history is not simply an event that is connected with a certain date. Basso even goes so far as to say that the dates are irrelevant when compared to the importance of the place itself. Being in a place where an important event of the past occurred, gives you a sense of connection and perspective that books cannot give you. When you step onto a historical landscape it is hard not to put yourself in the shoes of those who were there before you. One has a tendency to imagine how one would have reacted in the situation, what is would have felt like to live there at that time. There is also a huge amount that can be learned just through looking at the layout of the landscape. Even if the exact facts are not available, being in a place will lead an individual to make suppositions of what life there might have been like. This is exactly what Charles does in Wisdom Sits in Places. Given little to know facts about what actually went on, Charles paints a picture of how he imagines things took place. He paints a vivid picture for his friends and turns a bundle of half-known facts into an exciting story that anyone could relate to. Similarly when presented with the short, 13-line story of the Shades of Shit, Charles builds and elaborates on the original story to give it more of a sense of meaning and importance. Since the stories told by Charles and others are not 100% true to the facts, they represent an alternate history. However, since the true history can never really be known, the alternate history is very variable. In the end the history of our ponderings is not that different from actual history. The human mind has not changed so much and emotions connected with a place do not tend to vary drastically.
ReplyDeleteThere is also a very important spiritual connection between history and places that adds to the moral quality. People generally regard mandates from the gods to be necessary rules that one must follow. Therefore those ethical standards that are preached with connections to the Gods quite often become the basis for societal morality. Charles tries to explain the intense spirituality connected with places when he criticizes Basso for his failing attempts to pronounce the names correctly. History is naturally about those who are dead and since no one really knows what happens to people when they die, there is an innate spirituality in history. Charles forces his audience to appreciate this religious tone when regarding the historical setting. Charles is a character who has a deep respect for history. Wherever he travels, it seems, he cannot help thinking about who was there before him and what their emotions were to that place. As a student at Columbia, I can slightly relate to this situation. Columbia is a historical university in that has been around for 255 years. Many students have sat in the lecture halls I sat in and have slept in the same dorm buildings that I sleep in. In order to take in the historical importance of this place it is necessary for to me to ponder over how they reacted to the same situations that I am currently dealing with.
History also plays an important role in morality because morality is often taught through history. Not just in Native American tradition, but all around the world, cautionary verses are used to teach people what and what not to do. Often the god(s) are used in conjunction with these stories to give them more weight. Stories are passed down from generation to generation through families. However, it is the places where these stories took place that serve as the constant reminders. Places take on different meanings when stories are connected with them. In a sense the “place-making” takes on a character through the stories of the past. A beautiful field becomes the sight of a tragic battle and a few old walls become a glittering palace. Basso addresses this situation when he talks about how there is a tendency to be shot by a story like one is shot by an arrow. This is a good analogy because it shows just how much stories of the past can affect life of the present. Just by walking onto the scene of a historical event, one might change his or her habits or decisions for the rest of your life. Where the moral message is still present within the story, people will have a tendency to follow that tradition. Although no one believes that they will meet some dismal fate by not acting morally, there is a feeling of necessity to live in a way that corresponds to the story.
Basso’s work presents us with an alternate understanding of history, because for the most part in European culture, history stays in the past. It occurs and then it disappears. Basso presents us with a history that is permanent—like the landscape. The reasoning behind this is that things that happened in the past don’t go away when they are marked by place rather than time. By linking place names with history and morals, these three things work together to serve as a constant reminder of the lessons of the past. It functions a bit like that trite quote often used in Euro/ Euro- American history: He who does not know his history is doomed to repeat it. By learning from the lessons of the past, one can avoid making these mistakes in the future. It serves as a moral force, because one can always see the landscape, and in observing it, it becomes impossible to separate the landscape from the lesson. As Basso puts it: “This reciprocal relationship—a relationship in which individuals invest themselves in the landscape while incorporating its meanings into their own most fundamental experience—is the ultimate source of the rich sententious potential and functional versatility of Western Apache place names,” (102).
ReplyDeleteWhile this is a distinctly different approach to looking at history, (as compared with Euro culture) it is also has the distinct affect of keeping Native culture attentive to its roots and therefore separate from European culture. For instance in one story, a young girl receives is reprimanded by her grandmother for wearing her hair in an inappropriate way. As a Westerner, Basso has to struggle throughout the book with his inability to break through into understanding of Wisdom and Apache place names. When he first sees the role of these place names in everyday context he doesn’t understand their role. Furthermore, he struggles to understand wisdom in the fuller, pervasive sense that his friend Dudley Patterson understands it.
In this way, “oral histories,” serve as life lessons. It doesn’t matter whether or not they really happened—they are a fundamental part of understanding life. While in some ways they manufacture history, they give more meaning and importance to the history of most other cultures. In truth we all manufacture history to an extent, as humans we try to learn about history, find intrinsic meaning within it, and come up with a great truth. In a reading for another class, I found an interesting interpretation of history. In their paper The Imperial Imaginary, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, discuss the role of narrative shaping our idea of history. They use a quote by Hayden White: “historical discourse consists ‘of the provisions of a plot structure for a sequence of events so that their nature as a comprehensible process is revealed by their figuration of a story of a particular kind,” (118). By using certain plot lines in history, by coming up with a label or a theme for history, it can continue to be understood, and as a side affect resonate with people. One way of doing this is by assigning a “moral” to historical events. With Apache oral histories, Basso describes this as an important reconstruction of history—a reconstruction that happens to be more explicit than most. One instance of this is the girl who wears pink hair curlers to the puberty ceremony. Her grandmother need merely mention the place of an important event, “the forgetful Apache policeman who behaved too much like a white man,” and she is chastised. In the case of Talbert Paxton, he has a tough break-up, makes a fool out of himself and is made to learn his lesson through the mention of “Trail Goes Down Between Two Hills.” In the end the accuracy of the event is unimportant—all that matters is that the lesson is learned. Nick Thompson says that these are stories designed to get us to think about our own lives. The idea of the landscape as not merely a physical presence but an omnipresent moral force, makes the implication of that landscape difficult to escape.
Nora Machuga
Compared to the Apache understanding of history, our society’s construction of the past is extremely estranged. The Apache integrate their ancestors into their daily life, language and rituals, all the while retaining and learning from their past. Part of their ability to do this arises from the fact that they still live in the same places, and in the preservation of the place-names and the inextricably linked histories/stories with morals attached. As Basso states, our version of history “lies silent and inert on the printed English page…unconnected to daily affairs and concerns” (33).
ReplyDeleteI grew up in a very small town, in the same house where my grandmother was born. Thus, I grew up knowing where I came from, and appreciating that my relatives had shared the same ground. Yet my ancestors had not named the land where they lived, nor did my family have any specific moral history associated with that house. This unique quality of the Apache to name places according to a certain event that happened there initiated the custom of preserving a specific piece of history in order to teach descendants moral lessons. In this way, by relating the story of a past ancestor to a present descendant, the Apache are much more of an interconnected and unified people than our society could claim to be today. Sure, some parents reprimand their children from time to time by telling an anecdote about why the child should not do what he/she did; yet the metaphor of arrows and hunting is what sets the Apache system of chastisement apart from the system I knew as a child.
Western Apache storytelling holds the power to rebuke; it is in this sense that one (generally an elder) “shoots” an “arrow” at someone who has misbehaved in the eyes of Apache society in order to correct their conduct. The story in relation to the place-name is the arrow and the person who shoots it is the storyteller: more specifically, the stories are about historical events and their geographical locations and furthermore they are about the “system of rules and values according to which Apaches expect each other to organize and regulate their lives” (52). The aim of shooting an arrow is that by establishing a bond between individuals and features of the natural landscape, the individual will be moved to rethink their transgression. This Apache practice lays the groundwork for a society in which the features of their landscape have become symbols for the way of living, the enduring moral character each member of the society strives toward.
Basso also details the notion of the arrow stalking the person who is shot; in this sense the Apache system of admonishment is much stronger and longer lasting than what I was used to growing up due to its self-reflective nature. No storyteller explicitly states, “Charley, this story is about you.” Rather, the Apaches are much more subtle and thusly more antagonistic. The moral of the story is not forgotten by the individual and instead haunts them throughout their whole life as to ensure that they do not digress again. The arrows also “promote beneficial changes in people’s attitudes toward their responsibilities as members of a moral community” (57). Now, I grew up a member of the Catholic Church. We went to confession every Sunday, recognized our sins, and repented for them by doing what the priest assigned us: three hail Mary’s, one Our Father and a hug for my sister was a common theme. Yet every week I returned with relatively the same sins to confess: I fought over something with my sister, I disobeyed my mother, I made fun of a kid at school. I never learned anything from saying a couple of prayers that were completely unrelated to the problems I was having. Yet if I were a Western Apache, an elder could have told me a story about how, in a specific place, two brothers fought and it resulted in a tragedy. And then I would think much harder the next time I was about to fight with my sister, and instead of doing that I would respect her as my family and thusly follow the upright moral code. I thoroughly admire the Apache tradition and hope that someday when I have children of my own I can teach them lessons as powerfully as the Apache do.
[Elissa Cashman]
Basso writes “…places possess a marked capacity for triggering acts of self-reflection, inspiring thoughts about who one presently is, or memories of who one used to be, and musings on who one might become. And that is not all. Place-based thoughts about the self lead commonly to thoughts of other things–other places, other people, other times, whole networks of associations that ramify unaccountably within the expanding spheres of awareness that they themselves engender.” (page 107) In this way Basso explains that a deep intellectual exploration of one’s geographical location can initiate an examination of the history contained in this place, of the people and events that began and ended in that very spot. By becoming aware of the history of one plot of land where homes have been made and torn down and where livelihoods have been earned and lost, we are reminded of the permanence of the earth, the rapid advancement of time, and the transience of our own lives, all of which are concepts profoundly associated with the notion of human morality.
ReplyDeleteBasso introduces the concept of a place-name by portraying to his readers the manner in which he himself learned about the significance of places in Apache culture. Charles’ vivid way of interpreting a place perfectly depicts the moral essence of history. He opens up a world for Basso in which Basso becomes aware that the land he walks on is so much more than what it is today alone. By visualizing the people who once discovered a landscape and named it as a significant locus to the sustenance of their way of life, we are attached, by means of the land acting as a bridge across the ages, to a culture distinct from our own, and to humanity in its entirety. Instead of seeing a place in our modern Western world that seems strangely misnamed, Charles allows Basso to find the story hidden behind such a mismatch. As he describes women and children praying and wailing at having found their source of water dried and gone, we are forced to see the history (the culture, the family life, religious rituals and implications, migratory movement, etc.) that surrounds a site as opposed to simply the natural history (the scientific fact that a stream dried up). When we face the emotional experiences of those who came before us, who stood on the land where we now stand, it brings about a unique experience of the world around us in which we have a duty to maintain the earth in a state that will support those who later stand on our land. Basso shows us that the history of places is a powerful unifying factor that has moral implications about human connectedness and environmental stewardship.
Zoe Feld
Regarding the interplay of history, place, and morality in Apache culture, I was struck by this strange sense (strange in that I’m not entirely sure where it comes from) that the Apache implicitly know or think of us humans and the world as being made up of the same material. Science has proven this to be true; both the Earth and we are made up of the matter exploded out of ancient stars. Although the Apache never explicitly talk about this in such a way, I still get the feeling that (perhaps because of their connections between place and morality) they believe in a world in which we are the earth and the earth is us, so to speak. This gives reason to such a strong connection between place and morality. Land is deeply symbolic to the Apache, as can be recognized through the stories told by the Apache in Basso’s text, stories meant to be learned from, to create a human morality. This idea that the earth and we are the same lends itself to the idea that the land can be extrapolated to directly apply to humans; land can be used to teach us of our wrongdoings or to show us the right path. Such a profound connection can also be justified in thinking that the necessity of good land equates to the necessity of good morals. For the Apache, good land, good places to settle, hunt, and drink, are necessary for survival; and good morals in humans allow humans and the land to function in harmony, the good morals allowing not only for survival but for a better (more just) life.
