Cushing's Zuni Sketchbooks: Literature, Anthropology, and American Notions of Culture

Figure 1.

“Frank H. Cushing,” accompanying Sylvester Baxter’s “The Aboriginal Pilgrimage,” Century 24 (1882), 528. Cushing is here pictured in his most classic pose, wearing much the same Zuni costume later painted by Thomas Eakins.

In the summer of 1882, a physically scarred white man pictured in the ceremonial garb of the Zuni pueblo tribe, along with his Indian “brothers,” made it onto the pages not only of Popular Science Monthly, but also of three of America’s elite literary magazines: the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Monthly, and the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. ¹ On pages declared by their editors to be participating in the “wholesome movement . . . for the purification of American public life,” Frank Hamilton Cushing held forth on his ritual initiation into the Priesthood of the Bow, the highest priestly society of the Zuni, and of the trials he endured to do so. ² Alongside Henry James writing about Venice and the influence of Punch illustrator George Du Maurier on London society, one reads of the Zunis piercing the lobes of Cushing’s ears while doing “a little shuffling dance . . . in time to a prayer chant to the sun.” ³ Paired with the serialization of a new novel by the dean of American realism, William Dean Howells, one finds Cushing’s description of a dog’s horrible mutilation at the hands of two Zuni clowns during “the Dance of the Great Knife.” ⁴ By thus situating Cushing’s adventures, America’s new class of genteel magazines created a stark juxtaposition between high culture and the first portents of anthropological cultural relativism.

Cushing has been remembered historically as not only the colorful figure who helped invent the ethnographic practice of participant-observation, but also as one of the few (perhaps the only) American anthropologist to have predated Franz Boas in using the term “culture” in its plural, relativized form. As such, Cushing marks the early end of anthropology’s paradigmatic shift from social-evolutionism, where tribes like the Zuni were seen as ancient ancestors to modern western civilization, to cultural relativism, where acknowledgment could be made on a localized and individuated level of the Zuni’s unique historical trajectory and complex social organization. If it was Boas who established the institutional structures needed to shift the paradigm towards cultural relativism (by 1926, every major anthropology department in the United States was headed by one of Boas’s former students), it was probably Cushing who first coupled a notion of “culture” with both the impulse to see life from the native’s point of view and doubts about westward expansion, giving the word its relativist twist. ⁵

But the articles by and about Cushing make it necessary to complicate this genealogy of the cultures concept, for they force the anthropological history of the term back into contact with the contemporaneous solidification of culture in the sense made most famous by Matthew Arnold: “culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know . . . the best which has been thought and said in the world and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions.” ⁶ As pointed out by Raymond Williams in his keyword definition of the term, the Arnoldian notion of culture, though long in the making, did not become common until the mid-nineteenth century. Returning the term to the context of the United States, we can add that the contiguous stratification of the notion—giving us what has typically been identified as “highbrow” and “lowbrow” culture—did not occur until the heavy commercialization of the late nineteenth century, roughly at the time of Cushing’s adventures in Zuni. ⁷

Cushing’s savage presence on the pages of the high culture periodicals forces a refusal of the antithesis between the anthropological and Arnoldian notions of culture—a refusal which opens up a number of broad issues in U.S. cultural history. The most important, in my mind, is that it demands a rethinking from within the American context of a dichotomy established by Norbert...