Pawnee Days and Ways
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS&WRITING Pawnee Days and Ways By Stanley Edgar Hyman One of the casualties of our era of specialization is the ambitious ethnography, the work, like Codrington's The Melanesians or...
...Lesser), relies primarily on Mark Evarts...
...WRITERS&WRITING Pawnee Days and Ways By Stanley Edgar Hyman One of the casualties of our era of specialization is the ambitious ethnography, the work, like Codrington's The Melanesians or Bogoras' The Chukchee, that sets out to tell everything that it can about a primitive people...
...and a productive life in accord with nature, full of respect for the individual and the loving care of the extended family, spared the Pawnee "certain distortions of the human personality" with which we are all too familiar...
...We see a chief trying to dash out the brains of his wife's baby in the jealous conviction that his brother is its father...
...Miss Weltfish wants us to take certain features of Pawnee life as models, not others...
...The Lost Universe has other faults...
...In its principal aspect, The Lost Universe is a remarkable reconstruction of the cycle of a year's activities among the Pawnee...
...In one of its aspects, as applied anthropology or a tract for our times, The Lost Universe is infuriating...
...The Pawnee have been fortunate in their anthropologists, and the anthropologists in their informants...
...The Sioux nevertheless attacked them so persistently whenever they hunted that most of the meat spoiled, and the Pawnee abandoned the hunt and returned to the reservation with the little meat they had...
...The latter, I must confess, is my source for the events of 1867...
...The illegitimate and impoverished were insulted and humiliated...
...She makes several perfunctory disclaimers of any such effort: "Pawnee life was certainly not a Utopia...
...Each of the semicardinal directions had its color, its sacred tree, its associated animal, its weather manifestation: these determined everything from where each member of the family slept in the earth lodge to what timber would be used for crosspieces in a ceremonial structure...
...Do you want to make wildcat meat palatable...
...Similarly, Miss Weltfish's conclusions about the exemplary nature of Pawnee family life and personality are everywhere contradicted by her data...
...This didactic emphasis (so characteristic of Pawnee elders) leads to all sorts of absurdities in the book: a sermon on the "loneliness" as well as the "incest-breeding welter of physical familiarity" of our nuclear family housing arrangements...
...As a reconstruction of Pawnee personality-in-culture, however, it is considerably less impressive...
...At a time when Melanesian Dendrochronology or Chukchee Phonemes are the expectation, Miss Weltfish's ambition is as rare as it is admirable...
...The Pawnee way is now actually more suitable for us than our own...
...I would feel somewhat more secure in that belief if a future edition were cut by many pages of repetition, idealization, and exhortation...
...Nor is this detail for its own sake...
...If a chief "thought he could not control his emotions he would not accept the office," they tell Miss Weltfish...
...Simple...
...As an account of how the Pawnee lived a century ago and exactly what they did from day to day, The Lost Universe is matchless...
...That year, as The Lost Universe nowhere reveals, the Pawnee were so demoralized by attacks from the Dakota Sioux (a few years later they left Nebraska to the Sioux and fled to Oklahoma) that they went on the summer bison hunt reinforced by the Omaha and the Ponca...
...Investigators have long realized," Miss Weltfish writes, "that the Pawnees had a culture that was unusually rich in ceremony and metaphor...
...The principal distortion comes from Miss Weltfish's understandable tendency to idealize the Pawnee (who are a very attractive people...
...It is not approved Pawnee behavior...
...This is not the actual behavior of any given chief (certainly not of the fellow who tried to dash out the baby's brains...
...The year chosen is 1867...
...How does Miss Weltfish get around this evidence...
...a military police force on the bison hunt restrains antisocial behavior by clubbing the offenders bloody...
...Knowledge is not wisdom, and a person can be a superb field ethnologist and still be no better equipped to solve American social problems, as Margaret Mead demonstrates periodically in the Sunday supplements...
...she calls coercion "the law...
...Do you hanker for bison brains...
...people too poor to own horses stay home from the bison hunt because going means that they would have to attach themselves to a wealthier family and take their orders...
...The men's gambling hand game was a form of symbolic warfare, the youths' hoop and spear game was a miming of bison copulation, the women's plum seed dice gambling game recreated the universe...
...I cannot imagine a more detailed and authoritative reconstruction of the vanished life of a Plains Indian tribe...
...They just did things willingly," Evarts says, but as he continues we recognize that this is a mode of coaching, not reporting: "The older men would say, 'When I was a boy, I used to do such things without being asked.' " Even the book's 1867 is not a literal 1867...