ReplyDeleteWisdom Sits in Places describes history for the Apache as one thought of in terms of location and places rather than time, like Western history. The Apache think of the importance of the land and how that dictates human action, how that dictates history, and thus there is much history in a place. But such a place is eternal, it does not change except through human transgression. The Apache think of places as locations that their ancestors discovered and described and used for survival, rather than thinking that their ancestors (their time) controlled the land. Their ancestors and time have the ability to affect the land, but cannot dictate history in the way that place can. This introduces the idea that humanity is below (subordinate to) the land, in the sense that the land dictates what is possible for us to do; and thusly, it also dictates what we ought to do, what is moral and right. The land tells us what we can and cannot do. It teaches us things that we would not learn otherwise.
After the quote about “doing human history,” Basso writes, “We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine” (7). By constructing the past, by creating these place-worlds, we essentially create ourselves. The land gives us the power of identity, the power of creation and knowing what is right and what is wrong. This comes back to the idea of the land dictating history, dictating human behavior. By creating place-worlds we are partaking in history, carving a place for ourselves in the location, in history; thus, in such a way, we are doing history.
Josh
Place names on Apache landscape remind me of the bible in a certain sense. Instead of referencing John 3:16 to receive a certain wisdom, insight, and lesson over matters Apache Indians read the landscape as text. There is an intense permanence involved with applying morality to landscape. A space where the landscape is the agent of authority. Intuitively, allowing the Earth a position inside of the adhesive bonds of social morality makes sense when considering the lifestyle of the Apache. When Basso described Apache prayer as being metaphorical tropes and lyricism it seemed to fit a people who placed high moral authority on the landscape through the imaginative projection of oral history.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the book permanence was such an acute factor for establishing this moral authority through the ages, I found myself wondering about nomads and what kind of frame of reference they might construe as moral cohesion in their lives. When Basso approaches an explanation of Apache wisdom, reflection (through the visual reminder of place-names) seemed the key component. To reach a ‘smooth mind’ one took the more difficult path, laced with set-backs, through intense reflection of ones life lessons and trials. Reflection is mobile, so perhaps the nomads have some hope. According to Basso, “Acute intuitive insight marks the presence of wisdom” (147) and the Apache wise men and women apply this insight through the timely application of place-names to current scenarios of strife or an opportunity at learning. They ‘intertextualize’ through the landscape so to speak. I see scholars do this kind of alchemistic maneuver all the time, only in this case with their texts. A weaving of sorts occurs where references are strung together to extrapolate meaning from the past knowledge or reference points into the present. Gaining a certain structure to their lives the Apache know and read their landscapes, like a preacher to his bible like the professor to his text.
Basso’s discussion and interpretation of the Western Apache landscape offers us a very enticing way to view the places that surround us. The notion that resonated most with me was his firm idea that people have individual ties to certain landscapes, and landscapes/places never really shed these ties. For instance, what I immediately thought of was this pond and vast forest near my house. My dad showed me the seemingly endless system of trails about 6 years ago and I have run countless miles through them. I think to myself, so much in the world has changed since my dad ran these trails when he was young, but these woods probably look exactly the same, impenetrable to the wearing of time. Moreover, when I come back to my hometown when I am an old man, running much slower than I do now, I can still run the same trails that I ran when I was first starting. This phenomenon is very similar to the feeling that some of these Apache Indians must feel, except to a much larger degree because their ancestors have lived in these places for centuries. Its funny how this is a phenomenon to me, and I guess the reason I view it as such is because I almost assume that everything is different now than how it was when my parents were young, including the forests. But when I realized that they couldn’t have been any different, it kind of served as a “Eureka” moment that I would be able to run on these same trails for the rest of my life.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, the landscapes are undoubtedly more significant to these people, because they are lacking in the abundant written history that is found in other civilizations. The places gain more and more meaning over the years as the same people inhabit them. I really liked what one of the previous posters said in saying that they “live in their bible.” The fact that there is no written history for us to use as a way of viewing these people, the landscapes become that much more important. So important, that they tend to take on an almost holy or revered status. I think this notion contributes to the emphasis that the Apache Indians have on naming their place, a notion that seems to be lacking in our culture to say the least.
Basso writes in his book that “places served mankind as durable symbols of past events as indispensable aids for remembering and imagining them.” We also talked about this in class, that the events that transpire in a certain place are linked with that place forever. For example, I know nothing about the landscape in Auschwitz, but I know what horrible things occurred there, and that it will forever be known for these things, no matter how admirable of a place it is. The opposite can also be true; places are often remembered as the sites of great events, which seems to be what is most common within the Apache Indians. Basso writes that the place-maker’s objective is to “speak the past into being” and with such a deep history in the landscape of the Southwest, I’m sure the Apache have no trouble fulfilling this objective.
Paul Corcoran
I wish I had read Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places before I attempted to write my Chacoan short story a few weeks ago. When I was writing the fictional story, describing landscapes, making characters, and portraying their feelings, I felt awkward and ignorant. I felt as if I was not in the position to be formulating a story about a history in which I had limited knowledge. What I now understand is that “constructing history itself, of inventing it, of fashioning novel versions of ‘what happened here’” is an acceptable way of determining the history of a civilization. It is with and of itself a way of acquiring knowledge about the civilization. Although I felt my knowledge was constrained, I was actually broadening my comprehension by place-making. Without actually seeing the landscape or visualizing actual people living in the site, the place becomes nothing more than a concept, nothing more than an artifact, something to be studied rather than analyzed and visualized. For Basso, the interplay between history, place, and morality seem to be directly linked. Therefore, by analyzing one of the concepts, we are able to learn about all three.
ReplyDeleteWhat does Basso mean when he says place-making "is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history" (7)? I believe it to mean that by place-making we are getting more accomplished than just by mere studying. We are in essence living the lives the people of that civilization lived. We are remembering that they were more than a concept. They were actual people who did actual things. By place-making, we are doing history rather than just studying and memorizing it.
As discussed before, place-making “is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history.” This statement is not only relevant when looking to distant past but can be applied to our lives today. For example, I had been dating my boyfriend for a few months before I actually went to his house where he grew up. I had heard stories of his childhood and pre-College days, but none of it really seemed real until I saw his home. I walked around his house, saw his room, his living room and was able to imagine his past. I formulated stories that may or may not have been true, but that is beside the point. I was able to construct a past and learn about his history by simply seeing the place where he grew up.
Christina Henderson
As Basso himself notes in his beginning chapter with his example of Bohr and Hamlet’s castle, the concept of place names and the more general idea of places containing ideas and stories is not really foreign to western society. I believe that it might be an almost universal concept, recognizable in some shape or form in nearly every human society. Of course in the Western Apache tradition, as presented by Basso in his book, the concept of place names is strongly integrated with society and fundamental to their concept of history and morality, unlike in societies more familiar to most of us. The degree to which place names are fundamental to Western Apache society is certainly foreign, but the basic idea of a place name isn’t. Ground Zero, the Bastille, even the Forbidden palace serve as reminders of great stories whose repercussions, though not always thought about by the people affected by them, still nevertheless resonate with those who live near or around them. Again, the way in which place names interplay with history in Apache society is quite different from the examples I gave, but I think that distinction is an important one to make explicit, rather than to assume it implicitly. Basso, as an ethnographer, interprets the role of place names in Western Apache society. Despite his best efforts, he necessarily imposes his own ideas and conceptions onto that which he is studying. We do as well, when we read Basso’s interpretation and presentation of this aspect of Western Apache society. I believe that it certainly would be an interesting and perhaps useful exercise to compare and contrast the concept of place names as manifested by Apache society and our own, which we might do instinctively while reading anyway. The caveat, however, would be that we should be careful not to impose our own conception and understanding of place names in our society onto that of place names in Western Apache society.
ReplyDeleteThe whole system of place names is dependent on the concept that the land is in some way timeless. While features of the land may change over time, the land itself is there as it has been in the past, and as it will be in the future. In this way, the land connects people together, even people of different time periods, through the events that occurred there. This is analogous to our understanding of time as a means of connecting people, even people in different locations, through the events that occurred at that time. What seems to be foreign to us is the importance of place over time in history, Western Apache society, as opposed to our society, in which time is more important than place when it comes to history. Given this, it seems obvious the way that Western Apache histories are presented, in that when historical stories are told, they begin with the location of the story. The location of the story gives context to the events, such that those who hear the stories for the first time can immediately imagine the landscape in which it took place, and how it relates to other locations which each might also have stories attached to them. Lanscapes and landmarks can then be associated with a particular story, such that different locations in the land are associated with the specific events that occurred there, despite the fact that other events have also occurred there. This again parallels our conception of history, whereby years and dates naturally associate themselves with events, for example 1066 with the battle of hastings, 1492 with Columbus’ first voyage, 1776 with the American declaration of independence, even though we know and acknowledge that other events occurred in those time periods. The most obvious difference however, would be in the usage of these stories/histories. While in our society, history is clearly almost always a subject of study, history (place names and the historic tales that accompany them) takes a more dynamic role in Western Apache society. History not only exemplifies and re-enforces the moral code, it is used as a tool that affects the way people interact with each other (via story telling) and with the landscape (thinking about the stories and places). We could say that place making is a practical kind of history, more-so than standard history is in our society, at least with respect to the daily lives of the people who use it. Place making is indeed a “venerable form of doing human history”, for it accurately and efficiently captures moments in time, events of interest, and relates them in a way unlike history in our own society, but which is nevertheless effective at reconstructing and understanding the past, and especially how it affects the present.
-Samrat Bhattacharyya
The history presented in Keith Basso’s “Wisdom Sits in Places” permits for an illuminated living history contrasted with the cold dead sort to which I (as well as many I’m sure) have been accustomed. For me, the pervading history expresses itself as a rock. That is to say, history is something that is dead and inaccessible. One may see it only with a telescope, because it is alien and removed from the terrestrial. Of what portent is a rock? Specialists bore into this sort of history and from their drill holes they pull texts, material culture and bodies. Importantly as a rock, this history is sedentary. It moves only when someone picks it up and tosses it. It is authoritative in so much as it can be picked up and used to knock someone on the head. It is employed to justify actions and to form explanations favorable to certain agendas. The history of the rock sort wears a moss coat, falsities sheath it. History becomes a contrivance, an inactive object to be awkwardly manipulated. This history is mute. And any voice it has is in actuality a mutation. Hugely, it debases forms of history that cannot be read, though, that which is read had at one time to be written and that is a mutation. Of science, one may say that their can be no manipulation, but scientific evidence always comes in a cloud of ideas – how can we paint Native Americans as savage cannibals? How can we make them childlike embodiments of who we were before?
ReplyDeleteThen comes a different vantage point, one less concerned with when and more concerned with where. And from a new position it can be posed again – of what portent is a rock? The Apache conception of history is extremely different from the set one above. Their history is active and present. The landscape is linked to language and together they invoke the past, it is the past alive in the present. Words, stories and names associated with certain landscapes grow legs and patrol the present. Landscape is authoritative because it is everywhere, it is an almighty that carries with her the lessons and identities of everyone and thing that passed and passes over her. If we apply Basso’s notions of landscape vested authority to Chaco post Chaco we see a spatial move correlating with an unfavorable breach, one of greed and hoarding. This avoidance of a landscape is a demonstration against it, an active move away from it. The space is in a sense living. It can be internalized and haunts and acts upon one. Though the Pueblo moral landscape may share certain similarities with the Apache moral landscape they are still quite distinct. We see with the Apaches a landscape that stalks, monitoring, keeping moral order. And with the Pueblos something less roaming and more rooted to create tension. Kachina, scary despots, act to maintain a moral society.
Maria Jagodka
As time passes, history or a certain historical perspective changes in the way it is presented, interpreted and passed on to future generations of people. History is interpreted and understood in different, alternate ways, including ancient texts or primary documents, archaeological findings or ancient objects, such as antiques. Media and other alternate agendas also influence the presentation of history when analyzing things pertaining to physical anthropology like fossils, skeletons, DNA and Katsina masks. History can also be interpreted and analyzed through other means, such as landscapes, myths, gossip stories, historical accounts, names of a former society and its inhabitants, as well as ancient language.
