Journeys West: Jane and Julian Steward and Their Guides

Preface

Preface During the many years I worked on this book and its predecessor, I made more than a dozen journeys west and had the privilege of seeing most of the places mentioned in the pages that follow. The mountains and deserts of the American West have an astonishing and enduring beauty that nearly two centuries of rough use have not yet destroyed. The native people who live there, and whose ancestors lived on that land for many generations, have also endured despite the odds. This book tells a story of adaptation and survival, both before and after an ecological crisis in the desert West. It is at the same time an inquiry into ideas and methods in cultural anthropology. The narrative centers on fieldwork that Julian Steward carried out in the West in 1935 and 1936. That research resulted in a classic ethnography known to generations of readers by its shorthand name, Basin-Plateau. It told how native people adapted to specific localities in the arid West before American colonization and settlement. The book, which became a foundational work in ecological anthropology, also helped to introduce the concept of cultural adaptation. Over the years many anthropologists and other scholars have disagreed with some of Steward’s ideas and conclusions. The test of a classic work, however, is not whether it is “right” in every respect but whether it continues to be read and to raise questions that lead to more research. Steward’s ethnography has met that test. It has provoked so much research and commentary—which continues to reach print in the twenty-first century—that simply commenting on the commentary would require a volume beyond this one. xii preface While this book is an outcome of my research on Steward and the dozens of Indian elders who served as his cultural informants, it also draws directly, if not as obviously, on my own experiences and memories as a cultural anthropologist and teacher. Decades after Steward ’s fieldwork drew to a close in western America I had an experience of fieldwork with native people in the western Caribbean. Like him, I sought out elders as cultural informants. My informants, like his, had lost their ancestral land to invaders but so many years in the past that firsthand memories of those events had died a century earlier with the first generation of survivors. Exiled to a new and distant land, they adapted and survived—with great hardship. Their past is a variation on a theme that runs through the history of the American West and the Americas in general. Years after that fieldwork ended, and in the course of a long career in teaching, my students raised questions about all aspects of research , including some perennial queries about objectivity. I thank my students not only for their questions but also for their patience with my musings about the term objectivity, a word with varied meanings, and about memory. I also want to thank several university administrators —who to my surprise questioned whether fieldwork qualifies as research. Their doubt is perhaps a measure of how esoteric and poorly understood ethnographic fieldwork remains, even in universities , and despite some well-known critiques by literary critics in the late twentieth century. I wrote this book as an extended reply to questions I have heard from students and others—and to my own questions. Telling the story has taught me much about the mélange of memories, words, observations , and experiences that become ethnography. It has also deepened my admiration of the elders who took part in Steward’s research, as well as my appreciation of them as distinct individuals. Every man and woman brought a unique set of life experiences and memories to the encounter with Steward. xiii preface In my efforts to learn about each of them I purposely did not seek out genealogical descendants, although I did encounter some over the years. The sheer number of elders and other cultural informants— more than fifty—dissuaded me from that plan. In the unlikely event that I managed to complete the task, I knew that the results would fill volumes, not just a single book. Current concerns, and conflicting views, about family privacy also led me to search for public records about individuals while forgoing family history and oral tradition for the most part and avoiding mention of descendants’ names. I used public records very cautiously, given their gaps, inconsistencies , and...