Renae Bredin
Women's Studies
Rutgers University
. . . I see no way to avoid insisting that
there has to be a simultaneous other focus:
not merely who am I? but who is the other
woman? How am I naming her? How does
she name me?
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, French Feminism
in an International Frame
No anthropological undertaking can
ever open up the other. Never the marrow. All
he can do is wear himself out circling the object
and define his other on the grounds of his being
a man studying another man.
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other
Despite currents in anthropological, ethnographic, and literary debates claiming the unknowability of the "Other," efforts to know the Other abound. Critical tourism of other cultures and identities continues marked now by polyphony, dialogism, and reflexivity. Pluralism notwithstanding, efforts by members of dominant groups to work in the cultural material of groups traditionally silenced speaks to a sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken desire for otherness. In this undertaking, I am working not to know "the other," but to explore the relationships of two groups Anglo- and Native-American to each other; to ask what happens in those moments when identities are constructed in contact. How do those relationships, once they enter narrative on the page, operate to sustain or change political and social conceptions of the categories which are in contact? Does the "emergent" nature of the performance of the moment of contact become static when textualized?
The textual meeting of three women differentiated categorically but located geographically in thesame space, and temporally across a century, provides fertile grounds for questioning these notions, and for exploring the terrain of self/other, "red"/"white," subject/object, and the seemingly opposed ideologies of social construction and biological essentialism.
When feminist anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons wrote her ethnographicaccounts of the Keres inhabitants of Laguna Pueblo, she created her version of what constitutes Indian-ness, more specifically, Pueblo-ness. Contained in her "factual" account of Keres ritual, tradition, and habits of mind are particularly white, feminist, upper-class assumptions from the world she brings to the act of writing. Her ethnography overtly participates in constructing what becomes construed by other white readers as the racial category of "Indian."
Forty years later, Leslie Marmon Silko and Paula Gunn Allen write fiction andnon-fiction accounts of the ritual, tradition, and habits of mind of the same Keresan group living at Laguna. Their accounts also participate in constructing what becomes construed as the racial category of Indian, but from subject positions that are identified as within the category being constructed. Unlike Parsons, the assumptions which Silko and Allen as Laguna women might bring to their enterprise are part of the category "red" which is already in circulation. There is embedded in both enterprises a parallel underlying construction of what constitutes the unspoken racial category "white."
In 1917, Elsie Clews Parsons first visited Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, in conjunction with an anthropological field trip to Acoma and Zuni. An early feminist sociologist and a pioneering ethnographer, she returned to Laguna at least four more times to research and record the culture. What she published (several hundred pages on Laguna alone) is an ethnographic account based in scientific discourses and "objective" reportage, but it is also a narrative discourse what James Clifford calls a "serious fiction" (Predicament 10). Parsons' authorial voice claims to be recording a faithful picture of a culture despite those ruptures and disjunctures in time and space inherent in the project of publication. These ruptures cover the distance between Laguna and New York, the 1917 collecting expedition, and the publication of the notes months later. A contemporary reading of these ethnographic narratives, the ethnographic monologue, must take into account a narrative that is full of voices in the margins, messages in the cracks, and dialogues between the lines. As Barbara Babcock asserts in her Introduction to the recent reprinting of Parsons' Tewa Tales, Parsons' style of writing, with page after page consisting largely of notes and countless references to other texts, including her own publications, reflects not only the thoroughness of her scholarship and her desire to leave as complete a record as possible for later scholars but also her belief that anthropology especially Southwestern studies should be a collaborative, comparative, and cooperative enterprise.
