Ch'orti Maya Area: Past and Present

20. The Mystery of Charles Wisdom: Producing Ch'orti' Ethnography during the Great Depression, 1930–1940

20 The Mystery of Charles Wisdom Producing Chorti Ethnography during the Great Depression, 1930–1940 Charles Lincoln Vaughan In October 1940, the University of Chicago Press published The Chorti Indians of Guatemala by Charles Wisdom. It was, as Ralph Roys put it, a pioneering work on a “little known but important member of the Maya family,” Ch′orti′ speakers being not only “of interest to the student of modern Guatemala, but [also] of considerable historical importance as the occupants of the site of Copan and possible descendants of its builders .” One reviewer felt it was “one of the best books to appear on the modern Indians of Middle America, and one would like to see more like it,” while another thought “the study will take high rank among excellent anthropological investigations of American Indian culture” (Wisdom 1940; Roys 1941: 330; Long 1941: 139; Thomas 1941: 669). Amid the praise, however, Wisdom’s reviewers also noted that “the book contains no theorizing, no interpretive frame of reference, no conclusions . It is a good example of plain descriptive ethnology” (Johnson 1942: 533). To some, this lack of theory was helpful. It made using Wisdom ’s ethnography for comparative studies easier. To others, “the abstract nature of the entire description of Indian life regrettably reduces the value of an otherwise important contribution to Middle American ethnology,” or worse, Wisdom’s detailed and careful writing about Ch′orti′ speakers, “lacks life and the perspective one would get from a less idealized picture ” (Siegel 1942: 132; Collier 1941: 414). In the years since its publication, Wisdom’s highly detailed ethnography has become the cornerstone of a growing body of scholarship on eastern Guatemala and western Honduras, past and present, and references to his work can be seen throughout this interdisciplinary volume. 275 276 · Charles LincolnVaughan In the last twenty years anthropologists have increasingly explored the impact that an ethnographer’s own social and personal experiences bring to their documentation of other cultures and the nature of ethnographic knowledge (Metz 1995). In this brief paper, I explore the formation of Wisdom’s germinal ethnography by focusing on his personal and professional efforts to navigate the formative yet turbulent waters of Depressionera Mayan anthropology and scholarship from the inception of his anthropological studies and fieldwork through to the final publication of The Chorti Indians of Guatemala, nine years after the work was begun. To date, Wisdom’s ethnography has been used primarily as a source of unproblematized ethnographic details about the Ch′orti′ speakers he lived amongst during the early 1930s. The Chorti Indians of Guatemala was not, however, only a product of Wisdom’s observations and information related by his Ch′orti′ informants, but also encompassed commentary from Guatemalan Ladinos whom he believed to be sympathetic to and knowledgeable about Ch′orti′ culture. The journey Wisdom and this ethnographic material would take from the field to the printed page would be a complex and arduous one, embroiling them both in the politics of anthropological research and theorizing at the time, economic concerns and limitations, and the trials of personal hardship and academic endurance during the Great Depression. From Tucson to Jocotán via Chicago Charles Willis Wisdom was born May 21, 1903, in Hope, Arkansas. He was the first in his family to attend college, enrolling at the University of Arizona in 1926, where he studied classical languages and philology with Byron Cummings, a pioneering figure in southwestern archaeology who led Wisdom and other students in summer archaeological excavations in Arizona. Graduating with his bachelor’s degree in 1929, Wisdom enrolled directly in the master’s program at Arizona. For his thesis, he conducted linguistic fieldwork on the Piman languages, and graduated in May 1930. Although he wanted to continue his linguistic studies under Franz Boas at Columbia, he was accepted at and chose to attend the newly created Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago (Lloyd and Sara Wisdom, personal communication, 2005; Charles Wisdom to Franz Boas, Feb. 10, 1930,).1 Helping to shape the new department’s profile were its faculty and research ties to the Division of Historical Research at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, also created in 1929 (Edward Sapir to Fay-Cooper Cole, Nov. 18, 1930, box 25, folder 2, Papers of the Anthropology Department , University of Chicago Library; department of anthropology, minutes of department meeting, Feb. 27, 1930, box 24, folder 3, Papers Ch′orti′ Ethnography...