ReplyDeleteA particularly interesting approach to take to learn about history, is to analyze and interpret the landscape and to learn about a past culture and civilization that way. A landscape is condensed with meanings, so to speak, as “American Indians hold their lands-places-as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made with this reference point in mind” (37). Basso claims that the landscape can serve as an “omnipresent moral force” and a good example of such a force, with high implications to morality is explained in the story of “It happened at Shades of Shit” (24). The story of the landscape at “Shades of Shit” presents a bad memory. This story deals with primarily greed, lack of sharing agricultural produce with the needy and selfishness. It is a story of a people who refuse to share corn with their relatives and, not doing so, end up in terrible living conditions and barely survive. The living conditions were so horrendous that the people were crying: “We could die from our own filth” (27). In summation, the story is explained as follows: “Look what has become of us! We were thinking only of ourselves. Our greed is responsible for our trouble. We looked down on our own relatives and gave them nothing. Look what has become of us! Then they shared their corn… finally… relatives took the corn away, saying nothing… Now those people were allowed to leave their homes, then those people said, ‘We must leave here and go somewhere else to live. This is a bad place. It stinks with signs of our stinginess and greed’” (27). Every Apache so called “place-world” presents a story. The “It Happened At Shades of Shit” story, whose “commemorative place-name” indicates a “sad event from which valuable lessons can be readily drawn and taken fast to heart… haunting and provocative” (28). There is a resonance of place names and a link is established between the places and the stories, which explains the landscape as a “moral force.”
History is supposed to be without any authorities, the stories are supposed to work in the present. This is claimed by Charles Henry and Morley Cromwell as “the country of the past-and with it Apache history-is never more than a narrated place-world away. It is thus very near, as near as the workings of their own imaginations, and can be easily brought to life at almost any time” (32). There are no definite answers in Apache history, just advances and a composition of potential worlds, through a creation of images of the past.
The land or landscape can be viewed as a means for survival of a culture. Furthermore, the Apache people have to “speak about this place and remember it clearly and well. We (They) must give it a name” (12). This implies place-making. In terms of place-making, it is a form of cultural and imaginative activity. It is not to be taken lightly. In fact, a mispronounced Apache place name would be interpreted by a maker of place-worlds, such as Charles Henry, as rude and disrespectful for the Apache culture and people! Mispronouncing the name twice or more to try to get it right is even more disrespectful! Repetition implies “repeating the speech of our (the) ancestors” (10). The land is a holy thing, it is also very beautiful and provides an opportunity to harvest corn, hunt for deer, dig and roast agave, collect seeds and cactus fruits for the Apache people.
Place-making can be a form of “narrative art,” where the “past lies embedded in features of the Earth-in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields-which together endow their lands with multiple forms of signatures that reach into their (Apache) lives and shape the ways they think” (34). The land is an “omnipresent moral force” in that it “looks after us,” while we associate the place where good or bad events happened and either stay or go away from those places (38). In essence, the land “makes people live right,” helping people make good decisions (38). The land “constructs the past” and “does human history,” as humans living on the land tend to leave signs and symbolic implications on some solid thing in the environment, engravings on rocks or caves for example. The environment initializes and builds patterns of social action within a culture. Those who break the barriers of traditional roles can expect severe consequences. A case in point is that of a man who becomes sexually attracted and tries to molest his stepdaughter, in a story called “Coarse-Textured Rocks Lie Above In A Compact Cluster” (53). He is hit on the head with a rock and his skull shatters, his head bleeding like a fountain. He is not buried and is completely disowned. In conclusion, Apaches consider their land as a reservoir of wisdom, a place that maintains tradition, supporting individuals’ efforts to create communities, where social standards of living are set forth and met.
Yauheni "Eugene" Abrazhevich
One of the more poignant analogies made by Basso in Wisdom Sits in Places, was the comparison made between the moralizing/historicizing story telling of the Apache people and the shooting of arrows (58). The Apache history is composed of these moralizing stories, stories with a purpose. More important than the actual details, as would concern a Euro-American historian, surrounding the events, is the purpose of such a story. To the Apache, according to Basso, the stories are “critical and remedial responses” to the offensive actions of the targeted audience (55). The stories are told with this purpose in mind, and the details that are incorporated into the story are to further strengthen the analogy being woven. To a western historian, this would greatly compromise the historical account of the event, but the Apache does not see this as a problem primarily because of the fundamental differences in how each group views history.
ReplyDeleteThe Apache see history as “unavailable for direct consultation or study” (31), a statement, if accepted, nullifies the entire western historical academic tradition. History is alive and tangible; it is not discrete and unchanging for the Apache. As such, they do not see a problem, or hold qualms with treating the details with less than accurate attention. The details that concern the Apache’s are the ones that will better arm their “arrows” so that the stories will have “quick and palpable effects” on the targeted, hopefully leading them to “modify their social conduct in quite specific ways” (57). The purpose of history in the Apache tradition is the root of the distinctions that can be made between it and the Western historical tradition.
The other obvious difference between the Apache form of history and the traditional western tradition is the importance placed on location. A place is just that in western history; a setting in which a cast of characters act upon one another. In the Apache tradition, location is elevated to a much more important role. Place-naming is incorporated into the story-telling previously described in this post. The places, the locations, contain the story. The place is a much more active component in the Apache historical story telling tradition, and not in a past sense, as is normally attributed to historical settings, but in a present sense. The places as they are seen now are defined by the stories that named them; they can no longer be viewed separately. And the places, to the Apaches, are a constant embodiment of their history, of their stories.
Thomas Nicholson
Basso says that when we are “place-making” we are constructing the past or “doing” human history. I agree with his notion that what we can and do “create” a “past,” based on what we can see in the landscape and what we know about it already. He references how Bohr’s view of the castle’s history was changed based on his knowledge of Hamlet (p 5-6). Bohr’s imagined history of the castle takes a sharp turn with the influx of that knowledge.
ReplyDeleteWhile very early in the book and just a framework for what he goes into much greater detail with it is here that I begin to question Basso’s mindset. Maybe not questioning his mindset per se, like the way in which we make our histories, because it is a very logically sound way of thinking about this, but I question whether or not this “place-making” that we all do is the right method of looking at a place. He defines the term place-making on page 5 as “retrospective world-building.” Certainly when we do this, we are using the evidence we can gather today as a means to “building” a past that we are actually able to envision. Is that really MAKING the past, though? Maybe he is right in that we are actually creating “the history” of the place because there is nothing to prove otherwise, but is it the correct history that we are making? And should we be definitively stating that this is what the landscape was? (Maybe not making a law, but claiming that this is how it was with any strong degree of certainty) After my reading, I am undecided on whether it is a great thing for us to do to bring back the past or something that is too dangerous to attempt because we can actually blot out the real past.
As he says, the idea of Hamlet completely changes the way Bohr viewed the castle and created his history of it. The moment he began viewing it as “Hamlet’s Castle,” an irremovable lens of Hamlet was placed over his eyes, coloring the view/opinion he has of everything inside. Had he not known this, he may have come to appreciate the different, more detailed things constantly overlooked that may be “essential” the actual, physical, tangible, place’s history. One of my issues with allowing it happen this way is that the place is almost robbed of any other significance it could have had. I am sure a lot of planning went into that castle, it was created for something else, has been possessed by somebody else, people died in there, etc. Even still, events that this place COULD have in the years to come/future are almost limited in their ability to become history, because anybody who is privy to this knowledge has a veil of Hamlet cast over their eyes. Not that there is anything wrong with seeing it as Hamlet’s because that very well could be the single thing of note to ever occur there, but I see danger in the human method of viewing things this way.
Suppose that somebody had the wrong idea about this castle and was “making” the history of it. What if it was actually the next-door-neighbor’s castle that Hamlet inhabited? The uninformed observer would be able to see nothing but Hamlet in a place that he never in fact lived. He would stretch the physical attributes of the place to fit his preconceived ideas, really never really giving any other, far truer history a chance to emerge.
The other thing that scares yet comforts me is an idea discussed following this Hamlet passage, where it is acknowledged that history can be re-invented or “revised.” It is great that we can revisit history as many times as we need in order to get it right, so there is no harm in making guesses or inferences. Nothing we say is ever permanent so it can always be re-done (or can it? Can a bad reputation of an innocent place ever be brought back to acceptance?) The scary part comes in when we think about people being brainwashed to believe something completely untrue about a place. The rest of the definition on page 7 includes that it is “also a way of constructing social traditions, and in the process, personal and social identities.” Maybe a new generation of people in a country could be taught that the location of an atrocity such as the use of a nuclear bomb was actually just the result of a natural disaster. Americans thereafter wouldn’t remember the devastating and dangerous effects that nuclear war can bring. Just a very random example but it shows how people can be convinced of anything and this revision of history is scary because of what it can “undo” in terms of learning or experience or value. This removal of an event could completely change the identity, maybe through ignorance, but perception is reality. Something like an atrocity, holocaust for example, should not be forgotten for a myriad of reasons, yet the identity of a people can be changed by “revising” history.
So, with all that said, I am not quite sure if I can consider place-making to be a venerable on the whole. In all of the possible employments that it can lend itself to, too many seem questionable for me to definitively post an opinion on whether it is the correct mode of thinking or if it is just the natural mode of thinking.
-Brendan Martin
PS- Random and unrelated but, Snakes Water reminded me of “man in the mountain” in New Hampshire. A large rock was named this because of an obvious “face” that it had. The rock is still called that despite the face’s nose and more falling off relatively recently. How long will this name persist? How will affect this the future’s value of this now less than special looking rock despite its former unique appealing appearance?
Ronnie Lupe prompts Basso to create maps – not those of whitemen but “Apache maps with Apache places and names” (xv). There are enough of the former, enough maps that chart and label whitemen’s places, or more precisely, whatever the whitemen deem valuable enough to be noted. Unlike the Western Apache, the whitemen view the landscape on a systemic level, largely in ecologic and geographic terms. The Western Apache differ in their perception of the landscape, with individuals seeing it on cultural terms.
ReplyDeleteThe Apache ancestors named and thus made places. They also named themselves for the places they lived in, such as the Juniper Tree Stands Alone people. Though they may not live in those places any longer, they are still known by them (21). Thus place-naming reflects Apache history, in both what they experienced and how they perceive themselves.
Morality comes into play in oral narratives where Apaches tell historic tales to warn people not to break standards of behavior. Place-names function as narrative markers, since each tale begins and concludes with where the event took place (51). Moreover, place-names evoke specific images of a geographic area and thus operate as a visual reminder “inviting people to recall their earlier failings and encouraging them to resolve, once again, to avoid them in the future” (61). Thus history, place and morality converge in these narratives, enabling the Apache to both remember the past and conduct themselves properly through the stalking quality of the landscape, where it is “not merely a physical presence but an omnipresent moral force” (63).
Apaches use place-making as a “way of constructing the past” (7) because they primarily value not when but where events happened and what each could illustrate about Apache social life (33). The past is a path crossed first by their ancestors. Since the Apache cannot communicate with these ancestors and hence learn first-hand of this path, they must use footprints, such as place-names, songs, stories and relics, to imagine that past (31). When they construct the past through place-making and refer to these places in historical narratives, they wound themselves and consequently, can “replace themselves” and heal their emotional and mental wounds (60). While people pass on, the landscape remains with its particular historically and culturally significant places. What also remains thus are the stories attached to those places and the moral meanings derived from telling those stories.
-Monica Qua Hiansen
Basso presents a conception of history, place, and morality that is intimately intertwined by the methods of story telling used by the Western Apache. Basso’s ethnographic work leads the reader to new ways of interpreting history and morality through places, and the landscape. It seems that the physical landscape of Arizona dominates the psychological landscape of the Western Apache, and “thus transformed, landscapes and the places that fill them become tools for the imagination, expressive means for accomplishing verbal deeds, and also, of course, eminently portable possessions to which individuals can maintain deep and abiding attachments, regardless of where they travel” (Basso 75). The way in which Charles tells Basso about the places they visit shows how the places transcend physical boundaries, and are used by the Apache in their social interactions in order to shape their interactions using places. Basso presents many examples of the way in which the Western Apache use places and place names in order to influence their social interactions, such as the “shades of shit” story, or the story Lola Machuse tells to Louise, who is troubled by her brother’s sickness after an encounter with a snakeskin.
