Zuni and the American Imagination - Book Review

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2003 by James V. Spickard

Zuni and the American Imagination, ELIZA MCFEELY. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. 169 pp. notes and index; $24.00 (cloth).

Hidden beneath the surface of this slim volume lies a tremendous challenge to sociologists of religion. Formally a history of three 19th-century ethnographers' encounters with the Zuni (Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest), it throws all such encounters into question. Its points are simple. First, scholars are driven by more than the abstract yen for knowledge, so the knowledge they produce has to be weighed in the light of personal and social motives that they may only partly understand. Second, these motives are shaped by the general visions of life that scholars absorb from their social milieux -- Le., by the scholars' own cultural representations. Third, ethnography is a two-way street: natives study scholars just as much as scholars study natives. Both have motives that shape their images of the other.

Too many sociological studies of religious groups have neglected both the motives and the social imaginings that shape the thinking of both the observer and the observed. Intellectual honesty requires us to foreground these matters in our writing, insofar as we can become aware of them.

Indians have long been part of the American imagination. Lost heathen, noble savage, bloodthirsty warrior, dying race, peaceful ecologist -- such images have followed one another through the last four centuries. American anthropology was born in the late 19th century, just after the "Indian threat" had been crushed. It developed in part out of a wish to salvage a past that White intellectuals thought was doomed to vanish. McFeely presents us with three of these early anthropologists as they attempted to preserve parts of Zuni culture -- not in Zuni itself, but in the museums and imaginations of White society.

Matilda Stevenson visited the Zuni on an early expedition sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Intrepid and unconventional, she explored Zuni life extensively, seeing herself as a representative of civilization among the barbarians. And to her lights, she literally was. Lewis Henry Morgan's evolutionary paradigm traced societies from "savagery" to "barbarism" to "civilization," and most of Stevenson's writings revolve around this trope. She wrote encyclopedically and dogmatically, cataloging as many fragments of Zuni culture as she could capture.

Among her more interesting feats was her hosting of a Zuni named We'wha at her house in Washington D.C. This "Zuni princess" became the talk of the town, cementing the Stevensons' place in Washington society. Stevenson learned much from this informant, though she apparently did not know at the beginning that We'wha was male -- a berdache come to Washington to learn how to resist White encroachment She studied her house guest while "she" studied Stevenson and her peers. There is no indication that either really understood the other.

Frank Hamilton Cushing is the most famous early ethnographer of Zuni life. Unorthodox in his methods, he was convinced that Zuni ways would be lost were they not collected. He thus bullied his way into Zuni ceremonies and into the secret societies. McFeely takes some pains to tell us that he did not "go native," as is sometimes thought Instead, he created a heroic "native" persona, visible in the costume he wears in the staged picture that appears in nearly every introductory anthropology text As that costume was cobbled together from bits and pieces of real Zuni clothing, so were his narratives cobbled together from his actual experiences. Brilliant as he was indefatigable, he recreated the Zuni past from their syllables and potsherds. And he did it without ever fully understanding the Zuni as they saw themselves.

Unlike Stevenson and Gushing, Stewart Culin did little more than collect Zuni artifacts -- of all kinds. meseum ethnologist, he bought (or stole) everything from masks to grave goods, which he installed in neat cases at the Brooklyn Museum. In keeping with his sense that Zuni life was timeless before the advent of Whites, his displays dehistoricized the masks, fetishes, and other objects they contained. Viewers thus got little sense of the real Zuni, though they got a good sense of the "noble Indian past." McFeely writes:

As the photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis fixed the poor starkly but safely within the confines of his photographs, these three ethnologists fixed their Zuni subjects, exposed but unthreatening, behind the glass walls of their exhibition cases. The end result represented not only the Indians but the fact that individual white American adventurers had found their way into the most secret corners of an alien culture and had captured the power of that culture by exploring it. (p. 41)

This is not the only way that the Zuni have been represented in the White world, but the pattern is similar. Two generations later, Ruth Benedict featured them in Patterns of Culture, perhaps the most famous anthropology book of all time -- a book based as much on her critique of modern life as it was on Zuni reality. At about the same time, Aldous Huxley used the Zuni as the paradigmatic, primitive Other to the Whites' Brave New World.. Each projected a later era's Euro-American concerns on a Zuni world. What would We'wha have made of that era, had she lived to see it?