Worldviews and the American West: The Life of the Place Itself

Western Folklore, Fall 2002 by Leary, James P

Worldviews and the American West: The Life of the Place Itself. Edited by Polly Stewart, Steve Siporin, C. W. Sullivan III, and Suzi Jones. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000. Pp. 265, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, map, bibliography. $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper)

Regionalist writing in the twenty-first-century American academy is fraught with perils and responsibilities, particularly with respect to the American West. If not engaged in combative "New West" revisionism or charmed by the secret language and salon radicalism of cultural studies, one might be assailed from the left as parochial at best, racist and chauvinistic at worst. If not bent on the aggressive, assimilating nation building of beef-eating oil barons with guns, one might be branded by the right as an un-American wimp, a Balkanizing anarchist unable to think hard thoughts and see big pictures. Worldviews and the American West appropriately acknowledges the perilous lures of fashion and ideological purity, yet ignores them ultimately to work from the inside out and the bottom up, to represent responsibly the messy plurality of ways in which diverse inhabitants of what's called the American West view their particular places.

The volume's subtitle, The Life of the Place Itself, culled from an essay by contributor Kim Stafford, echoes the notion of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan that the spaces we inhabit are transformed into places by the complex ways in which we live in and think about them. And as the editors astutely observe in their Introduction, competing notions of place frequently contend within the same space:

Our goal has not been to reconcile these sometimes inharmonious worldviews, but to try to get inside them through their outward expressions and to represent them accurately and fairly. (4)

Such wisdom recalls Walt Whitman's recognition that America is more paradox than paradise: "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself." The conceptual rigor and poetic sensibility suffusing every essay in this anthology, however, are tributes to Barre Toelken, whose teaching, writing, mentoring, friendship, insight, clarity, and eloquence have inspired many students and colleagues, especially those who have worked, like Toelken, in the American West.

Fourteen interrelated yet provocatively unruly contributions are subdivided into such categories as Song, Objects, Narrative, and Groups. We encounter the hymns, ballads, holy cards, grave-markers, playthings, postcards, legends, trickster tales, personal experience stories, speech, pranks, belief systems, and cultural landscapes of missionaries, farmers, cowboys, miners, loggers, women, children, Anglo-Americans, Mormons, Mexican-Americans, Coquelles, Tlingits, Upper Skagits, Wascos, Irish, Italians, Poles, Scandinavians and more. While the transcription, translation, and annotation of a Tlingit narrative by Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer painstakingly illuminate a single performance, other essays consider broad patterns across time and space. C. W. Sullivan links Jesse James with British outlaw legends; Hal Cannon sketches a "Western Songscape" wherein nature and culture fuse through cowboy poetry; Jim Griffith offers a typology of "Folk Saints of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands" evident in the ephemeral medium of holy cards; the more permanent icons dominating Southern California's Forest Lawn Cemetery are discerned by Elliott Oring as twentieth-century evocations of the nineteenth century's genteel Victorianism; and Margaret Brady reveals conventions and themes recurring in the "Letters, Diaries, and Reminiscences" of women on the frontier.

Beyond articulating internal cultural practices, several essays address the purposeful manipulation of regional folklore by insiders and outsiders. Steve Siporin's "Tall Tales and Sales" links perpendicular lying-the taxidermic hokum of jackalope and fur fish, postcards of giant mosquitoes and cabbages-with cultural tourism; Jeannie Thomas tells us how and why Barbie dolls have become "commodified folklore" inhabiting the West almost as much as the beach; Robert McCarl chronicles deep-seated conflict between workers and corporations over the preservation and interpretation of industrial landscapes; and William A. Wilson critiques prevailing concepts of folk religion and environmental determinism as hindrances to understanding Mormon folklore.

The aforementioned uniformly analytical essays are nonetheless free of excessive jargon, sparked by the authors' experiences and commitment and cast in lucid, often inspired, prose. Deft personal reminiscence melds seamlessly with trenchant scholarship in particularly memorable essays by George Venn, Jarold Ramsey, Twilo Scofield, and George Wasson about the horror and beauty of cross-cultural encounters amidst Western mountains, forests, and waterways.

The anthology's major theme-that the American West is a multifaceted, imaginative, and evolving construct emerging from the varied personal experiences of human beings with their surrounding environment and with one another-is emphasized through a "Personal Essay" each from Barry Lopez ("The Language of Animals") and Kim Stafford ("Local Character") that frame and resonate with all the other contributions. As artful essayists tending toward folkloristic analysis, Lopez and Stafford likewise heighten our appreciation of this anthology's second crucial theme: that art and scholarship are not mutually exclusive. Sharing Hal Cannon's recognition that "some of the finest ethnographic work comes in novels and paintings rather than in analytical observation" (34), his fellow-contributors invariably cast their analyses in compelling descriptive modes. The result is an exceptionally accessible, coherent, and thoughtful anthology that testifies fittingly to the influence of Barre Toelken.