ReplyDeleteThe way history is recorded through places at first does not seem very different than the European idea of monuments, which are built into the landscape in order to record historic events that occurred in certain places. However, the Western Apache do not physically change their places in order to imbue them with a sense of history. Instead, the landscape itself reminds people of historical events, through description of natural elements. This description of history by means of a name seems to be very powerful, because by simply uttering a few simple words, Charles and the other Apaches in Basso’s book are able to communicate entire complicated stories that carry moral meanings.
The names of places do not just describe these places. Basso says “ If place-making is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history, it is also a way of constructing social traditions, and in the process, personal and social identities” (Basso 7), and so the use of place impacts many subjects in a complicated nexus of social relations. By giving places iconic names, the Apache attach a specific event to that place, thus forever creating an indent for that place in the oral history of their people. At the same time, the land impacts the name, since the names usually reflect some aspect of the landscape, or the way in which humans have interacted with the landscape. This complex web of relationships does not end here however. The landscape impacts its name just as the name then impacts the identity of the land in the minds of humans, but also humans themselves create identities based on these places and their names. Basso’s account of the young girl with the hair rollers is a good example of the way in which a story shapes a person’s identity: the girl changes her behavior and outward appearance after her aunt tells her a place name.
Similar to living beings themselves, the landscapes are not constrained by their names, and instead are an identity behind their names. These landscapes almost become like living beings, because of the way in which they interact with the Western Apache people. Basso talks about how Western European history is “unspoken and unanimated, it lies silent and inert on the printed English page” (basso 33) where as Apache history lives through the places and their names. Apache history surrounds its people in the way that a history recorded in books by chronological dates cannot. The places are timeless, and as each place and its name is used to impact a contemporary person, a new bit of history is added to that place name. Places acquire more history as time goes on, and so Apache history, as constructed by places, is not a thing of the past, but instead it spans the past, present and future all at the same time. The living aspect of places makes them very powerful retainers of history, and this explains the way in which the Apache say things such as “’I shot her with an arrow’” or “’I know that place. It stalks me every day’” (Basso 56-57).
One more important aspect of the places that probably plays into the way in which the Apache use the land in their social interactions is locality and ties to the land. Starting with the industrial revolution many Western European people have become detached from their places, they no longer are interested in living closely with and in their landscapes. Instead they construct landscapes physically, distancing themselves from the natural landscape. By doing so there is no sense of closeness to local places. With the advent of current technologies that enable long distance travel and communication within short periods of time people are less connected to their land than ever and the importance of places is not a historical force that many contemporary Western people think about on a daily basis. So the most important aspect of the Western Apache’s places is their local nature: these are places that the Apache pass by on a daily or semi-daily basis. If they did not renew their connections to the places frequently, the places would no longer be able to make history, or be used to impact social interactions. A physical connection to places is what gives them teir power to create social relations and construct histories.
-Hannah Kligman
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ReplyDeleteBasso and his Apache collaborators allowed us to see that what whe see in nature was made with divine hands. It is as if they are referencing the Bible from the book of Pslams 19:1-2 where refers to the firmament of God's work in creating the Earth and the landscape that we are allowed to view. In realation to Basso's quote God represents the "omnipresent moral force" and the we can look around and see his presence in nature. The Native Americans viewed nature as a strong force with will and that it was something to be honored, respected, and sometimes worshipped. Nature is not something that only exists with those existing, but is an entity of its own. Through Basso and his Apache collaborators we are able to see that nature had a place in their history, both societal and geological, how they judge faulty of will and presence of good, and location. The used oration as a way to pass on the morality through nature to younger generations and to people of their villages.
ReplyDeleteWe are able to understand hisory itself through these stories. They name certain areas as a result of history and what events took place at that particular site. The names that are assigned to sites reference something that points to Apache history or their lifestyle.
Along with that comes a story to tell, a lesson to learn, or a virtue to strive for. Morality becomes intertwined in the views of the Apache by being portrayed in a folk tale or a narrative of sorts. If a story of morale is relevant to a site in the landscape then the Apache have come full circle by combining the building of community that comes with history, the sense of location with place, and the sense of self through morality.
When we are told th place-making "is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history"(7) it is meant that naming a place helps of reveal secrets of the past and connect the past with the present. This gives people a better sense of the land on which they stand and realize that is hallowed or depending on what took place. The Apache are less concerned about when an event took place making it seem that a date is harldy relevant to an event and that the memories that were left in that site are markers of permanence that cannot be removed by the sands of time as long as there are those that remember what took place.
--Shambreya Burrell
The issue of place and morality continues to be a source of interest for me. I agree somewhat with Basso's characterization of Western history as lacking a strong sense of place, or rather as containing a sense of place that considers space as something to delineate rather than incorporate into one's own social and moral framework. What's attractive about Basso's discussion of Apache place-making is that it considers the physical bodies that constitute the social. If you'll allow me to generalize, Western metaphysics typically posits a divide between mind and body and clearly emphasizes the former. If social interaction and consequent moral development exist within a particular place, how could one not consider the impact of the surrounding environment on one's moral and social development?
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, however, I feel that Anthropology majors (myself included) are wont to oversimplify the techniques of Western intellectuals as a means of highlighting the "difference" of their subjects. While it is important to emphasize differences when they are conspicuously (or inconspicuously) present, sometimes I feel that our discussion of "Western" approaches falls victim to the same oversimplification that plagued earlier explorations of the "Other."
As we discussed in class, Apache history lies not in the thick tomes of Butler library but in the actual, physical landscape its people inhabit and traverse daily. One doesn’t have to own a library card or even know how to read in order to feel the impact of history; wisdom is determined by the moral understanding one is able to glean from recounted stories instead of one’s ability to analyze a progression of events.
ReplyDeleteI was particularly struck by the fluidity and flexibility of the Apache historical tradition. For one thing, history is told through stories that, for all intents and purposes, are timeless; there is very little emphasis on chronology, no attempt to organize these stories into a succession based on when they happened. Also, as demonstrated by Charles’s expanded version of the “Shades of Shit” story (p. 25), the stories themselves are so simple and austere that they lend themselves extraordinarily well to imaginative interpretation. This exposition seems to not only be acceptable, but desirable: Through his imaginative widening of the narrative, Charles constructs “an astonishing world as surely revealing of Apache social values as it is violently offensive to their most basic sensibilities.” Precision, in terms of both chronology and narrative accuracy, is not what’s important here; as long as the stories strongly and effectively convey social and moral values, these things can be changed and even entirely foregone.
The Apache sense of history, then, serves a practical and moral purpose, one that is essential to the maintenance of tradition and values. If these morals are essential to the survival of Apache values, features of their landscape are essential to the transmission of these morals to future generations. Not only are the Apache stories an “omnipresent moral force” because they are inextricably tied to places and are thus unavoidably inserted into the consciousness of passerby, but they also have an unmatchable power to reproach—so powerful that they are compared to “arrows” that pierce an individual, inducing him or her to change and take tradition into account when making decisions. To me, what was most striking about this way of rebuke was its extreme subtlety, the ability of a seemingly offhand comment to hold such sway over an individual’s conscience.
After reading Basso’s formulation of Apache place-names and the ways in which they function, it is almost impossible to discount the differences between the Apache approach and the way we approach history ourselves. History may be more to us than just facts in a book or the implications of a certain genetic marker. We may be acutely conscious of our family history or the history of our nation; however, I could not think of any examples of history affecting me as deeply as the Apache places affect members of the tribe. Perhaps this is because many of the places I have inhabited are covered by urban sprawl, or because our culture doesn’t make places into physical manifestations of a common history. But despite this difference, I was able to relate to the Apache sense of history because, after all, we all tend to naturally link places with memories, with the events of our own, personal histories. The fact that the Western Apache take advantage of this particular psychological tendency makes their history all the more poignant, all the more effective at maintaining a sense of cohesion and tradition, and maintaining links to the land.
The Western Apache see their land as being of paramount importance. To them, it not only encapsulates their history morals and traditions but it is actually much more than that. The land becomes a venerable mirror of their entire society. To the Western Apache, the land is an entity all its own that has affect and influence people on its own. The storytelling of the western Apache is well illustrated by the hunting metaphor. They see every story told is equally about the event that occurred and the place in which it happened. Additionally, all the stories are about the person “at whom it is directed”. These people are generally people who have done something immoral and cross what is thought to be the acceptable apache traditions and customs. The stories are used to teach people these lessons and defame the people who have committed the social indiscretion. These stories serve to solidify and preserve the customs and social norms of the community. Another important point to recognize about Western Apache historical accounts and storytelling is that they have a very different way of thinking about events in the past or history than we do as traditional western thinkers. To us, an event occurs in the past at a certain point in time and then it is over. To the Apache, when something happens it does not disappear as soon as it is over. On the contrary it is something that is a shaping force in the present. It is engrained in the land where it happened and is eternally connected to the landscape. This serves to keep the memory of the event fresh and alive through out time so that its message might be preserved to teach others in the future.
ReplyDelete-Caroline Van den Berg
The supremacy of "where events occurred, not when," in determining a people's history, seems to be an overarching theme in Wisdom Sits in Places. This concept resonated very deeply with me in my own understanding of what makes something historically signifiant. I have always found the history that resides in a place to be the most fascinating kind. Going to a museum and examining ancient objects is interesting, but for me, it is not engrossing on the same level as visiting a place and examining its surroundings and the objects that belong there. The knowledge that one is interacting with a place that has remained this same way since further back than anyone alive today, and anyone they have ever known, can remember is a unique form of historical engagement.
ReplyDeleteWisdom Sits in Places also made me re-think the importance of language and oral narratives in history. When Charles criticizes the narrator for failing to properly pronounce the name of a place, it emphasized the honor given to this particular sound and words. His failure to pronounce it correctly would be on par with mistranslating an ancient text in a society that holds written narratives as the core of their historical identity. Just as history exists within a place and its surroundings, it is understandable that repeating the words just as the ancestors did is deeply important, because it is the only way to accurately preserve something that took place in ancient times.
I was also very interested in how Charles tells the histories of various places from the point of view of the people who experienced them first hand. Rather than telling them entirely in past tense, as might be expected in a Western historical narrative, he switches tenses throughout the story, going between past and present: "None of these places had names then, none of them did, and as the people went about they thought about this...Now they are coming! They are walking upstream from down below. Now they are arriving here, looking all about them, noticing everything about this place. It looked to them as it looks to us now." (12) What struck me most about this passage is that it reflects the fluidity of history and time. This regular shift between the past and the present parallels the timelessness of the physical place and puts other changes into sharp relief. While Apache society changed, this place looked to the ancestors as it looks to modern people, and in this way we gain a much deeper understanding of the society itself and how it changed as time passed.
As I was reading Wisdom Sits in Places, I also found myself thinking of our discussions and readings earlier this semester on the Kennewick Man. Something that this book illuminated for me was exactly how a Native American society's "different" concept of history might influence how they perceived the Kennewick man. Though archaeologists and scientists were fixated on exactly how old the remains were and the significance of this numerical date, many among Native American groups were much more deeply concerned with the location of the Kennewick Man's remains. Reading Wisdom Sits in Places helped me understand how this way of looking at history meant that the date attached to the Kennewick Man's remains had little significance to many Native Americans. He was rather an "ancient one" who was a part of the place their ancestors had always lived, and therefore belonged in their histories.
-Laura Schreiber
On page 5 of Wisdom Sits in Places, Basso states, “It is clear, however, that remembering often provides a basis for imagining. What is remembered about a particular place – including, prominently, verbal and visual accounts of what has transpired there – guides and constrains how it will be imagined by delimiting a field of workable possibilities.” By remembering various events and past experiences, the Apache people constructed their own lifestyles and values, and in this sense, they created their own present lifestyles. They created their own history by remembering the most significant things, such as favorite memories or past experiences and events, that they wished to remember and hold on to, and in doing so, they were able to establish and maintain their past. People create their own history, and by remembering events, learning from events, and trying to change mistakes, they allow themselves to avoid repeating history. People need to learn from their past mistakes and Basso uses the term “place – making” (5), which refers to the history and the events that the Apache people encounter, create, and endure with one another. In many ways, the Apache people created and made their own places in the world and Basso states that, “for what people make of their places is closely connected to what they make of themselves as members of societies and inhabitants of the earth” (7). Basso is saying that the Apache people created and established their lifestyles and how they want to live as active, contributing members of society.