In "Feminist Anthropology: The Legacy of Elsie Clews Parsons," Louise Lamphere identifies the "polyphonic Boasian mode" of ethnographic inquiry and textualizing to which she asserts Parsons was committed. The twenties was the period in which the "Classic ethnography" was formulated, as exemplified by Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. The new style of ethnographic writing transformed observations and dialogue gathered in particular places and at particular times into a text containing a unified voice, that of the ethnographer representing beliefs, practices, and behaviors of a whole culture (Clifford 1983; Clifford and Marcus 1986). However, Parsons' fieldwork differed from that of Malinowski and Mead. In the 1920's Parsons stayed within the Boasian tradition, which represented a more polyphonic description, but she has framed that description in terms of culture elements, diffusion, and culture history. (Lamphere 522-23)
There are actually two methods Parsons used to report on and textualize her experience of Laguna. The first, in the 1920's, is as Lamphere describes, "polyphonic description" of specific cultural details. In "Laguna Ceremonialism," "Mothers and Children at Laguna," and other such reports published in various anthropological journals, Parsons catalogues ritual observances, records sacred and everyday stories, and describes kinship systems in great detail. She offers little by way of generalization about or analysis of the details she reports. In "Mothers and Children at Laguna" there are descriptions of an altar and the rituals associated with presenting a new child, gift giving, pregnancy taboos, lullabies, and childhood training practices. The report is loosely held together under the rubric of mothering, and there are a number of informant voices offering "factual information." This is the general pattern found in most of the other material Parsons publishes about Laguna Pueblo.
However, as Lamphere also notes, her later work contains and monologizes her earlier descriptions. Pueblo Indian Religion, published in 1939, after much of her fieldwork in the Pueblos had been completed, is precisely that "unified voice [of] the ethnographer representing beliefs, practices, and behaviors of a whole culture" (Lamphere 522-23). In the preface, Parsons asserts that "Pueblo society appears remarkably unified . . ." (vii), and later in the introduction, begins to codify what constitutes a Pueblo by categorizing Pueblo "Habits of Mind," "which are fostered in Pueblo life" (76). While she disavows what she is doing when she says that ". . . in what degree these traits characterize the individual Pueblo I do not know" (76), it is in the disavowal that the fetishistic nature of this text becomes apparent. Her suggestions of Pueblo "susceptibility to ridicule or criticism and to fear, the urge to separate one's self from whatever may seem offensive or dangerous, and that very widespread way of mistaking an attribute for an independent object," along with her larger claims to Pueblo compulsive behavior, clairvoyance, analogous thinking, arbitrary relationship of events, reliance on orientation and sequence, and other habits (76-111), function to generalize what she has observed as the texture of daily life into what constitutes a psychological race profile. Is this not the founding gesture of imperializing discourse?Native InformantRunning alongside Parsons' narrative of what she reports from Laguna in the earlier 'polyphonic' fieldwork, embedded in her oscillation between the "objective" and the "personal" stances of her texts, that there are the voices in the margins of her cultural interpreters or informants, as well as those who functioned as her linguistic interpreters. These are the individuals who offered up the details from which Parsons devises her psychological race profile. Many of these voices are women from Laguna who are related to each other by matrilineal blood kinship as well as clan affiliation, such as those of Mrs. Walter G. Marmon (Gawiretsa), a native- born Laguna woman, Mrs. E. F. Eckerman '(possibly either Mrs. W.G. Marmon's mother or aunt), Wana (Margaret Marmon (possibly related to Mrs. W.G. Marmon), Getsitsa, and Dzaid yuwi.' Of these, the most provocative voice is that of Mrs. W.G. Marmon (Gawiretsa). Parsons speaks of her, in footnotes and in textual reference, with warmth and respect, callingher an "excellent" informant ("Notes on Acoma and Laguna" 180), "unsophisticated and uncontaminated by American shoddiness . . . strong, gentle, and very lovable" ("Laguna Ceremonialism" 87). Her continual textual reappearance (used as an informant) locates her as one of the co-writers of the narrative(s). Because Parsons identifies Gawiretsa in such a way, as a kind of "noble primitive," my attention is provoked. The relationship between Parsons and Gawiretsa is personal and intimate rather than anonymous and formal, as is the case in much of ethnographic writing. Her voice, while marginal, is stronger and more consistent than those of the other women informants/(co)authors. How does the "noble primitive" function as co-author? What then, constitutes authorship, authority and authenticity? It is in this marginal polyphony that questions of power and privilege are pointed to and enacted in ethnographic discourse.
