Journeys to the Edge: In the Footsteps of an Anthropologist

Toward Northern Forest

Toward Northern Forest Another Point of the Compass I would probably have been wasting my time if I had attempted to obtain permission for tribal research in south India in the early 1970s. The Indian government had become sensitive about its nation’s humblest citizens, and the latest visa guidelines for scholars discouraged any such inquiry. Still, what I most wished to do was follow up on my earlier research with Paliyans. There were strong hints throughout my Paliyan notebooks that the individuals I knew best differed from one another in the ways in which they labeled and defined things. Was that really so? How marked were their differences? Were they greater in some subject areas than in others and, if they were, what accounted for that? Only formal study could reveal the nature, extent, and causes of such variation . It had not been among my goals in the 1960s to measure or explain these things. I was also curious in the long run as to whether there were differences across the world’s societies in the extent to which people exhibited individualized concepts and beliefs. Émile Durkheim told us almost a century ago, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,1 that sharing of concepts was necessary in a human society, and most of my fellows in anthropology had no apparent disagreement with him. They spoke comfortably about Navajo beliefs , or about Ainu concepts, as if these were standardized from one human head to another within each society. The general public did this too. Yet, only four years after Durkheim’s theoretical pronouncement, 119 young Bronislaw Malinowski,a fact-oriented fieldworker,painted a wholly different portrait in his paper “Baloma: The Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands.” He reported that “personal opinion” varied from person to person within communities in the New Guinea area and it was only“public belief,”as expressed in formalized myth and ritual, that was standardized. Some early twentieth-century pioneer scholars in sociology and folklore talked in the same vein. If you stop to think about it, the nervous systems in which we take care of all our perceiving and thinking are inherently private. We also have entirely different histories and experiences from one another, even within a small community. A lot of our knowledge simply has to be idiosyncratic. To look at it from another viewpoint: how could one ever explain any of us having knowledge, concepts, or beliefs that are identical or even closely similar to those of our neighbors? By 1970 I had moved to the University of Missouri, located in the attractive college town of Columbia. Mike Robbins in my new department and his student Richard Pollnac employed very different methods and language from those I envisioned using, yet I found them engaged in the actual study of interpersonal cognitive differences among the Baganda in East Africa. This line of research was far too fascinating for me not to pursue it myself. June Helm had heard my description of the individualism and selfreliance of Paliyans at a 1965 conference on band societies in Ottawa. Her initial comment to me at the time was that I had just described her former Dene subjects, of the Lynx Point Band, in the Canadian Northwest Territories. For years, I remembered that response. Literature on the subarctic by yet earlier anthropologists bore her out. Later, I found a Dene leader, George Barnaby, saying something about his people that I would have expected to hear only in tribal south India: “No one can decide for another person. Everyone is involved in the discussion and . . . the decision [is] made by everyone. Our way is to try and give freedom to a person as he knows what he wants.”2 If my Paliyan friends were temporarily beyond reach, it could be rewarding to point myself north, rather than southeast, and undertake the follow-up research I so wanted to do with Helm’s northern Dene. Getting ready to work in a wholly new region, with a set of techniques I had never used outside a classroom, took me more than two years. I developed the plan jointly with a former graduate student of mine from Texas, Jane Christian, who was well trained in linguistics. Her ap120 Journeys to the Edge proach to her work was something I had long admired. A linguist with prior northern Dene research experience, Marshall Durbin, helped prepare...