Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies

7. Traces of Others in Our Own Other: Monocultural Ideals, Multicultural Resistance

7 Traces of Others in Our Own Other Monocultural Ideals, Multicultural Resistance Juan Bruce-Novoa While it is undeniable that to some extent the quality of “authenticity ” within human groups is linked to physical characteristics, it is far more commonly a matter of a set of customs made up of performance codes and rules that determine membership in and status within the particular group. Performance is a matter of cultural discourses designed to render actions meaningful within the group’s system of attributing value and assigning relative position to its participants . This is certainly nothing new. In The Structure of Evil, Ernest Becker observed that humans use language, play, work, ritual, and art to create systems of self-signification intended to provide the means to achieve, in Kant’s words, maximum individuality within maximum community. Patterns of behavior are institutionalized through repetition and rewards—or ritualized through the same process if one prefers to focus on the religious and sacred aspects of the same phenomenon, as Mircea Eliade demonstrated thoroughly in his vast opus. Participation in these institutionalized rituals, whether in the strictly controlled forms of the central events of a culture’s calendar or the daily routines 133 134 Native Authenticity of pragmatic interaction, garners recognition from one’s peers while simultaneously earning one a sense of significance within the established system of values. This is possible as long as all participants agree on or at least acquiesce to the pattern of rules and goals. Even those who do not consent to the pattern at least accept that their non-compliance is exactly that, eccentric behavior in relationship to the centric rule. In this way, discordance ironically reaffirms the communal concordance even as measures—defined by the system for handling anyone who strays off course—are taken to control miscreants. In The Denial of Death, Becker argued that performance of the cultural ideal of community could be interpreted as a pattern of codes for achieving the status of hero in the eyes of one’s society. A symbolic action system lays out for participants a wide range of performance possibilities, from those simple acts that reaffirm compliance with basic expectations up through those that would merit extraordinary recognition and rewards. A structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior , designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. . . . each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” . . . to the “low” . . . [even] the plain, everyday, earthly heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease. (4–5) Cultural authenticity would be judged, then, on how well one performs one’s role as defined by this code of communal heroics. However, Becker recognized several problems with the description of society as a homogeneous system, somewhat utopian in the present situation of high rates of mobility of all sorts and proven patterns of heterogeneity in most areas of the world. A fundamental, significant problem is the extreme difficulty in maintaining the communal exclusivity necessary to assure total adherence to the rule of behavior. The outside, or Other, is a menace that represents to the homogeneous cultural ideal, according to Becker, the menace of an impoverishment of meaning. The exclusive group stages its own ideal dream, which all members live in unison. It draws on the combined personalities of all its members, including ancestors with whom the group 135 Traces of Others in Our Own Other feels intimate ties . . . the outsider represents an immediate impoverishment in a joint drama. (229) When outside influences begin to permeate through the communal defenses, or insiders begin to desire alternative forms of behavior, the question of authenticity—that is, the adherence to cultural norms of performance—becomes central to the preservation of the culture’s ideal dream of itself . . . or the culture’s dream of its ideal self. When a group migrates from its traditional space to another, it takes with it those codes of performance. A comparison can be drawn with what Mircea Eliade refers to in his discussions of the function of the talisman or touchstone in times of migration or diaspora. Something—a rock, a plant, a relic of a hero or saint, or customs themselves, like dances, rituals, etiquette—of the original place must be brought along to serve, more than...