James Clifford, in The Predicament of Culture, asks us to reconsider the authorial voice of ethnography, when he states: "Who is actually the author of the field notes? . . .indigenous control over knowledge gained in the field can be considerable, and even determining" (45). Ethnography is a discourse which simultaneously produces and problematizes textual relationships. As an ethnographer, Parsons steps into Laguna in a position vs vs established institutions as female (minor), but vs a vs Laguna her position is dominant and privileged by virtue of her race and her class. She comes to Laguna loaded with the baggage of the original white male settlers to whom Parsons' informants are connected, baggage which troubles her exchanges with, and reportage of the "culture" from within which she remains "outside." She participates in the construction of a "serious fiction" which passes for scientific knowledge and comprehensive understanding of Pueblo and Keresan culture. Her construction is possible only by virtue of the object of scientific inquiry the "native informant."
Parsons' relationship to Gawiretsa is one of subject/object, a relationship which is reproduced as textual in Parsons' writings. It is grounded in the lived connection of participant observer/informant. Mrs. W.G. Marmon, a full blood near the "center" of Laguna (her brother was a Cheani), informs and interprets to an outsider for outsiders; she writes none of Parsons' material herself, but offers Parsons carefully selected pieces of the culture to be re-interpreted for a white audience. In her #2 footnote to "Notes on Acoma and Laguna," Parsons alludes to Gawiretsa's position in relation to the material she tells to Parsons. The kachale appear to have encroached in other ways too upon the cheani. In the somewhat bitter criticism of the kachale by my elderly woman informant [Gawiretsa], the sister, I recall, of osach cheani, I had a glimpse, I thought, of one of those institutional feuds apparently characteristic of Pueblo Indian society. (185) That is, Gawiretsa's participation in what Parsons characterizes as an "institutional feud" offers "bitter criticism" of the kachale. It is clear in the margins, at least, that this is not an anonymous, objective informant. Gawiretsa will, by implication, tell only what supports her own claims. This self-selecting strategy is precisely the strategy which affords the object of investigation to take up a subject position and "write" the field notes, take control of the transaction, and becomes an authority.
This strategy of selective representation by the represented is described by Greg Sarris in Keeping Slug Woman Alive. Sarris describes how Pomo women informants in northern California carefully managed encounters with anthropologists. They called their storytelling sessions "money-storytelling-time" and "giving-them-a-piece work." Those who came to record the stories of Pomo Indians were only given carefully chosen and sometimes never before heard stories, bits and pieces, but "[t]hey never get the whole picture . . . [b]esides, they make up what they want anyway. They tell their own stories about whatever I tell them" (105). This Pomo woman is clear about what is going on in these transactions. She is offering bits and pieces, for her own reasons, knowing that what happens to her information is beyond her control once she gives it over. Because the storyteller's version of what constitutes Pomo cultural practice moves outside of her control once the encounter is ended, she works to retain control in the telling. What the non-Indian recorder does in making up what s/he wants anyway is to make a textual Indian that speaks to the desire of the non-Indian as non-Indian.
Trinh T. Minh-ha describes the relationship between the anthropologically observed and observer:
A conversation of "us" with "us" about "them" is a conversation in which"them" is silenced. "Them" always stands on the other side of the hill, naked and speechless, barely present in its absence. Subjects of discussion, "them" is only admitted among "us," the discussing subjects, when accompanied or introduced by an "us," member, hence the dependency of "them" and its need to acquire good manners for the membership standing. (67) Rather than Trinh's "naked and speechless them," indigenous control over what happens in the ethnographic exchange would seem to be more multivalent. But the subjectivity of the moment of exchange is quickly lost made naked to ethnographic textualization at the precise moment that performance becomes fixed. "This is the way Aunt Susie told the story" If my calculations are correct, Gawiretsa is a paternal great-aunt to Leslie Marmon Silko, one of the three women moving through our triangle. Silko is one of the pre-eminent voices of the contemporary Native American literary renaissance, a movement which is bringing together traditional oral storytelling and Western textual practice. Both Gawiretsa and Silko function in important ways as cultural informants and interpreters of Laguna for non-Indian culture. Silko, a mixed-blood and somewhat marginalized figure vis a vis spatial relationships at Laguna (her family lived on the outskirts of town), offers "us" as readers her version of Laguna, coming from "a certain kind of background and place" which involves Laguna people and culture ("Stories and Their Tellers" 21).