ReplyDeleteIn Wisdom Sits in Places, we can see that place – making is a way of living in the present and a way for an individual to create his or her own lifestyle. This topic reminds me of part of one of my CC discussions where we were discussing Hegel and his view on how history is maintained and preserved. In the Introduction to the History of Philosophy, Hegel states, “But on this question I have made my position clear from the very beginning. I laid down our presupposition (which is to appear only at the end, as the result of our investigation) and our belief, that Reason rules the world, which means that it has ruled history as well” (28). I think it is interesting to note that if reason rules history, then people should always learn from their mistakes once, and therefore history should not repeat itself. History does however continue to repeat itself in many different ways, so generalizing and saying reason tends to rule history may not be as accurate a statement as Hegel originally thought. Basso believes that history seems to be construed from the ways in which people want to remember history regardless of whether or not they are repeating it. By place – making, people can express their own individuality and can make their own history by acting and living in the present instead of looking back on the past and events that occurred in their past. Place – making is another way of improving the future so people can realize and change their current actions and behavior and not have to look back on them wishing they could have done things differently. In this sense, people do always want to avoid repeating history and want to hopefully learn from mistakes in the past and move on to what is occurring in the present.
-Emily Brown
Wisdom Sits in Places presented me with an alternate understanding of history in how it communicates family lineage. In today’s world, lineage tends to be dictated by the father’s last name, and while a place of origin is sometimes detectable, it isn’t always. In the apache lineage system, it is a matrilineal system, similar to other Indians, and their names are actually representative of the places they are from. “They were known by their places. That is how they are still known, even though they have scattered and live now in many different states” (Basso 21).
ReplyDeleteThe interplay of history, place and morality is especially palpable in the Shades of Shit anecdote we discussed in class. Jason, Morley and Charles come across a place called Shades of Shit, and Charles tells the putrid story behind the name. It is not often that coming across a place can evoke such a powerful and morally-driven story. The morality involved concerns the opposition of sharing versus greed—and the way Charles tells it is what makes the place so powerful. He tells a story replete with specific dialogue (that obviously can’t be completely confirmed) that he draws from his grandfather’s story combined with what he sees at the place that lies before him. Thus the wisdom gained by Jason and Morley from Charles’ story really does sit in this place.
The title of the book is further explained in the last chapter, also called Wisdom Sits in Places. The narrator states, “I am also aware that the place-name identifying the tree’s location – Gizhyaa’itine – has taken on a vibrant new dimension. Formerly nothing more than a nicely descriptive toponym, it has acquired the stamp of human events of consequential happenings, of memorable times in the life of a people. As a result the name seems suddenly fuller, somehow larger, endowed with added force…” (Basso 120). He goes on, stating that the place-making has changed the place from a geographical site to a theater or stage. It is this idea that explains how place-making serves as a way of “constructing the past.” Due to the story about Old Man Owl, the narrator now views the place completely differently; it has given it life and meaning beyond the physical. Similar to the Shades of Shit story, these stories are what make the places vibrant to the Western Apache, and explain exactly how wisdom sits in places.
David Sims
Although this book read wonderfully and easily, and Basso elaborated upon the different interactions amongst language, environment and history in an interesting way, I thought the most compelling part of the book was when he explicitly discussed the differences between Western history-telling and conceptions and Apache conceptions of history, and how that conception is closely tied with the oral traditions of the Apache.
ReplyDeleteHe mentions that for the Apache, history is not a cold, stale subject like so many students today approach it in American classrooms—for the Apache, history is lively, imaginative and instructive in ways that “classroom” history cannot be. Many western historians agree completely with dates and times and main characters, but the events remain the same—there is a right and wrong. In the Apache tradition, right and wrong exist as moral questions, not as correct or incorrect details or facts. Thus, Apache can acknowledge different interpretations and ideas within their history, but still gathering it into their overall historical narrative.
History in western eyes is also unchanging, because it is so rooted in a time period that is static: the past. The past is concrete, written in stone and absolutely irrevocable; as such, history as well takes on those qualities. But as Basso notes on page 33, the Western Apache succeed in stripping the past of that stasis, the “pastness” and “long-elapsed events are made to unfold as if before one’s eyes” (33). By removing the past from history, history becomes instructive and dynamic, always changing and reinventing meaning, one reason why I believe the Apache so intricately combine history and morality. By bringing history into the present, people interact with it in a more personal, complex way. They are part of history, not just students of it.
He also explores how language factors into history and story-telling, and I wonder how this book changes Apache history. And by that I mean, Basso talks about the rigid detachment of westerners from history, concerned with names and dates on a written page, and I wonder if this book doesn’t effectively do the same thing that he speaks against. I am, quite literally, reading names in this far-removed island in the United States, no where near Apache land. Am I not just as guilty? Is he not just as guilty of doing to Apache history what they most revile? I can’t really say, but I do think he challenges things while conforming to them at the same time. Maybe a contradiction, or maybe he’s just beating the historians at their own game.
--Cristina Najarro
Landscape as more than “a physical presence” and as “an omnipresent moral force” is certainly true for the Western Apache, but also applies to many other groups of people. For example, if an area becomes deforested due to human action (and inaction), it is more than the physical atmosphere that changes. A need for a variety of things to recreate and prevent is recognized. In the same way, the act of preservation is also a type of moral force. All of these things come about from a sense of duty and dependence on the landscape in some form or another.
ReplyDeleteThe chapter entitled “Wisdom Sits in Places” opens with a quote from Carson McCullers from her novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter –“To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.” History, place, and morality are all a part of this. Knowing where one comes from, gives one a sense of direction for the present and future and enables better foresight.
“Place-making” is a way of answering the questions of “what happened here”, and “what people make of their places is closely connected to what they make of themselves as members of society and inhabitants of the earth” (7). Places reflect the place makers, and do not necessarily mean the same thing to all people. Wisdom sits, rather than lies or stands, in places. Its position allows for stability and mobility, invention and reinvention.
d. sullens
What struck me most upon reading Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places was the personal struggle I encountered in attempting to formulate my reaction to the book. I find myself grappling, as we have discussed many a time in class, with the concept of alterity. What defines difference? How different is the Other? How do we walk the line between denial of alterity and radicalization of alterity? Throughout my reading of Basso’s work I was plagued by an inner battle between wanting to do one or the other—either write off the Apache differences completely by viewing their historical tradition as analogous to our own moral tales, or reject the comparison of the subject matter entirely by denying the Apache tradition as being one of history at all. Ironically both of these inclinations seem to stem from a desire to be able to label exactly what the Apache are doing in my own terms. I would thus like to explore the various ideas that came into play in this struggle.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in a family of history teachers, so my perception of the importance and emotional impact of (Western) history is probably different from that of average Americans/Westerners. The object of history from my perspective is to understand how we got to where we are—what ideas have shaped our evolution, which were exhausted or transformed or remain intact, what features of the present bear the mark of which cultures, individuals, or natural phenomena, etc. In one sense Apache history plays a similar role, creating an explicit presentation of the moral concepts at play in the present society. On the other hand, the stories of Apache history do not explain where those concepts of morality came from, but rather ascribe to them a kind of timelessness which I personally feel makes of the moral system a dangerous sort of dogma. For me history is a means of understanding the present; for the Apache it is a way of molding the present. The emphasis on stories being outside of time renders the sense of chronology unimportant, replaced rather with an emphasis on geography given the custom whereby stories and place-making go hand-in-hand, the one shaping the other and mutually invoking the other when referenced. However, chronology is not completely effaced, but rather simplified. When Basso has difficulty pronouncing a place-name, Charles takes it as an affront against the sanctity of the ancestors. The veneration of the ancestors is directly connected to their having come before, their wisdom the result of its connection to past experience.
The nature of the narratives of history as an “omnipresent moral force” as I saw it was chiefly the product of changes in nature being ascribed to punishments for transgression. No human authority figure is needed to enforce justice because nature/history serves as a personified authority figure alone. I saw these stories as very similar to our own fairy tales and fables: they are constructed in present imagination rather than directly recounting the “true” events of the past. They can serve as moral lessons merely by mention of the name, albeit usually a person’s name, that of the main character(s), rather than a place name. They are not directly tied to the date of occurrence. And quite frequently they are reinterpreted and retold by the individual telling them—Disney, for instance, retold the Brothers Grimm tales and Hans Christian Andersen tales to have happy endings; my own mother retold such tales by inscribing strong heroines over former damsels-in-distress. Similar to the concept Aristotle voiced in the Poetics, such stories (both Apache and Western) are more about what could be than what was.
To segue into a discussion of how Apache history is similar to Western history, I should again reference my personally unique relationship with history: history for me has never been about general truths. Furthermore, one of what I consider the major benefits of my particular upbringing was the opportunity to learn history WHERE it occurred. I see this as essential to real understanding and appreciation. Whether it was learning about ancient British history at the ruins of Tintagel, the proclaimed birthplace of the legendary King Arthur, learning about the sinking of the Titanic and rescue of its passengers at the port in Halifax, Nova Scotia where the surviving people and objects were first brought, or learning about the Spanish settlement of California by touring the missions along the coast, the appreciation for and connection to the history of places I have learned about in situ cannot be remotely approached by that for which history I have only encountered in books and lectures. Thus in this sense the Apache conception of history is not so foreign to me.
A few other notes on similarities are left to mention. For one, wisdom does sit in places in the Western consciousness. When we visit places like Pearl Harbor, Ground Zero, Gettysburg, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, or Wounded Knee, whose names alone invoke their stories; we cannot help but feel a seemingly living presence of the historical characters and events involved. And finally, while I was first struck by the idea of the exact alterity of Apache groups naming themselves for places, and Westerners naming places for themselves, I realized that this is not always the case in the Western tradition. As a personal example, my hometown of Folsom, California opened a new bridge this weekend. There was a huge debate when it was first commissioned over what to name it, with a particular faction championing the name of Johnny Cash Bridge, given the international recognition of Folsom due to Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” and a much larger group scoffing at this (myself included) and eventually succeeding in naming the bridge Folsom Lake Crossing. Like Apache names, it is fairly indicative of both function and location. Also, at least around my area, urban sprawl has had the effect that countless streets and towns once named for their setting—Deer Creek, Willow Meadows, Fair Oaks, Orange Grove, to name a few—now look nothing like their name. The name thus serves as a moral testament to the tragic loss of the deer, the creeks, the willows, the oaks, and the orange trees, which has been the effect of human over-abundance. But whether my Western fellows appreciate the lessons offered, I cannot say.
--Marina Cassio
Having a somewhat VIP pass into the underbelly of the American Museum of Natural History this past weekend has revealed certain harsh realities about the discipline of archeology to me, especially regarding the history of Native Americans. Walking through the cavities of the museum unseen by the public was as though we were walking through different realms of time, from eighties metal filing cabinets, to Margaret Mead’s gaseous poison chambers, and finally to the classic twenties style wooden armoires with glass panes. In so much as archeology is about different times, as a discipline in itself, it is inherently connected to time. Methods that were once viewed as avant-garde and ahead of their time are now outdated and neglected, gathering dust. In the museum, for example, there were artifacts glued to pieces of paper, glued back to together or pieced with other materials to support their longevity, but which actually detract from the state of the artifact and its ability to be used for research. In one hall, human remains lined the walls. We were told that though in recent years there has been an overwhelming effort to repatriate remains with the enactment of NAGPRA, there was a point in history in which Native American remains, without information of origin or tribe were sent to the Museum to be part of a morphological study about race. In these cases, the remains cannot be attributed to any particular region or region or tribe, making it very difficult to repatriate remains (especially as tribes in Native America are extremely diverse). The archeologist giving us the tour explained that they do not have any use for the bones and would gladly repatriate the remains, as they merely take up space (in a fairly expensive piece of real-estate, I must say) but they have an ethical obligation to both the tribes and the remains themselves; thus abandoning these unassigned remains to their cabinets.
