New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations

8. Self-consciousness, Ceremonialism, and the Problem of the Present in the Anthropology of Native North America

KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 185 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [185], (1) Lines: 0 to 55 ——— 6.53001pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [185], (1) 8. Self-consciousness, Ceremonialism, and the Problem of the Present in the Anthropology of Native North America robert e. moore Introduction Students of Raymond D. Fogelson have often shown a propensity for two seemingly different kinds of anthropological work: the use of documentary archives to understand the past(s) of American Indian communities— the now vital field of ethnohistory—and the use of ethnography to understand the present in these same communities. Often enough, one body of documentation (e.g., field notes) can be made to illuminate the other (e.g., the archive).1 And vice versa. In this respect, of course, Fogelson’s students follow his example, even if there are few, if any, who can do it as gracefully as he can (see, e.g., Fogelson 1984). Now, this attempt to conjoin the past with the present would hardly deserve mention at all except for the fact that several decades of “memory ethnography,” followed by acculturation studies, followed by the era of repatriation and federal recognition, have made the problem of the present in American Indian studies an acute one. The absence of the present in earlier decades of American anthropology is quite noticeable, especially when one searches the literature of the 1920s and 1930s for descriptions of (then) contemporary reservation life. Two exceptions that come to mind are Margaret Mead’s The Changing Culture of an American Indian Tribe (1932) and Clark Wissler’s Red Man Reservations (1938; previously titled Indian Cavalcade). Mead’s account , of course, is “ethically challenged”—the research, as she admits, was carried out under false pretenses—while Wissler’s account was travel literature aimed at a general readership (as its two titles suggest). The situation today is dramatically different. Anthropologists, together KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 186 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [186], (2) Lines: 55 to 79 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [186], (2) with linguists, archaeologists, and sometimes physical anthropologists, now routinely serve tribal groups and reservation communities in a range of advisory and consultative capacities. Moreover, they are often called as expert witnesses in land claims cases, federal recognition cases, and other court proceedings (cf. Clifford 1986; notice the shadow life, outside the academy, of the Boasian “four fields”). Most if not all of these activities involve mapping (often quite literally ) from populations in the past to existing social groups in the present through a framework of legal rights of possession and/or usufruct of lands and other such “cultural resources”—a term that sometimes includes surviving elders with traditional knowledge (e.g., of language). The focus may be on the past, but these discussions are taking place in the present and are constitutive of it. Like other ethnographers and linguists whose focus, if not their training, is “Americanist” (Darnell and Valentine 1999), many of the contributors to this volume have been struggling to develop an analytic vocabulary for talking about these and other aspects of contemporary life in Native American communities in a way that contributes to wider discussions (in anthropology and related fields) of globalization, modernity, and indigeneity (see, e.g., Cattelino 2005, Carneiro da Cunha 2005). In this chapter I will be attempting something far more modest. The ethnographic material will be more or less contemporary (mid-1980s to the present), and my focus will be on the variety of roles that individuals play, or don’t play, in observances whose manifest function is to mark and effectuate their transition from one status or stage of life to another. By using different modes of participation in life-cycle ceremonials as a set of lenses through which to view the changing significance of personhood , I hope to describe the emergence of a kind of “identity politics” in the...