The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West (review)

Anguish for snails, perhaps, but fortunately not for us. Barre Toelken's latest book distills a life of personal and intellectual engagement with Native American communities in the West into an eloquent text appropriate for non-specialist and specialist alike. The book is primarily a compilation of greatest hits, mostly of Toelken's own work, but also of some of the great examples in American Indian folklore scholarship. Toelken revisits his own work on Navajo coyote stories and intertribal powwows, for example, but adds explorations of such landmark studies as Dell Hymes's retranslation of "The Sun's Myth." The result is an excellent resource for some of the key scholarship in Native American folklore studies over the past forty years and therefore an excellent text for the university classroom.

In the book, Toelken takes on the full range of folkloric expression—visual arts, dance, story, and song—as well as the more abstract cultural patterning found in humor and the process of discovery. He restricts himself to those elements of culture that are unequivocally public and thus appropriate for public consumption. This sensitivity comes at a time when the 2003 American Folklore Society meetings were dominated by panels and roundtables on cultural and intellectual property rights. Does such sensitivity compromise the folkloric endeavor? Toelken argues no, though it does risk a kind of politeness that can cause more trouble than solutions if applied to fieldwork and not just publication. In discussing totem poles, he notes, "Clearly, to go any deeper would require us to master a lot of tribal convention and custom, much of which we may simply not have access to" (p. 26). Of course, scholarship is always at risk of missing some esoteric element, some layer of meaning, so this loss is likely no more prevalent here than in other studies.

Nonetheless, Toelken finds plenty to talk about. In keeping with his attempt to cater to a broad audience, he defines key folkloric terms clearly and succinctly encapsulates some of the major conclusions of folklore scholarship over the past half a century. Some of the most useful are his articulations of worldview and of the varied and complex power of song, stories, and dance.

Toelken also extends our understanding of Native American folklore in the West by revisiting long-held assumptions and applying new approaches to old texts. By applying John Bierhorst's conception of "reciprocative structure" within the context of Chinook culture, for example, Toelken is able to convincingly challenge logical interpretations of "The Sun's Myth" and supplant them with a more persuasive and culturally resonant reading. The accomplishment is particularly compelling because it revives structural approaches to narrative analysis that seem to have been ignored in recent folklore scholarship.

The book is filled with such insights, even the smallest of which is interesting and useful, such as when Toelken argues that etiological endings—once thought to be the key to meaning, later virtually ignored as artistic flourishes—serve as mnemonic devices for listeners so that whenever they see coyote's yellow eyes, for example, they will reference and remember the entire story in all its complex meanings. His chapter on Native humor is also an important addition to existing scholarship. Although Toelken does not attempt a full analysis of the material, his cataloging of recurring themes in Native humor is particularly useful and interesting.

Toelken's one major fault is that he is in some cases too knowledgeable about the material. With so much data to draw from, he occasionally supports his arguments with entertaining anecdotes and brief, discrete examples rather than case studies.

The strength of the book lies primarily in Toelken's ability to construct a compelling and reasoned comparative analysis of such a broad culture area. Such ambitious work is often avoided in favor of the intellectually "safer" studies of single cultures. Toelken is able...