An Anthropologist's Arrival: A Memoir

Chona and the O’odham

159 Chona and the O’odham What Boas had for me was $500 and the Tohono O’odham Indians. “They are down in southern Arizona, where few whites have come since the days of the Spaniards,” Ruth Benedict told me, with her beautiful dark eyes fixed as usual on a point that seemed to lie beyond me. “We ought to hurry with our study of simple cultures like that, for very soon all the field studies will be acculturation studies.” Of course, the prospect of plunging into an unknown “primitive” culture was to me endlessly exciting. Hesitantly, I asked Boas, “What am I to do there?” He gave me his quick little smile and said, “Just find out how those people live and come tell us about it.” I know how nearly fatuous this sounds today when we have $40 books instructing anthropologists on every phase of fieldwork. Now the holistic approach and the single anthropologist without a definite problem are ghosts of the past as much as palmistry. To be fair to Boas, I do not think he would have given such instructions to all students. Perhaps my age and the simplicity of the culture chosen for me led him to think I could not come to much harm. Perhaps, too, it was an inexpensive way of testing my ability to mingle with strange people and to plan my own work for three months. It is true, though, that Papa Franz liked to use indefinite preparation as preliminary work with a trustworthy person. Later, when I was planning fieldwork for others, I said to Dr. Boas, “Should we not get ready some preliminary instruction for all new workers so they can avoid the worst mistakes?” He said, in his abrupt way, with a German burr, “If they do not know what to do, they should not go.” So I went to find out how those people lived. • Becoming an anthroPologist 160 I settled down at the Place of the Burnt Seeds, otherwise known as Santa Rosa. For a while I had a room at the government boarding school. (More of that later and of the kindly teachers who had never been trained to deal with people of another culture and another language.) Soon enough I learned that the Tohono O’odham are a small division of the larger Uto-Aztecan language group, spread over Mexico and the western United States. When America wished to level off their southern boundary, they just drew a line straight across from west to east, and that cut off this little tiny point of O’odham country. Despite this, they were quite united. Many people had not visited them at all since the Spanish priests had come, so I found that to ask one person about their religion or their social customs really gave me a great deal. Immediately I decided I would like to deal with the women rather than the men. I’d known women to walk straight up to a male chief and say, “Here, I’ve come to study your people. Now, will you help me?” That looked pretty difficult. Instead I got started through the teachers at the small local school. The teachers were kind to me and said that I was somebody who liked Indians. I was introduced to the children, and they introduced me to their mothers and said, “This is somebody from way off east, and she likes the O’odham.” The women were a bit offish for a while. Then they found that I really did like O’odhams and that I didn’t ask questions at all. In fact, my social training had been to the effect that you mustn’t ask questions of strangers—it’s very rude. Instead of saying, “What’s your name? Where do you live?” and so forth right away, you sit quietly with them and when they’re making something, you say, “Oh, what is that? How pretty!” and they tell you about it. Little by little you get to knowing where they live and what they do, but you do not ask direct questions. I found that that was a great advantage for me, because the boys in my class had never had that social training. The boys would fire right away with questions to anybody and would be met with a suspicious look. I simply went into the houses and sat down as a neighbor to talk. I would explain that I didn’t know any...