ReplyDeleteI was surprised by the amount of artifacts that actually are displayed as opposed to those that reside within these hidden, temperature-controlled rooms for no one except the few lucky observers to gain access to see. The percentage is extremely low, particularly in the Native American exhibits. I found this to be extremely interesting. Our society sends archeologists into the field to uncover treasure from other times and once they have it, they place it in dark drawer, surrounded by plastic wrap, in a sterile room that completely lacks all of the vibrant history of the actual artifacts. I left feeling unsure about our treatment of the past, which most people can only access through photographs in textbooks. How can we validate our archeological practices if after our use and analysis of the objects, like a “sucked orange” (archeologist jargon), the remains lie useless in drawers and cabinetry? Like the "place-making" in Basso's text, we must construct human history and not let it remain in its currently dismantled form, behind the glass panes and wooden doors.
-Sarah Darro
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteBassos’s “Wisdom Sits in Places” discusses the unique connection the Western Apache held with their surroundings. Indeed, the Western Apache peoples believed that the specific location of a certain historical event was important in the understanding of the event itself; the “place” itself held historical significance. This idea of a “place-name” is deeply embedded in the Western Apache history and culture, as well as a crucial teaching tool in understanding their history. Interestingly, however, these “place-names” do not act as a simple history lesson – of all of the stories Basso discusses in his text, none of them have a specific date attached. Rather, they act as a framework for storytelling, as it allows the Western Apache to honor the landscape in front of them and imagine the remarkable historical events that the land beheld many years ago. The concept of the “place-name” allows these Native Americans to connect the past with the present, and these special places remind the people of their values and ideals. Thus, these “place-names” serve as an important moral guidance in Western Apache culture, providing a means of harmony and unity within their culture.
ReplyDelete-Megan Brown
In the first chapter of Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso uses a metaphor of a path to describe the Apache understanding of history (31). The image of the disappearing path--the path that must be reconstructed--brings to the fore the fact that history is not merely a collection of facts but also product of human creativity and intuition. The Apache approach to history has notable similarities to the Western tradition; both are "constructed...with the aid of historical materials...that have survived to the present" (Basso 31), yet in the Apache model the creative labor of constructing history is explicitly acknowledged. With this comes the recognition that history is never neutral, but a reflection of a community's morals. History's function, therefore, is to instruct individuals about how to behave properly. By anchoring histories to places, rather than dates, Apache place-making creates environments that constantly remind people of social norms. Like the young woman "haunted" by the place Men Stand Above Here and There (Basso 57), Apaches need only to look around them to be reminded of the lessons that past has to impart on them. In a population that developed with no written language, inscribing history in the environment can be a powerful way of remembering.
ReplyDeleteCrystal González
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Basso's text, Wisdom Sits in Places, when compared to the Western Apache, the misled outsiders' take on Native American history seems akin to trying to capture wind in a bag. The Apache past is living, one of movement, and any attempt to commit it to paper and dates causes the history to lose its vitality.
ReplyDeleteThe Apache history is rooted in places rather than dates, as the past is much like the landscape. The land and the past are both permanent and eternal, but they are not as stagnant as maps and history books would imply. However, the land changes daily in the new light of the Sun and these changes are compounded as time passes. Likewise, the past changes in the light of imagination, stretching over it in time.
In fact, from Basso's presentation, it appears to me that the way the Apaches view place is like poetry. He writes:
"In many instances, awareness of place is brief and unselfconscious, a fleeting moment (a flash of recognition, a trace of memory) that is swiftly replaced by awareness of something else. But now and again, sometimes without apparent cause, awareness is seized-arrested- and the place on which it settles becomes an object of spontaneous reflection and resonating sentiment" (103).
This is essentially what William Wordsworth describes as poetry, famously phrased "emotion recollected in tranquillity." Emotions are analogous to what Basso describes as fleeting, unconscious moments of awareness of place. They are felt immediately and immediately stored away in one's mind. However, in these flashes of lightening, a poem is created, and a place becomes a part of history
The history of places is a poetic history. Poets fit the unspeakable parts of one's universal relationships to existence, such as the timeless emotions of love or grief, into words. One cannot only describe the emotions with images and by channeling the individual. Likewise, the Apache history is one of living images, rooted in the awareness of these timeless places.
To describe emotion in any way but poetry and to compose the Apache history in any other way, are both like trying to look directly at the Sun. The attempt would merely overwhelm and blind the viewer. Instead, the poet and the Apache look to the land lit by this Sun. The images that emotion render, and the past that these places embody, are the living histories. The history of poetry and the Apache history of places are universal and individual; they are past and ever-present.
- Anna Pamela Calinawan
Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places his is a work of cultural anthropology that sets out to understand the place-names of the Western Apache people by exploring the relationship between people, place, history, language and identity.
ReplyDeleteThe place names of the Western Apache are detailed, descriptive, and notably long: "Water Lies With Mud In An Open Container," "Green Rocks Side By Side Jut Down Into Water," "Circular Clearing With Slender Cottonwood Trees."
Especially important are names that relate to historical events, such as "They Are Grateful For Water," "Trail to Life Goes Up," "She Carries Her Brother On Her Back." These place-names are also the titles of stories the Apache oral history in which socially disruptive acts occur. Telling stories to correct behavior is thought of as 'shooting someone with an arrow,' (Like the story about the Apache who went to Los Angeles and became a homeless alcoholic; when he returned he realized he had become self-destructive because he had moved away from the landscape that held the wisdom stories.)
When a place is named in the present moment the name functions not only as a signifier of place, but also as a reminder of the story behind it. In this way, speaking aloud an Apache place-name implies a spatial mapping of stories and involves a constant tapping into a collective cultural memory. In their oral culture, the features of the land function as ever-visible mnemonics, and these landmarks and their tales are socially and morally important for the Apache and tie its members to the landscape in unexpected ways.
One of my favorite lines from a man Basso quotes in page 62 perfectly and beautifully applies to Apache place names: “Time takes on flesh and becomes visible for human contemplation.”
Bakhtin
oops! dinooooosaur is Galen Boone
ReplyDeleteIn Keith Basso’s book, Wisdom Sits in Places, the author discusses the relationship that the Apache have with their surrounding landscape. Basso describes the significance of the “sense of a place,” what it really means, and how this sense associated with a place can shape the identity, morality, and history of the Apache.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, Basso describes the incident of Shades of Shit. As the story goes, “it happened at Shades of Shit.” When the group of people who had lived their refused to share their abundance of corn with their relatives in need, even after they begged, the relatives “got angry.” The relatives prevented those that wouldn’t share from going out of their homes, even for the most basic necessities such as going to the bathroom. Soon, the shades filled up with human waste and the people trapped inside became ill. Eventually, those in the houses relented and agreed to share their corn. The place where all this occurred became known as Shades of Shit so that no one could forget what happened there or the lesson that the story related, that of taking care of one’s brothers and relatives. In this case, the landscape and the name associated with it constitute “not merely a physical presence but an omnipresent moral force.” For as long as the name Shades of Shit is used to identify a place, the moral associated with the name will remain as well.
What Basso so interestingly dwells upon is this idea of the landscape as a “moral force.” I think that in Euro-American culture and practically everywhere else, landscape is not so much a moral force but a driving one. What happened at Shades of Shit was a confrontation between two groups resulting in a victor and a loser. Today and throughout history Shades of Shit has happened over and over again. I do not mean this in the literal sense of course but people have fought over land and its natural resources since the beginning of the idea of property, maybe before. Wars have been fought over actual square footage, oil, water, and too many other things to fully recount. What the Euro-American societies has not done is then preserve these tales. Yes, the stories are in the history books, but those history books are housed in buildings that in some cases are thousands of miles from the areas where the wars and battles took place. Nothing but a dim memory remains in many places where people fought for land and/or what is associated with it. What if these battlefields bore names that reflected what happened there, just as many places of the Apache do? I do not think that war would cease but there would be “omnipresent” reminders and maybe it would cause some hesitation or at least appreciation of what happened and what may happen if certain circumstances are repeated. We do not possess the wisdom of the land, “the heightened mental capacity that facilitates avoidance of harmful events by detecting threatening circumstances when none are apparent.” We do not allow the landscape to warn us of future harmful events, instead we use it as a reason to engage in them.
The Apache had it right when they gave the landscape extreme significance. The global landscape is significant for everyone and always has been. But one of the main differences between the Apache and global attitude towards our physical environment is that the Apache allows the history of the landscape to shape them while the rest of us strive to do almost whatever it takes to shape the landscape and its future to fit us.
Shoshana Schoenfeld
Basso’s “Wisdom Sits in Places” is an interesting study in language. Never before had I thought about place naming beyond this place was named for this particular person, religious icon, object, etc. It was a novel concept to think of a place name as a dialogue between the earth and the Apache. In the dialogue expressed on page ten, the concept of hurrying through the words is disrespectful, and that each word is an expressed historical connection to the ancestors because one is repeating what they once said. I appreciate how there is a creation of an story rather than just a name alluding to the feature or a past discoverer. There is an active narration between the landscape and the observer. As Basso expresses it there are three types of involvement with the environment: observation, communication and utilization. Through this involvement we find alterative history that is connected to human stories that are actively remembered and retold.
ReplyDeletePlace-Making in Basso’s book expresses the difference between the mind and the brain. I find these to be particularly pertinent when it comes to creating an alternative stories about history and the place names that it accompanies. The human involvement creates alternatives because it allows history to be retold each time the names is spoken, it provides stories about morality, and descriptions of ecological changes. There are so many different aspects of place making in the Apache language that naming creates so many different stories that are intertwined with history, tradition, morals, taboo, and the present. The land is a permanent player in the life story of the Apache. The history of the Apache is not constrained to textbooks or oral retellings, but is part of their identity. However, the downside of this alternative history is that is available to a privileged few and not the masses. But this use of history and narration keeps the culture united at basic geophysical level.
Keith Basso’s “Wisdom Sits in Places” is a fascinating look into Western Apache ideology that uses their unique perspective of landscape to culturally define them. Basso asks us to throw away previous notions of the landscape in a physical sense. Places are now viewed as part of history, almost like threads in a vast tapestry. The past, present, and future are manifested in the landscape and through the practice of place-naming, the Apache use these places and their history to create a larger image of their culture and individual identities. Specific place-names such as “Whiteness Spreads Out Descending to Water” and “Juniper Tree Stands Alone” have unique and significant histories attached to them. The latter refers to a spot where the women of a community first planted and harvested corn. It helped them survive and they named themselves after it, even becoming a matriarchal society to mark the place’s importance. The “Juniper Tree Stands Alone People” use the place-name to define themselves, root themselves in the past, and retain a connection to their ancestors. They will never forget where they came from and how they came to be there.
ReplyDeleteMyriad places like the one above define and shape the Western Apache. These names have practical purposes, such as allowing them to mark where the landscape and climate have changed since the time of their ancestors (ex. “Snake Water”, a now dried up spring), but also create a certain kind of mentality by which they live their lives. Their historical perspective is not linear, but circular. Place-naming and place-making keep the past alive as well as provide an opportunity for revision, allowing them to make sure the past stays relevant to the present and that they remain connected with their past. This push and pull of generations allows the Apache to move forward while still keeping alive the spiritual base of their culture. Every place holds a story that chronicles the hard work of their ancestors and celebrates the qualities revered by their ancestors. In a sense, their naming of the landscape creates a culture of deep respect. While we went to Sunday school and religious services to learn lessons of morality, the Apache have their equivalent of biblical stories woven into their landscape. They can’t live and function without remembering and thinking about their past and the lessons their ancestors passed on.
The key is that their culture ties them to the land. Their land is their pride, their livelihood on which their families and their ancestors survived both physically and mentally. Lessons of respect, work, and determination don’t get dusty on a shelf; they are revisited every day. This doesn’t so much as constantly bombard them with their culture as much as it ingrains it in their hearts and minds. They all share the same history and identity and are united by a spirit that will pervade their culture as long as it exists. Therefore, I believe that place-making is a faith, a commitment to each other, to those that came before them, and those yet to come. They are surviving off a legacy of knowledge and using it to define themselves and continually shape their world for future generations. I stand in awe of their trust in one another and their reverence of the historical landscape.
