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KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 351 / 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 [351], (3) Lines: 38 to 98 ——— 6.53001pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [351], (3) 15. Culture and Culture Theory in Native North America robert brightman Introduction Consider a Crow elder’s remarks: You see that tin shed. It’s like my culture. You can sit back here, ask questions, and describe it. But it’s not ’till you get inside, ’till you see what’s inside and feel it, that you really know what the tin shed is about. You can’t stand outside; you’ve got to go inside. [Frey 1987:xv] This brief for participation is one exemplification among many of a rich contemporary discourse by Indians on Indian cultures. Raymond Fogelson , whom we honor in this volume, has long been attentive to what he calls “ethno-anthropology” (or perhaps “ethno-ethno-anthropology” [see Fogelson 1974]), and I attempt here a skeletal and comparative discussion of North American Indian varieties. The topic is metacultural discourses on “culture,” “custom,” “tradition,” or “convention” that are commensurable (or not) in sense and reference with the anthropological culture concept(s). Not all discourses on culture are necessarily “[ethno- ]anthropological,” and the latter appellation might better be limited to forms that exhibit the explicit or implicit comparativism central to the Western discipline. Throughout I employ the word Indian, ambiguities of correctness notwithstanding, because it remains (politicians and academics to one side) the commonest unmarked English self-designation employed by the peoples concerned. There exist, of course, not one but multiple and heterogeneous anthropological culture concepts. As a point of reference, here is a 1930s definition by Edward Sapir: “Any form of behavior not physiologically necessary, interpretable in terms of the totality of meanings of a specific KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 352 / 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 [352], (4) Lines: 98 to 116 ——— 6.5pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [352], (4) group, and the result of strictly historical processes (imitation, instruction) is ‘cultural’ ”(1994:37). The Boasian culture concept here explicated was plural, relative, historical or conventional, nonbiological, totalizing (“all the manifestations”), and contextualized in distinct social collectivities. Beyond these core features , there was diversity: the superorganic versus the subject, behavioral determinism versus agency, configuration versus disorder, ecology versus history, and so on. The difficulties of comparing Western and Indian ethnoanthropologies are exacerbated by a like diversity in North America. Indian groups were and are diverse in their modes of conceiving their own and other people’s cultures. Proto-Anthropologies in the New World Natures and Cultures Insofar as anthropology ascribes culture only to Homo sapiens sapiens, the concept, in classically segmentary fashion, at once unites and differentiates the species. Although both biogenetic capacity for culture and participation in historical cultures separate humans from other organic (and inorganic) entities, the plurality and particularity of these same historical cultures bespeak internal diversity. Positioned ambiguously between natural unity and cultural diversity are substantive or abstract “cultural universals”—fire, cooking, language, division of labor, incest taboos, “some form” of family, production, economy, politics, religion, art, and the like—unparalleled among nonhuman species. It remains to be known whether this linkage of natural unity with cultural diversity and plurality is paralleled in other peoples’ ethnoanthropologies . Though ideas commensurable with social and cultural pluralism are commonly present (see discussion later in this chapter), it is unclear how widely distributed is the notion of a unitary human kind. Monogenetic or polygenetic accounts of human origins in Indian mythology will afford greater clarity on the issue than the usual linguistic speculations based on polysemous nouns meaning both (one’s own) “tribe” and “human.” Earlier European scholars engaged in exhaustive debates as to whether New World peoples were beings like themselves, and there are few grounds for supposing that Indians never reflected in similar terms on the humanity of their neighbors or of Europeans...

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