At the Desert's Green Edge (review)

At the Desert's Green Edge by Amadeo Rea, paintings by Takashi Ijichi, linguistic help from Culver Cassa. University of Arizona Press, 1997

A gift of knowledge for the world, this book tells what half a dozen elderly Pimas knew about the plants in their homeland along the Gila River in southern Arizona; what a number of other more or less distant but culturally related individuals could chip in; what written history and science tell about the last 150 years of this river, plain, and mountainside homeland, fifty by seventy miles (according to a map on p. 39); and it shows how the plants look, one by one, in the ink-brush paintings of a Japanese artist. This is a very large assembly of knowledge, thirty years in the preparation. It forms a large but not unwieldy book, nine by twelve inches and a little more than an inch thick.

Two projects comparable to this one by Amadeo Rea are the thirty years that Edward Curtis spent in the early 1900s to produce twenty volumes and twenty portfolios of photographs, plus writing, on all of the Native tribes of the North American West, and the approximately forty years spent by John James Audubon a hundred years before Curtis to produce several portfolios and books on the birds, insects, and mammals of the then largely Native North America. Rea's project was a botanical-ecological-tribal history made through a combination of reading and walking (one thinks he must have been in almost all of the 3,500 square miles) and conversing with Pimas on what they had learned of the plants and the land during their long lives.

I would say it was an arduous book to produce, but not particularly difficult in the sense of involving a high risk that the whole thing might not work. Or, the risks involved were myriad but separate: can a Pima plant name, recorded some time in the past, be remembered by anyone today and matched to a real plant with a Linnaean name and a "voucher" (dried sample) on file somewhere? What is the etymology of this Pima word? Who knows about mosses? What is the Pima taxonomy (classification) of plants? That the project was arduous but not risky should encourage the writing of more books like it, except authors often prefer books that cover more territory, have fewer pieces, need fewer people, and don't take so long. The book sets an excellent example, and without doubt the world would be better if there were more like it.

The heart of the book is excerpts from interviews--conversations--conducted and taped over the years on all kinds of things: the look of a flower, the method of cooking something, the making of irrigation dams, the use of mesquite bark to tie things. Rea had his tape recorder and inquiring mind, and the people he went back to again and again were ready and willing to share what they knew. Although formally and publicly he may be more of a biologist than an anthropologist, I consider this conversationalism to be anthropology at its best: two people talking, one of them mainly an inquirer, the other mainly an answerer. The book says he is an "ethnobiologist," broader than botanist and specialized in cultural inquiries, thus something like an anthropologist.

The conversations were in English, which is also a feature of anthropology. The conversations are conducted in the inquirer's language, yet the inquiry is into thoughts that were formed and mainly exist in another language. Rea is clear about this. The introduction begins, "First I want to tell you I am not a botanist and I do not speak Pima" (xxiii). I would like to consider two issues where the dependence on English may have curtailed--cut short--the results. I don't offer these in criticism, because his conversations yielded many humanly...