Benjamin Velez
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ReplyDeleteThe “omnipresent moral force” of the landscape for the Western Apache is due principally to their reverence for the history of the land, which is inextricably tied to ancestor worship, and is therefore a moral issue. In this way, history and the preservation of history is a part of Apache morality, and respect for location is a small part of this. In keeping the place names given to locations by their ancestors, places are imbued with history and respect. In imitating their predecessors by keeping the same names, words and locations as they did, the Apache are doing more than venerating long-standing traditions: they are also “doing human history” by simply living their lives. They are part of these long-standing traditions, and their concept of history thus differs from our own, Western concept in which history is a thing of the past and not considered particularly viable for constructing narratives about the present. The Apache see the landscape as an actor in the grand narrative of history, of which the present is also an active part; place-names bring them back to the moment of discovery, a time in which a currently dried-up riverbed may have been a fast-paced stream that sustained people and animal life in a more productive way than is currently the case. In this way, the history of the Western Apache place names is also sometimes a sad story—places with hopeful, sprightly names are now dried up and relatively barren compared to the bounty that they apparently once offered the ancestors of the modern Apache.
ReplyDeleteOr, as a critique of Basso's analysis of the changing nature of the locations with no-longer-suitable place names, perhaps the method of naming locations has changed through the thousands of years since the Western Apache settled these locations. Perhaps a name suggesting an abundance of water was an invocation of hope, a sort of “if you build it, they will come” strategy for attracting much-needed resources from an unaccommodating landscape. In this way, the modern Western Apache concept of history as interconnected and fluid is even more meaningful: while the ancient Apache were looking toward and hoping for a mythical, bountiful future, the modern Apache are looking back on a mythical, bountiful past.
Rachel Wagner
rw2264
As anyone who has studied American Indian history knows, the western sense of time has no meaning in Native American culture. Time is not a regimented mode for recognizing distance between events; it is, rather, a fluid connection between events, people, and places. For this reason, Native American history is often seen as difficult to decipher, when in reality, the answers are still present within communities around the United States today. Basso’s exploration of the meaning of place within Apache communities clearly reflects this different conception of time. History in Native American cultures revolves around memory and re-telling. As Basso says, “what is remembered about a particular place…guides and constrains how it will be imagined” (Wisdom Sits in Places, p.5). The act of remembering is the central focus of history for Native Americans, and memory is often demarked by locations. It is this concept that links history, place, and even morality. In place-naming, locations have a name, which conveys the history of the site as well as the morality learned from the events that took place there. In Western tradition, we do not really have any similar practice that I can recall. We have not named Boston after the Pilgrims or any event from Boston’s history. The sundial on Columbia’s campus named after what it is. Events have occurred there, but they are not brought to attention simply through their name. Furthermore, in Western tradition we have greatly separated morality from our history. We are always told both sides to every story and warned that history is written by the victors, so we must be skeptical of what others have written about the past. Essentially, every side in history is somehow right (with the few exceptions of the Holocaust, and similarly horrible events). Native American history is more of a narrative than an attempt to retrace facts about the past. Therefore, the stories of the past, the feelings they invoke, and the morals learned are what make history important to today’s communities of Native Americans. The tales of these places, like Shades of Shit sound more like fables than history, but like Basso explains in relation to human connection to place, things may appear simple due to how naturally they occur in the human mind. Just because something is natural does not mean it lacks complexity. While these tales may tell a fairly simple fable, they connect a place and a moral to them, greatly increasing the complexity of the site itself, and the emotions it elicits. The fact that these Apaches bring together three things (place, morality, and history) displays their ability to understand the complex human interaction to place, which we in Western culture often disregard.Michelle Hutt
ReplyDeleteI have been waiting for a book like this for a while! The question of what constitutes “history” is a very fascinating one. Especially in the study of non-Western cultures, but also Western cultures from pre-Enlightenment time, the traditional Euro-American academic discipline of history has been quite constricted and unhelpful until recently. The time is very ripe now to allow the alternate understandings of the idea of “history” to shape new theoretical frameworks that historians can use.
ReplyDeleteThe way Basso has been able to explain and translate abstract Apache ideas into a narrative that makes sense to Euro-Americans is amazing. Of course many understand that land and certain places are especially significant to those who consider themselves “people of the land” (also in Europe), but the idea that these places ARE both history and carriers of moral explanations, is very interesting. Basso argues that land is in fact the source of identity. Place names function as names for the particular people who live there, but also as living history. As Basso framed it, for the Apache it is important where something happened, not when.
Basso’s Apache consultants repeatedly indicate that their land is not only their history, but also their ethic guide. Places stalk people with stories. Each place with its name has a narrative of past events connected to it. Some of these narratives are in fact instructional. The retelling of these histories that are bound to places and place names, is a moralizing device that Apache use “to shoot each other with like arrows”. Knowledge of the place names and their histories is in fact knowledge of the “right ways” or ethical conduct in the Apache society.
I do not wish to fall in the trap of universalizing, but certain ideas presented in Basso’s book regarding the history-making do seem to apply to more than just one culture. He himself draws some comparisons between various Native American cultures (p. 63-64). Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa wrote in 1992 that for Hawaiians it is the genealogies that are history. In 2002 Jonathan Osorio captured the essence of Hawaiian understanding of history: “We face the past, confidently interpreting the present, cautiously backing into the future, guided by what our ancestors knew and did.”
This seems to me so strikingly similar to the way the Apaches look to their ancestors for moral answers to the current questions.
The place-making itself also brings to mind some comparisons. The builders of Stonehenge (Mike Parker Pearson’s lecture) with their choice of place, their use of the monumental “everlasting” stone, and the significance of the roads certainly had a very special relationship with their landscape. Or consider the Chacoans with their mysterious use of the Canyon’s features for their stone palaces and the similarly mysterious roads.
Paulina N. Dudzinska
Basso conveys a very different perception of history is Wisdom Sits in Places. For the Western Apache, history is told through stories that occurred in different landscapes and areas of occupation, and is measured by location instead of years. Basso states that “what matters most to Apaches is where events occurred, not when” (31). More importantly, the names of these different places have great value to the Western Apache, because the Apache place-names are “the speech of their early ancestors” (10). Through his guide and place-making narrator named Charles, Basso opens up this amazing view of the past.
ReplyDeleteWhat fascinates me is that the Western Apache way of making history can measure climate change, such as the Snakes’ Water location whose water has since dried up. The way that the Western Apache ancestors named the lands that they came across seems to make much more sense than the way that we name things in current times. While it may seem plain and boring to name something after its function or what it looks like, it certainly stands the test of time and conveys how things change as time passes. Thus, these place-names are an amazing function of history that create history and maintain it well into the future, independently of the individuals who find and name each place. The way that places, buildings, and the like are named in the present-day has never appealed to me. Tons of places or buildings are now named after people who have either given money for their creation or have some sort of prestige. First of all, I find this method of naming to be completely uncreative, but I also do not think that things should be named after people if they have no connection to the function of the place for which they are named. People these days are too worried about getting their names on things and getting credit for doing things that they forget to give creative names and preserve the history of previous names. For instance, a lot of buildings (such as Columbia’s Baker Field) get renamed just so that they can get people to pay them money. The Western Apache way of place-naming seems to make much more sense and hold a tremendous amount of worth – ancestrally, historically, climatically, and morally.
The Western Apache’s history of place-making also ties in an aspect of morality in the hunting model for storytelling. If you belong to a Western Apache society are not “acting right” according to the standards of those around you, another person will tell a place-making story which will works its way into your mind and show you the wrongness by which you have been living. This story will make you “want to live better” and “want to replace yourself” (59). Even if the person who told you the place-making story dies, or if you move, “that place will keep on stalking you…[and will] make you remember how to live right, so you want to replace yourself again” (59). This is a very powerful image! It’s a moral lesson – teaching how the live right in that society – that will penetrate the mind and will never be forgotten. How many parents, teachers, and religious figures in the present-day would love to be able to teach such a moral lesson? Furthermore, I could not imagine what it would be like to have this place reminding me of the ‘way to live the moral life’ stalking me all the time everywhere! In the current day, there is no one right way to live, or so it seems. That each Western Apache tribe could standardize what was the wrong and right way to live and enforce it really baffles me. They seem to be one of the only peoples who have managed to keep some sort of hold on their younger generation and stop them from completely becoming just American or losing touch with their own history and culture.
Lastly, it is incredible that one place-making story can have such an effect as to make someone feel physically ill while connecting them to the right life, the storyteller, their own behavior and self, and the place in which the story is set. There is certainly a deep connection between place and the Western Apache peoples’ understanding of their culture, morality, and history, which cannot be erased with the passage of time, despite the ruin or modification of those same locations which once made their histories and developed their culture and morals.
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ReplyDeleteCamille Hutt
Prior to reading Wisdom Sits in Places, I hadn't given much thought to the importance of place names and the “faithful evocation” of the names. I'd never thought of names as a direct connection to the person who first uttered the words and named the place, but this concept actually resonates quite strongly with me. Not to stray too far from the topic, though, the issue of place names and faithful evocation have always been issues with me in my own culture. It is difficult for non-native speakers of Chinese to properly pronounce the names of cities, places or anything. In attempting to pronounce it, they too are guilty of the same thing that Basso experienced, that is, disrespecting the ancestors who created the name. In mispronouncing the name, speakers also lose the literal meaning of the words and attempt to make the name itself a word, if that makes any sense. The name has meaning and reason behind it, but in mispronouncing it, the original words and intentions (of the “namer”) are forgotten.
ReplyDeleteI felt that this topic was very relevant to Basso's ideas in Wisdom Sits in Places, and I was glad to be able to relate to his writing. It certainly wasn't something I'd paid much attention to before, but I likely won't be able to speak the Native American name of a town or city (and there are many in New York) without feeling some form of guilt for not knowing the meaning, or for pronouncing the Anglicized version of it.
As to the issue of morality, it directly connects to history of a place and the place name. I love the concept of a place name being a constant reminder of the history that has taken place and the moral stories that history must always impart. This seems to create a much more personal connection to the landscape and the ancestors who existed on that very same landscape some time ago. It is strikingly different from the way we live, in built concrete cities that have eradicated all signs of the past and are constantly evolving to meet the needs of the future. Perhaps we could use some lessons in history and morality from the past, particularly in times like these.
Cindy Huang
Basso locates at least part of a culture's moral force in the landscape within which that culture develops. In Wisdom Sits in Places, he examines the relationship between moral instruction (knowledge of a culture's moral norms) and "local knowledge," (knowledge of a landscape). Because both of these didactic forms rely on culturally-transmitted metaphors and allegorical devices for their efficacy much in the same way that a song relies on rhythm and meter to be easily memorized, Basso argues that landscape, as a pervasive and determining force in cultural development, is an obvious source from which such metaphors may be drawn; and thus by extension, forms of signification that inform a people's worldview may also be understood to at least partially originate in the material forms of the world around them. In a sense, Basso is simply pointing out that, even in questions of morality, the world around us influences the way in which we see the world.
ReplyDeletePointing out that "places" are in fact socially constructed spaces, Basso explores how the construction of these places involve not only the geographical features of a certain locality, but also include much of a people's history and folklore. Thus, certain instructional tales that serve to convey moral or ethical values are not only temporalized (in the Western Apache case, as occurring "in the beginning," "long ago," or during any other of the historical fields among which their narrative forms are divided), but also localized in the surrounding landscape. This serves a variety of purposes, salient among them is the specificity provided by linking places to people.
Upon transgressing a social norm, a Western Apache person may expect to have any of a number of didactic tales deployed by others as a reprimand or correction. These tales not only contain specific advice and moral instruction on how to correct behavior, they are also implicitly linked to a certain locality in both the speaker and the interlocutor's vicinity. From the moment that the tale is deployed, the person is forever connected. Just as actants are perceived to fall within the "fields" of morality or ethics, so are moral choices situated in specific places. This complex relationship accomplishes an almost tangible web in which moral agency is linked to a geographic place, to mytho-historical events and folklore, and to a place in the cultural imaginary of a people that is reflected as much in water holes and streams as it is in discourse or material culture. Morality, like wisdom, thus sits in places.
