The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the Folk Material Culture of Western America by Richard C. Poulsen (review)

Reviews 189 swan as angel looking down from heaven and “knowing the xylophone of her bones, / the lute of her back and the harp of her belly, / the flute of her throat, / woodwinds and drums of her muscles, / . . so that his technical skills sometimes impede his ability to realize a fully human being in his poems. One is sometimes tempted to wonder about the poet’s human relationships, and to refer back to that opening poem, “These Poems, She Said,” with ques­ tions about whether the poem is a made-up thing or a “found” poem, some­ thing actually spoken to the poet. Bringhurst, clearly, is fascinated by the beauty of the weapons, but a poem is not a knife, nor is prosody a prologue to the dance of death. The poem must live a life entirely its own. The years will be good to Bringhurst. They have been good to him. Because his intelligence is large enough to demand of himself a sweep of understanding, and because history reduces us all, and because history imbues a poet with a huge sadness, Bringhurst isa poet to watch. There is a depth of humanity in these poems, one that will grow, one from which we all may learn. The Beauty of the Weapons is a wonderful introduction to one of the finest younger poets in North America. SAM HAMILL, Port Townsend, Washington The Pure Experience of Order: Essays on the Symbolic in the Folk Material Culture of Western America. By Richard C. Poulsen. (Albuquerque: Uni­ versity of New Mexico Press, 1982. 182 pages, $19.95.) On the surface this book appears impressive. A provocative title and eyeopening chapter headings trumpet in a host of catchy quotes by some of our most quotable thinkers: Freud, Jung, Geertz, Eliade, Foucault, and LéviStrauss . But when you actually dive into what Poulsen has to say, you discover a distressing shallowness. You find an argument marred by false premises and hasty conclusions tucked into paragraphs that strain under the weight of their confused ideas. Symbols, Poulsen argues, centrally provide humans with meaning. The researcher can explain the form and use of artifacts by finding their symbolic value to the society. This is a new approach, he claims, which supplies a contrast to the historical approach. History cannot provide explanation, he says, for it insists on chronology. An artifact’sform tells the real story, the real symbolic meaning for the society. Although he intends to give evidence for his case from the expanse of the West, his fieldwork was done primarily in Utah and Alberta, Canada. Take his chapter on the handclasp motif in Mormon iconography. Poulsen relates the handclasp’s importance to the significance of the hand in culture. No revelation comes from this explanation, since it is a tautology. His other conclusion that the handclasp in nineteenth-century Mormon folk 190 Western American Literature burial dramatizes the essence of Mormon belief is then evinced by a basically historical argument! In the chapter on the western custom of hanging predators on fences, Poulsen makes the mistake of assuming that similarities in the symbolism of different cultures imply a continuity. Without proper context and historical organization, the conclusion about the practice expressing a changing attitude toward defiance of establishment authority is tenuous at best. He repeats the mistake in his chapter on circular space in the West. He compares Indian reliance on the circle as sacred space to white usage of the circle. In fact, the rectangle provides the basis of folk design for whites. To build his argument regardless of the evidence, Poulsen forces you repeatedly into making large leaps of logic while important ground lies remissly uncovered. Poulsen’s misunderstanding of material culture and the analysis of form is most evident in his chapter on vernacular regression. Scandinavians lost symbols as they became acculturated, he claims. Poulsen shows this by point­ ing out that forms known as English barns and I houses prevailed in the area. Knowledge of form reveals, however, that the bilaterally symmetrical plans are pan-European. Indeed, the I house stands proudly in Sweden’s national folk museum to represent a popular regional type. Furthermore, Poulsen fails to ask what happened...