Silko and Gawiretsa re-produce their kinship textually. Silko tells the stories told by her grandmother, her Aunt Susie, and her community, as an insider. In Storyteller, Silko hands authorship over to Aunt Susie early on, making her the teacher and teller, in turn authorizing and authenticating Silko's telling. Arnold Krupat describes Silko's dialogism in this way:
Silko dedicates her book "to the storytellers as far back as memory goes and to the telling which continues and through which they all live and we with them." Having called herself a storyteller, she thus places herself in a tradition of tellings, suggesting what will be the case, that the stories to follow, Silko's "own" stories, cannot strictly be her own; nor will we find in them what one typically looks for in post-Rousseauian, Western autobiography or, as Bahktin would add, in poetry a uniquely personal voice. There is no single, distinctive, or authoritative voice in Silko's book nor any striving for such a voice (or style); to the contrary, Silko will take pains to indicate how even her own individual speech is the product of many voices. Storyteller is presented as a strongly polyphonic text, in which the author defines herself finds her voice, tells her life, illustrates the capacities of her vocation in relation to the voices of other storytellers Native and non-Native, tale tellers and book writers, and even to the voices of those who serve as the (by-no-means silent) audience for these stories. (163) Linda Danielson asserts that 'The myths and stories have come to Silko through specific others, whom shecredits: Aunt Susie Marmon, Great-Grandmother Maria Anaya Marmon, Aunt Alice Little. . . [a]mong these . . . the grandmothers are the primary sources instead of the unconsulted, as in so much anthropological fieldwork' (qtd. in Storyteller 329).
Gawiretsa stands "on the other side of the hill, naked and speechless." Her absent presence is made even more apparent when her kinswoman stands on "our" side of the hill and herself becomes "subject, participant, and sole [co]-author, not 'object'" (Visweswaran 39). This relationship, and the shift in power relations reflected in Silko's agency and authority to speak, textualize and make known the "unconsulted" who reconfigures the questions of authorship, authority, and authenticity."Ethnologists blame the Marmon brothers"There is another relationship, also textual, which mirrors and reconfigures the Parsons/Gawiretsa and Silko/Gawiretsa dialogues. In a 1976 interview, Silko refers frequently to "anthropologists" without much affection. One anthropologist is singled out and named. ". . . there was a kind of continuum that was really there [Laguna] despite Elsie Clews Parsons. In 1930, you know, she wrote off Laguna as a lost cause. She said it had no kiva, that it was dead. I think she wrote that somewhere" (Silko, "Conversation" 30). In Storyteller, Silko continues her dialogue with Parsons. Near the end of the book, a Coyote story Silko's great- grandfather told to Parsons is retold. After the re-telling, Silko offers a response to one of Parsons' central concerns about the ethnographic and cultural identities at Laguna.
A good deal of controversy surrounded
and still surrounds my great-grandfather and his
brother
who both married Laguna women.
Ethnologists blame the Marmon brothers
for all kinds of factions and trouble at Laguna
and I am sure much of it is true
their arrival was bound to complicate
the already complex politics at Laguna.
They came on the heels of a Baptist preacher named
Gorman
who also must have upset Laguna ceremonialism. (256)
When Parsons arrived in Laguna, she arrived with her cultural baggage intact. Laguna itself was, according to her textual description, "hybrid." She identifies in several of her writings the big controversy between the "conservatives" and the "progressives" at Laguna, a controversy brought on by the insertion of "white" cultural practices and familial ties.
It is these brothers, Walter G. and Robert G. Marmon, who figure in what Parsons reads as a central problem for the community on her first visit (of a few days) to Laguna: "At Laguna ceremonialism or sacerdotalism is disintegrated and the social organization is considerably Americanized," which Parsons attributes to the marriage of Gawiretsa to Walter G. Marmon (192). Gawiretsa is also the daughter of Kwime and the sister of Giwire, both of whom served as Shikani-kurena cheani, a position central to ceremonial life and sacerdotalism in Pueblo cosmology. Gawiretsa, functioning as Parsons' access to this disordered pantheon and ceremonial organization (244), is actually one who is at the center of the "disorder," as well as an active participant in the causes of the disorder in the system, by virtue of her marriage into the dominant white culture. In the interstices of Parsons' "narrative text," Gawiretsa sits within established power relations, both inside the Pueblo and inside the ethnographic institution. But she also sits outside some of those power relations, as a female outside of white male ethnographic "science," and as a participant in the split between the traditionals (favoring barring white participation in ceremonial life) and progressives (favoring acceptance of white participation and "ways"). Here is a confluence of power and marginality which actually "writes" pieces of the whole which Parsons offers readers as "Keresan culture."
