The debate over a crypto-Jewish presence in New Mexico: The role of ethnographic allegory and orientalism

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 2002 by Michael P. Carroll

Clifford suggests that ethnographic accounts function on at least two levels. At one level, such accounts tell a story (that often represents itself as "simple description) about the particular society being studied. On the other hand, embedded in this first story (he argues) is usually a second story, one that has been shaped by the ethnographer's own culture and cultural concerns. This second story is usually an allegorical account of the modern world itself, by which Clifford means that it is an account of the modern world not as it is but as the ethnographer (and others) would like it to be. For example, he suggests, much of the appeal of Margaret Mead's classic account of Samoan adolescence derives from the fact that its depiction of easy-going and guilt-free sexuality presented Western audiences in the post-WW I period with a vision of how much better their own society would be if prevailing sexual mores were liberalized.

The CJNM hypothesis functions as an ethnographic allegory because it presents us with a view of the twentieth century as we would like it to have been, not as it was. After all, if the actions of the Inquisition are symbolically equated with the Holocaust, then the crypto-Jews who settled in New Mexico are the intended victims who went into hiding and survived. They are, in effect, the Anne Franks who were not betrayed to the Nazis and so not ripped from their hiding places and sent to the death camps. The ethnographic allegory implicit in the CJNM hypothesis, in other words, allows us to envision a world in which the horrors of the Holocaust are a little less horrible than they were in the real world -- and this makes the hypothesis appealing despite the scholarly evidence that undermines the "Inquisition as proto-Nazism" view.

Yet, while the CJNM hypothesis's value as an ethnographic allegory might account for the first puzzle (why so many scholars embrace the hypothesis so tightly despite the ambiguity of the evidence), it does not explain the second puzzle, i.e., the fact that over the years New Mexico in particular has become increasingly central to discussions of crypto- Jewish survivals in the Southwest. To explain that, we need to look at the ways in which New Mexico has been "good to think" (to borrow Levi-Strauss's famous phrase) for Anglos.

Orientalizing Hispano Culture (finally)

Borrowing directly the work of Edward Said, a number of scholars (Babcock 1990, 1997; Hinsley 1990; Rodriguez 1994; Weigle 1994; Weigle and Babcock 1996) have suggested that New Mexico has long been "orientalized" in Anglo discourse. Sometimes this orientalization has been literal, as when early commentators like Charles Lummis described New Mexico as "a land of swart faces, of oriental dress, and unspelled speech" (1952[1895]:30), or when travel writers characterized Navaho males as "keen-eyed Bedouin" and Pueblo settlements as "Palestinian villages" (see the examples cited in Weigle and Babcock 1996:6). More often, however, Anglo orientalization of New Mexico has been implicit.