Artistry in Native American Myths by Karl Kroeber (review)

authors offer a cultural history ofanorexia and argue diat it should be seen "as a form of hysteria, as chiefly a means of avoiding sexuality or transferring sexual fantasies into other modes" (210). Although the rejection of the commonly accepted view among in feminist theory that anorexia nervosa is a sort ofprotest against our culture's cult of thinness and objectification of women's bodies is bound to make many feminist readers uneasy, die close reading of Freud's work on defense on which dieir conclusion rests makes die argument radier convincing . Not only is this piece valuable for its fresh view ofthe current anorexia epidemic , but it also — as do odier essays in the latter halfofthe book — demonstrates the ongoing relevance ofFreud's work to feminism. Overall, Young-Bruehl's compelling and original views, consistently grounded in superb scholarship, recommend diis volume to readers across disciplines. % Karl Kroeber. Artistry in NativeAmerican Myths. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. 292p. Linda Lizut Helstern Southern Illinois University, Carbondalf. In his most recent book, respected scholar Karl Kroeber reaffirms his commitment to bringing an understanding oftraditional Native American Indian myths, often known outside tribal communities only by anthropologists and folklorists, to a broad multicultural readership. His andiology TraditionalLiteratures oftheAmerican Indian: Texts andInterpretations, recently reissued, has been in print for nearly two decades. Kroeber's unofficial career as an editor of Indian stories, however, goes back to his childhood. In Artistry in Native American Myths, Kroeber confesses that he once told a Yurok storyteller, who had just finished relating a traditional tale to his anthropologist father, that he hadn't told the story correctly. The young Karl had heard this story before, and he recognized some significant differences between the tellings. There could be but one correct version, according to the reigning view ofmyth, and to Karl's way of diinking, the first story he had heard was the correct one. This is but one truism Kroeber seeks to correct in his comprehensive reconsideration of Native myth in light of contemporary scholarship in the field of ethnopoetics. It is now accepted that myths exist in the multiplicity of their tellings, and diat the art ofmyth telling lies in die details die teller chooses for a specific occasion and audience. Another misapprehension Kroeber seeks to correct , and one that he himself has perpetrated, is die idea that myth is literature, defined as aesthetic discourse. Myth serves traditional tellers and listeners in prac112 Hr ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Hi FALL 1999 deal ways that imaginative literature does not. Approaches to Native myth, he notes, have too often been colored by the Western bias toward print and original authorship, even judged by standards applied to literary production and found wanting, their seeming simplicity proofofWestern progress over "primitive" cultures . Central to Kroeber's reconsideration is the fundamental orality ofmyth. Even our best attempts to conceptualize oral cultures, he suggests, are contaminated by our experience ofliteracy. Kroeber notes two markers that distinguish oral stories from stories in print. The first is the degree of repetition inherent in traditional tellings. Such repetition has often been edited out ofprint versions. The second is the modular configuration ofthe Native myths, which may be told with as few or as many of the constituent building blocks as the teller deems appropriate to a given situation. This modularity is one reason for the variations in stories noted by anthropologists, who have tended to criticize the shortened versions as incomplete . The heart oforality, however, lies in the intimacy ofthe relationship between teller and audience, and it is here that Kroeber focuses his explication. After a chapter in which he traces the roots ofethnopoetics to Boasian anthropology with its focus on the individual tellerand telling as opposed to structural anthropology's penchant for generalization and classification, Kroeber attempts, as best he can in print, to give readers the flavor ofthe oral experience, what he calls "mythic imagining ." Among the myths that open his second chapter, Kroeber includes four versions of the Yurok myth of the creation of money and three versions of the Blackfoot myth ofScarface. Theirjuxtaposition is intended to engage the reader's critical faculty for comparison and contrast. Traditional listeners, he suggests, would have...