Cultural change and survival (hybridity) is the space in which "white" and "red" operate in contact. It is the figure of Malinche/Malintzin the traitor, translator, and mother of the mixed bloods that comes to mind here. In the history of race relations on the American continents, indigenous women appear to be the key turned between men for political, diplomatic, and proprietary rights; the space of emergence and hybridity. What is sometimes called the Pocahontas Complex fills a crucial role in pointing to masculine privilege, and some ways in which these subject/object relations can be re-scripted as subject/subject relations. But this figure is also, as pointed out by Alarcn and Greenblatt, 'one who asserts her own subjectivity in choosing certain lines of action her alliance with incoming white men is one not necessarily always already a scene of rape/domination.'
At Laguna, this similar alliance between Gawiretsa and the incoming Marmon brothers is a crucial moment in Parsons' version of what happened. She does not imply that Gawiretsa was forced to marry a white man, rather she sees Gawiretsa as an agent, telling stories, acting in the midst and on behalf of Keres praxis as well as on her own behalf. At the same time, Parsons blames much of what happens to ritual practice and community cohesion on the arrival and subsequent marriages to local women like Gawiretsa by the Marmons.
Walter G. Marmon, appointed government teacher in 1871, married the daughter of Kwime , chief of the Kurena-Shikani medicine men and father of Giwire, who was to take his father's position. This group led the Americanization faction and was opposed by most of the hierarchy, by the other clown society, the Kashare, by the Town chief and the War chief or head of the Scalp-takers, by the Flint, Fire, and Shahaiye societies or their chiefs. . . . the withdrawing ceremonialists first took their altars and sacrosanct properties up a mountain to secrete and protect them, and later brought them down to Mesita, three miles east of Laguna. Meanwhile the two kivas of Laguna were torn down by the progressives, while Robert G. Marmon was Governor, and there was a meeting at which the old women in charge of what was left of sacrosanct things brought them out and gave them up. (Pueblo Indian Religion 889) Miscegenation, then, is the agent of hybridization. As Homi Bhabha points out, the 'hybrid' moment of political change is critical as transformational "the re-articulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One . . . nor the Other . . . but something else besides which contests theterms and territories of both" ("Commitment" 120). Miscegenation at Laguna is a contestation of both Pueblo and white elements, the "terms and territories of both" undergo transformation. The Marmon brothers become not fully white, Kwime and Giwire become not quite Indian. In the introduction to Pueblo Indian Religion, Parsons asserts the value of the 'hybrid' and points to what becomes an obsession for late twentieth century anthropology acculturation.
When the town was first studied, twenty years ago, its ceremonial disintegration was so marked that it presented an obscure picture of Keresan culture. But, with recently acquired knowledge of that culture in mind, today Laguna and her nine colonies offer unrivaled opportunities to study American acculturation and the important role played by miscegenation. (890) Parsons' interest is in the hybrid, and what constitutes both cultural survival and cultural disintegration (subjects which, like her informants, appear consistently in her footnotes). Her material from Laguna constantly refers to the arrival of the Marmons and the attendant cultural disintegration. While there has also been constant contact with Mexican and American influences, and in fact, the Shiwana Kurena Kwime' had been educated by priests in Mexico, it is the fact of "white"/"red" miscegenation that Parsons makes the moment of hybridity.
While Parsons takes care to report the split, and to identify at times) her informants, Gawiretsa again, "stands on the other side of the hill, naked and speechless" a "them" barely present, yet a woman who possibly participates in controlling and determining the ethnographic text. Parsons has ultimate editorial control, and in the written moment, she is able to silence the other participants in the dialogue, the fiction of polyphony turned to marginalia.MarginaliaAccording to Clifford, ". . . ethnographic texts are orchestrations of multifocal exchanges occurring in politically charged situations. The subjectivities produced in these often unequal exchanges whether of 'native' or of visiting participant-observers are constructed domains of truth, serious fictions" (Predicament 10). Herein lies one of the tasks at hand. If there is an honest acknowledgement about participation in both privilege and oppression, the position of privilege in the discourse of power relations is relatively clear. Parsons' positions either as privileged or subordinated in this discourse are more troubled (it should be noted that she operated within a set of social rules different from our own with resistance), and Gawiretsa's position is nearly invisible. "For the first-world feminist critic, therefore, the challenge at this particular time is to develop a discourse that responds to the power relations of the world system, that is, to examine her location in the dynamic of centers and margins" (Kaplan 189). Where is the margin and the center?