...Two of the classics of American anthropology are The Hako: A Pawnee Ceremony, by Alice C. Fletcher, published in 1904, and The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game, by Alexander Lesser, published in ]933...
...As this suggests, these idealizations are not Miss Weltfish's impositions on Pawnee culture...
...Boil it in water with false indigo (Amorpha fruticosa) twice, and pour the water away each time, then cook the meat normally...
...Pawnee life, if hard, was "freer than ours...
...ceremonial symbolism is endlessly explained, but when in their horseplay the doctors pretend to draw blood by forcing com cobs down each other's throats, no interpretation is offered...
...Scalp the bison to expose the skull, then, using the lower part of a foreleg with the hoof on it as a hammer, break off the skull cap just below the brow ridge and remove the brains...
...it is the Pawnee ideal of chieftainship...
...Miss Weltfish has extraordinary gifts with language and material culture...
...In regard to the first, Miss Weltfish shows orders being constantly given: an old man dispatches the young men as sentinels or tells the villagers to sweep the streets and carry off the dirt...
...Both get at Pawnee culture by the antithesis to Miss Weltfish's method, by showing how much of the whole is embodied in one isolatable unit...
...There is a good deal of carelessness, and some inexplicable omissions...
...Beyond that, all such tractarian anthropology must inevitably be selective...
...With all this said, The Lost Universe is still an event...
...The same is true of absolute voluntarism and the absence of coercion...
...Miss Weltfish did her Pawnee fieldwork between 1928 and 1936, and at that time her principal informant, an old man named Mark Evarts, had amazing recall of 1867, when he was a boy of six named Otter...
...a ceremonial errand man is sent on so many errands "that he began to resent it...
...They didn't have to be told...
...Anthropologists have just as much right to preach as anyone else, and just as little authority in their preachments...
...Rivalry and hatred as well as love and community were as much a part of Pawnee life as of our own...
...Nevertheless, the tendency of The Lost Universe is to present Pawnee life as Utopian in two important respects: it was free of all coercion, with everything done voluntarily-"No orders were ever issued," Miss Weltfish says...
...Miss We1tfish explains all such techniques in exact detail, follows every ceremony step by step, chronicles all the varieties of human relationship in the year's round...
...Everything is meaningful...
...Simple...
...All that needs adding is that Pawnee culture was as richly dualistic as old Persian religion, and that its symbolic meanings were as overdetermined as any Freudian dream...
...How can Miss Weltfish believe that orders were never given or coercion used in Pawnee culture...
...Gene Weltfish has just published a big book about the Pawnee, The Lost Universe (Basic Books, 506 pp., $12.50), which aims at comprehensiveness in just that archaic fashion...
...The book's 1867 is a "hypothetic" 1867, the good old days, a kind of Pawnee alcheringa or "time of the dreaming...
...Thus the earth lodge, in which the Pawnee lived in extended families and where most of the ceremonies were held, was at the same time a microcosm of the universe and a macrocosm of the womb...
...She calls orders "instructions," "directions," or "the plan...
...She certainly does not want us to limit our recognition of humanity to kin, or to engage in perpetual warfare with most neighboring peoples, or to suspect the envious of sorcery killing...
...They are the culture's own ideals, its slogans, and Evarts and the other old men who serve as her informants tell her that things were so because the Pawnee wish them so, and the old men have come to believe that in the old days they were so, despite any remembered evidence to the contrary...
...This idealization is gainsaid not only by evidence from other sources but by Miss Weltfish's own honestly reported facts in the book...
...Lesser, like Miss Weltfish (at that time Mrs...
...Whole areas lie outside the range of Miss Weltfish's interests...
...Both draw on remarkable informants: Miss Fletcher uses an old man of enormous imagination and eloquence named Tahirussawichi...
...It is my belief that The Lost Universe will join these two predecessors as a work of permanent importance...
...She is as weak on personality and psychology as she is strong on material culture and language: one learns every stage in making a tobacco sack out of the skin of a bison heart, but nothing about weaning...
...this combination, along with Evarts' amazing memory and insight, makes The Lost Universe, as an account of Pawnee doings and their meanings, a remarkable work...
...in our "need to develop a society composed entirely of creative individual personalities" we must take the Pawnee as a model...
...It is unbelievably repetitious...
...Miss Weltfish describes cheating on kin obligations, theft of crops and wood, quarreling and cursing within the family, abandonment of an old woman by her relatives, abortion so widespread that a month was named after it suicide...
...a proposal for a new sort of housing, more like the earth lodge, complete with floor plans and the suggestion that floor hostesses could be recruited through "the proposed Domestic Peace Corps...
Vol. 48 • April 1965 • No. 9