-Francisco Salas
If we are to combine the ideas of history, place, and morality, I believe that the end result would be memories. For the Apache, history is marked not chronologically, but by events and the location in which they occurred. Each of these events corresponds to the place in which it happened, and that event therefore is allowed existed simultaneously with the site at which it happened. Therefore, history is re-conceptualized in a way that moves away from time, where individual events act in the continuous present and as cautionary tales for the future. Because history is such an active part of day-to-day life, it stands as a constant marker of ‘culture,’ something the Apache see as a combination of past, present, and future. In Basso’s book, Nick Thomas explains, “It’s hard to keep on living right. Many things jump up at you and block your way. But you won’t forget that story. You’re going to see the place where it happened, maybe every day if it’s nearby and close to Cibucue. If you don’t see it, you’re going to hear its name and see it in your mind.” (59) The physical is not separated from the emotional and thus stays in the conscious in a more effective way, I would argue, than in a Western conceptualization of history that segments events away from their modern consequences and relationships.
ReplyDeleteI am very interested in the human/non-human interactions, and the Apaches not only respect but also believe in the importance of recognizing non-human agency. In part, this explains their understanding of the landscape, which privileges space as a primary site for historical construction. In many ways, this is knowledge that should make Apache culture more relatable to the West. The West strives to reach a point on which it can depend on material culture, where a technological environment can act as an agent for cultural understanding. Similarly, though with a very different take on technology, Apache culture already incorporates the mutual dependence of physical environment, the “stuff” within that environment, and the people in that environment.
-Perri Goldstein
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ReplyDeleteAccording to Basso, unlike the European conceptualization of history, which typically treats historical events as a function of the social climate rather than location, the Apache named places for what happened in the past, effectively linking historical events to a physical location. Of course, when I say this, it's not meant to imply that the European conceptualization of history completely discounts the physical location as being a function of history. After all, if I take a trip to Fort McHenry in Baltimore, it will be acknowledged that that location is where Francis Scott Key penned The Star-Spangled Banner. However, there is no intrinsic value in the physical location itself---the location is merely incidental to the event; if Francis Scoot Key wrote the Star-Spangled Banner in Gunpowder Park, then Fort McHenry would likely hold no significance. The Apache, however, according to Basso, see the location and the event as working together in tandem, rather than the former being merely incidental to the latter.
ReplyDeleteMorality ties into this in that merely evoking the physical image of a place should engender certain feelings, thus teaching people to appreciate their history while, at the same time, enforcing social norms and keeping behavior in check. The concept of a certain site (or merely the physical image of a site) linked to a historical event evoking emotions is not a particularly novel concept (ex. WTC Ground Zero), but the thought of a place holding an intrinsic moral value is a rather interesting concept.
--->Nonye Madu
In the Western Apache worldview, history, place, and morality integrate as a unified and reinforcing presence that continually recreates and rebuilds the identities and actions of people. Places are ascribed with meaning based on events which happened there, and the stories of those events are transmitted through the use of place-names and story-telling, which in turn serve—very basically—to teach moral lessons. In retelling stories or simply in stating the descriptive place-names, the places and the events are not merely recalled but relived and re-experienced. It is in this way that history remains a living, conscious, and purposeful act, rather than a dead past. The Western Apache are not merely recalling past events but experiencing them, learning from them, and instructing through them.
ReplyDeleteThus, the Western Apache presents an alternative view of history from what we may term as a European view. The European view of history, simplified greatly, relies not as much on places as on times and grander processes. Certainly location is important and essential to European history, but if placed in stark comparison to the Western Apache, or to Native views in general, the specificities of location in European conceptions of history seem minor. (See Vine Deloria Jr.’s God is Red for such a portrayal).
This basic difference leads us to two more nuanced ones. First, Western Apache history relates the present to the past not through similar processes of past and present but through the existence of the present in the same landscape as the past. Second, Western Apache history does not seek to be authoritative because its goals are apparently normative, not descriptive.
1. This native view of history does not oppose historical contingency—many of the stories are situated within a historical context of arriving at a location or dealing with rival groups—but it does not concern itself with historical processes as European history does. Instead of searching for patterns and trends of historical events in relation to each other, the Western Apache continually reevaluates and reuses historical events in relation to the present, remaking the past as the present itself is made. European history may seek to learn from the past by comparing historical processes to ongoing ones in hopes of doing better this time around. In Western Apache history, ongoing events do not connect to past ones through possibly repeated or continued processes such as social evolution or class relations. Instead, new events—the present day (such as the eagle attack)—are situated on the actual landscape, and thus literally placed in view with events of the past. As of Basso’s informants describes, history is a map of the landscape in one’s mind.
2. One feature of European history that is certainly eroding but still holds great sway is its attempt to be authoritative. Thinkers from across the European academic spectrum—think of Darwin, Rousseau, Marx/Hegel, and Morgan—rely on grand designs of history that attempt to explain everything, to describe how and why things happened. Without judging the others, it is Darwin’s account, by virtue of its avoidance of historical humanity, that has remained most intact. Even more critical European-style accounts of history such as Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States attempt to be authoritative, using their descriptive accounts as a means for activism. The difference lies not in how they construct history but from whose perspective or for what purposes that history is constructed, though in all cases the purpose appears descriptive—at least until they make recommendations for the present day. It is true that as new documents come to light or as new analyses are made, European history is continually reassessed and remade in relation to present fashions, interests, or purposes, but the authoritative thrust remains, even if eroded somewhat in our age of globalization and pluralism.
How different for the Western Apaches. While the Western Apache way of doing history is perhaps just as entrenched as the European one, it explicitly does not attempt to be authoritative, and actually thrives not necessarily because of a pluralism of ideas, but because of a pluralism of accounts. A storyteller may leave out much information purposefully so that the listener can create in her own mind her own personal experience. This process is done because history for the Western Apache is practiced in a social setting for a moral purpose and is often directed at specific individuals. To remove the agency of that individual from their experience of a historical place-event would undermine the moral possibilities of the story, and of history. This way of doing history does not need to be totally and perfectly descriptive as European history attempts to do because that result is not its point. Instead of creating an account and then making normative recommendations or observations off of it, the actual historical account of the Western Apache resides in the nation’s most fundamentally social context of language and is morality—in action, in effect, in description—itself.
jason patinkin
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ReplyDeleteKeith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places is a compelling investigation of what function place-names serve in Western Apache discourse. For these people, place-names are not merely appellations of a corresponding “physical presence” but semiotic markers of a great moral lesson that occurred there at some point in ancient Apache history. This interplay of place, morality and history is no doubt complicated, but is easier to concretize given Basso’s metaphor of Apache treatment of place-names as “historical theater” (33). He characterizes the places themselves as a “natural stage” and the ancient Apache who serve as the moral-teachers of these “fables” as a “cast of actors” (121). In this way, the act of retelling the historical morality tale tied to a particular place-name becomes “doing human history” in the form of imaginatively constructing a historical morality play of what happened on a particular ancestral spot as if it were happening in the present. This is exactly what the Apache people do in retelling such history: “mak[ing] extensive use of quoted speech to enter the hearts and minds of those whom it portrays” (33). This understanding of history is vastly different from our own, if only because the “where” is emphasized so much more than the “when” in what Vine Deloria would characterize as the Apache “spatial-conception of history” (31, 34). Dates are not only unimportant but completely disregarded; what is important in the Apache conception of ancient history is merely place.
ReplyDeleteFor the Apache people, according to Basso, the “physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind” (107). This idea made me think of some of the opening lines of Woody Allen’s Manhattan, which I recently re-watched for another class: “He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved.” Basso himself may have made the same connection:
“You can no more imagine an Apache sense of place without some notion of Old Man Owl, smooth minds, and what occurred at Grasshoppers Piled Up Across than you can fancy a native New Yorker’s sense of place without comparable ideas of Woody Allen, contending with subway rush hours, and Central Park on the first warm day of spring” (144-5).
By placing what he deems “an Apache sense of place” within this context that is easy for us Columbia University students in particular to understand, Basso really drove home his point of the transformative power of places on the human beings who physically and mentally know them at least in my mind. Just as mastering the subway system has taught me and I’m sure many of us “New Yorkers” how to be that little bit more independent and responsible, the places Basso discusses serve as “mnemonic pegs [for the Apache people] on which to hang the moral teachings of their history” (62). The Apache use the stories associated with each place to teach future generations how to “live right” in both thinking and conduct (38). This is how, to use Dudley’s phrase, “Wisdom sits in places” for the Apache people (121). This is how the very land itself makes people wise.
--Jenny Johnson
This project of Basso’s began with a conversation with Ronnie Lupe. Lupe directed Basso to create maps of the Western Apache. He was careful to tell him not to create “whitemen’s maps.” This statement is enough to tell the differences of meaning that Apaches and white Americans ascribe to their places. Basso even uses a quote from Native writer Vine Deloria to kick off his second chapter. “American Indians hold their lands-places-as having the highest possible meaning” (37). The white capitalist investment in land is much more secular than the Apache. We have this paralyzing concept of the land as quantitative and finite. There is only a fixed amount of land available and land can bring us resources, production and ultimately capitol. Therefore, Euro-Americans are constantly in opposition to these Indigenous groups whose viewpoints on land exist in vastly different spheres then our own. Basso even writes himself that for the Apache, the concept of place reaches deeply into many other cultural spheres. Using Geertz’s term, “Local Knowledge” Basso informs us that the importance of place is a cultural trait of the Apache, while at the same time senses of place are possessions of individuals.
ReplyDeleteThe conversation at the Machuse house (93) deals with the association between place and history. By Lola using the names “Line of White Rocks Extends Up And Out,” she was evoking a historical tale that created a very distinct visual image in the mind. According to the Apache in Wisdom Sits in Places, speaking with names will even make you feel better. Apaches are able to travel in their minds to view the places spoken. When this happens the Native has a strong connection with his past and ancestors. This knowledge of the past can inform you of the present and make you feel better.
-Sean Quinn
In Wisdom Sits in Places, Basso relies on living Western Apaches to explain a past that otherwise would not only not be understood, but would not even be visible.
ReplyDeleteLanguage is the definer of culture. Without a Rosetta stone, it is practically impossible to interpret material culture or understand whence it sprang. Yes, sometimes a pot is just a pot, but unless we know the language in whose cultural context it was created we will never fully know what its designs signify, or why an object invested with the time to fashion such beauty would have had its bottom knocked out and been buried with a particular person. During a recent backstage tour at AMNH, archaeologist Matt Sanger displayed the contents of drawer #7 in the New Mexico storage room: objects of stunning refinement and artistry; still possessing the soul-stirring quiddity of the people who made them millennia ago. Photographs of these precious things illustrate David Grant Noble’s In Search of Chaco but do not do justice to their vivid reality. Queried as to why such stunning objects were not on view, Sanger explained several reasons. Money is the big problem. Pre-Columbian art is not considered sexy, so no prominent donor has yet emerged to endow a gallery. Only 2% of the AMNH’s holdings of Native American material culture is on display, primarily in the Hall of the Peoples of the Pacific North West. Nothing there has changed - not even the gloomy green paint Franz Boas chose for the walls at the start of the 20th century - since he curated the collection he single-handedly obtained with his invisible assistants, according to a contextual phylogeny of his own devise. The room stands in stark apposition to the rest of the Museum’s evident restless desire to stay at the vanguard of the curatorial state of the art. It is a wormhole transporting visitors to a radical alterity of place and time.
The remaining 98% is not displayed because archaeologists do not know what the objects are, what they were for, how old they are or who made them. The small white tag attached to each states only place of find and date of acquisition. Without language, there is nothing to bridge the fragments of a people’s past and the society who long ago made them. Since objects rarely embody their intrinsic meaning, much archaeological interpretation of material culture conducted within a void of known contextual language sinks to mere conjecture.
Sylvia V.T. Calabrese