Barbara Babcock, in "'A Tolerated Margin of Mess': The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered," explores the nature and possibilities inhering in the phenomenon of "marginality."
. . . as an operational definition and point of orientation in these shifting concepts of "marginality," let it be said that a situation of "marginality" exists whenever commonly held boundaries are violated, be they those of the social structure, of law and custom, of kinship, family structure and sexuality, of the human person, or of nature. (Babcock 155)
Babcock explores possible definitions, including the classic sociological definition, particularly Everett Stonequist's, who defined "marginal area" as "'the boundary of two cultural areas where the occupying group tends to combine the traits of both cultures,' and 'marginal man' as 'a personality type that arises at a time and a place where, out of the conflict of races and cultures, new societies, new peoples and cultures are coming into existence'" (155). Here again is a way of speaking about hybridity, which is useful in examining the version that Laguna Parsons is offering us. Laguna Pueblo as a geographic site is situated on the geographical margins both temporally and spatially. Parsons comments on this temporalized marginal space in her opening remarks in "Notes on Laguna Ceremonialism."
Although Laguna was one of the first pueblos to be visited by Americans, of itthere is little or no ethnographic account presumedly [sic] because the ethnographers of the Southwest have felt that because of the late origin of Laguna (settled, it is said, in 1699) and its continuous contact with Mexican and American it would present a hybrid and therefore uninteresting culture. Such a preconception overlooks the tenaciousness and ubiquity of Pueblo Indian habits of mind or culture. Moreover, the preconception is unscientific in its indifference to some of the most significant problems of ethnology, the problems of acculturation. It is a preconception explicable only as a variant of the race snobbery which is ever seeking for pure races. (87) It should also be emphasized that Laguna is geographically located on what was once the main road across New Mexico, a road which later became Route 66. Settled in 1699, it is physically located at a geographic crossroads/center, yet it remains marginal in several ways. First, as an indigenous community, it is outside of the boundaries of the social structure of the colonizing communities by which it is surrounded and controlled White America. What is outside, therefore not inside, participates in defining the inner field of what constitutes "White America." Then, its "continuous contact with Mexican and American" further marginalizes its identity for the "scientific community" that Parsons is here scolding for its "race snobbery." Finally, Parsons herself participates in its marginalization with her 20-year-long commentary on the disintegration of ceremonialism and social organization. Johannes Fabian identifies this kind of textualized spatial and temporal distancing as necessary to the project of modern anthropology. Without this, there is no "Other" to know. Fabian charts the ways in which anthropological discourse has used not only spatial relations to construct a proper "Other," but has also been tied to the politics of time as a dimension of cultural contact. As a strategy of social construction, Laguna is geographically, spatially, temporally, and textually distanced from the white ethnographer (Parsons) and her audience (white cultural tourists), and in the distancing, is strategically constructed as what is not there and then. Conclusion Parsons' assumptions about her audience are also part of this discourse of disintegration and hybridity. In "Laguna Genealogies," a longer article tracing kinship terms, clan moieties, and town gossip (her primary informant being Margaret Marmon, another of Silko's aunts), Parsons relates much gossip that could be considered dangerous.
In repeating gossip I have been frank in the same way that the native is frank; and prudent, I hope in the way he would wish. Incriminating evidence about "selling information" about ceremonia lparticulars I have withheld; and the one witchcraft case I have cited in particular is past history, the principal is dead. Moreover there is hardly a possibility of these records ever falling into the hands of a Laguna townsman, or, if they did, of his ever reading them. At Laguna, as elsewhere, gossip must follow certain lines to be considered interesting, lines which I trust I can be charged with avoiding. (260)
Apparently, however, these records did fall into the hands of an unintended audience, for it is clear that Silko has read these documents, and possible that another Laguna writer ,Paula Gunn Allen, has also taken a look at them. Clifford asserts that "The multiplication of possible readings reflects the fact that 'ethnographic' consciousness can no longer be seen as the monopoly of certain Western cultures and social classes. . . . indigenous readers will decode differently the textualized interpretations and lore"(52). While Parsons envisioned a unified white audience to whom she would represent a "monological authority" on Keresan culture, when Leslie Marmon Silko reads Elsie Clews Parsons, she "decodes differently." Parsons' presumption of illiteracy, disinterest, or lack of ability on the part of "Laguna townsmen" is shattered. Silko, a Laguna towns-woman, re-reads, re-interprets, and re-constructs theKeresan object made by Parsons, and in this re/versal, reads, interprets and constructs Parsons the "white" other as white object.
