Mediating Knowledges: Origins of a Zuni Tribal Museum (review)

A photo on the cover of this book tells the story. A Zuni man and a little girl are planting corn in the traditional way, using what appears to be a long wooden pole to drill a hole in the soil. Both the man and the child are wearing blue jeans and T-shirts, and the little girl is holding what appears to be a large glass jar of corn kernels. There's the whole story in a nutshell: Native traditions and Anglo-American trappings have come to coexist, sometimes uneasily, in the evolution of the Zuni Pueblo's A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center.

This book is an ethnographic account of the evolution of the museum. The author was a participant observer, an outsider working at the museum for about eighteen months in the late 1990s. Her footnotes and bibliography make clear that she conducted numerous ethnographic interviews, but they are not oral histories and there is no indication they are archived publicly. Indeed, this study deals with oral traditions and scarcely mentions oral history. But it offers important insights for oral historians as well as for ethnographers, public historians, and anyone interested in complex philosophical issues of just who can be said to "own" knowledge and how it can be transmitted to future generations.

The author devotes nearly half the book to providing cultural and historical context for readers who may know little about the Zuni Pueblo in western New Mexico, the Zuni religious and political hierarchy, the pueblo's experiences with early archaeologists, and Zuni concepts of knowledge.

Before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, the author says, the Zuni exercised a theocratic form of governance in which a rigid religious hierarchy was responsible for various spheres of community life. That changed over the years as first the Spanish and then the U.S. governments imposed new expectations of governance, and the Western missionaries and Bureau of Indian Affairs worked to discredit Zuni religious philosophy. Nonetheless, Zuni religious societies and clans continued to play an integral role in pueblo governance and decision making.

The Zuni religious hierarchy is marked by, among other characteristics, varying levels of knowledge keeping. Isaac says that while anthropological conventions portray knowledge as powerful because it is secret, the Zuni perceive that "knowledge is secret because it is powerful . . .. In this system, knowledge is considered to lose its power when it is diluted—that is, if it is shared with too many people or used unnecessarily and therefore irresponsibly" (32). Thus, in Zuni tradition, knowledge is shared on a need-to-know basis and must be transmitted orally. As one non-Zuni high school teacher told the author: ". . . the idea of seeking knowledge that rightfully shouldn't be yours is an attempt to acquire some power which rightfully shouldn't be yours" (44). This frame of reference has been at the core of debates over tourist access to customary Zuni religious ceremonies and prohibitions against outsiders photographing such ceremonies, which many Zuni perceive as an "intent to remove or 'steal' knowledge" (56). That frame of reference also underlies the contentious history the Zuni Pueblo had with early anthropologists and archaeologists, dating from the late 1870s.

With that background, the author describes the evolution of the Zuni museum. The idea for it emerged in the 1960s during the Great Society years, a time when federal funds for tribal economic development efforts became available and when Zuni leaders were empowered to take control of anthropological research in the pueblo. In time, however, the museum's purpose began to reflect a desire to protect Zuni cultural heritage, including repatriation of Zuni artifacts from other institutions, and to revive traditional cultural practices. The community turned away from a goal of encouraging tourism to one of generally restricting outsiders, despite reliance by many Zuni families on selling handcrafted jewelry to tourists as a major source of income.

The author describes a seemingly endless...