Clifford tenders the deconstructive position when he asserts that ". . . one may also read against the grain of the text's dominant voice, seeking out other half-hidden authorities, re-interpreting the descriptions, texts, and quotations gathered together by the writer" (53). Gawiretsa, Juana, and the other women whose discourse Parsons appropriates, albeit with more care than others of her time and profession, are the "half- hidden authorities" we might seek in the silences, the cracks and gaps, the interstices of Parsons' narrative ethnography located spatially in Laguna and temporally in the marginal boundaries criss-crossed by acculturation and changing social and family structures. They are "ethno-graphed," gathered on the other side of the hill, clothed in the strategic power, "warriors of survivance."
Notes
1Following Edward Said's ground breaking work in Orientalism,
as well ascritiques from feminist and womanist theorists like
bell hooks, Gloria Anzalda, Cherre Moraga, Norma Alarcn, and others,
the prevalence of "white" theoretical tourism through
Third World texts, it would seem that more care has been taken
by "white" critics to attend to cultural, ethnic and
racial specificity. However, if one attends to who is still doing
the critical consuming of Third World production, it becomes clear
that the tensions remain unresolved.
2The moment of contact is textualized by Parsons, moving
it from the realm of verbal art to that of textual production.
However, following Richard Bauman's formulation of the emergent
nature of verbal performative events, I would argue that this
kind textualization stands between the moment of "completely
novel" speech event of ethnographic field work, when social
change is immanent, and the static nature of "completely
fixed" written texts grounded in other written texts rather
than speech events(see Bauman 41).
3This information, and further biographical information
is found in Daughters of the Desert:Women Anthropologists and
the Native American Southwest, 1880-1980, eds. Babcock and Parezo,
andin A Woman's Quest For Science by Peter Hare.
4I take this phrase from Arnold Krupat's The Voice
in The Margin, where Krupat argues for and about the inclusion
of Native American texts and aesthetics in a revised canon of
American literature.
5Freud's notion of the fetish as standing in for what
is lost or denied is not unrelated to the use of fetishes in indigenous
tribal groups. Freud, and Lacan in his wake, recast tribal fetishistic
practices in individual terms, rather than through community agreement.
Parsons' individual disavowal of the very nature of her enterprise
connect her to this Western European paradigm.
6See especially Krupat's The Voice in the Margin, Evers'
"Going Along With the Story," Owens, Other Destinies,
and any Vizenor.
7See Norma Alarcn in "Traddutora, Traditora: A
Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism" for apertinent discussion
of the figure of La Malinche. See also Greenblatt in Marvelous
Possessions, and his chapter "The Go-Between," and Hulme
in Colonial Encounters.
8See "The Laguna Migration to Isleta," p.
180, note 1.
9See Time and The Other: How Anthropology Makes Its
Object for a more complete discussion of this concept. In particular,
see page 27 for a chart of time/space distancing.
10In a 1976 interview, Silko noted, "One of the
things I recall reading in one of the anthropologist's books was
the Lagunas had a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for cataloguing
and listing. . ." then later in the interview, she talks
about an ". . . old story, which I'm sure is in Parsons"
(Evers andCarr 32).
In Joseph Bruchac's interview with Allen, in Survival This Way,
Bruchac mentions Parsons, and Allen's response seems to indicate
that she is familiar with Parsons' work.
This is a portion of the title of Gerald Vizenor's recent Manifest
Manners:Postindian Warriors of Survivance.
Works Cited (and Selected Bibliography)
Allen, Paula Gunn. Skins and Bones: Poems 1979-87. Albuquerque:
West
End,1988.
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