Mother's Table Father's Chair: Cultural Narratives of Basque American Women (review)

No concept yields such high measures of both rewards and challenges to folklorists and cultural historians working within American contexts as syncretism. The idea that our Americanness is the product of an enormous and intersecting simultaneity of diverse ethnicities lends excitement and even joy to the enterprise. It also introduces a level of complexity that inevitably vexes any examination of ethnicities. We now take for granted that all forms of cultural identity are invented, that cultural groups are continually collapsing and reconstituting traditional practices, that modernity and globalism are shaping factors behind even the most determined gestures of group solidarity. "How do we maintain our uniqueness and still find common ground?" asks the author of this fine monograph on the pleasures and bewilderment of Basque American life (p. 134). Jacqueline Thursby's thorough approach, which is based for the most part on her own fieldwork among women both in the Basque country and in the American West, offers one of the most cogent and solidly anchored treatments of syncretism that I have encountered in any text by a folklorist.

Thursby's book presents equal and nicely interwoven parts text and context. Each chapter of Mother's Table Father's Chair includes a broad sampling of the narratives the author encountered among the Basque American women she interviewed and an appropriately nuanced discussion of those narratives' interpretive significance. In an introductory chapter that offers insight into the origins of her project, as well as into her methodology and theoretical interests, Thursby makes the following observation, which I take to be indicative of her interest in syncretism: "The Basques of the American West have realized that as Americans, a definition almost synonymous with diversity, the celebration of their unique ethnic heritage has a better chance of survival if they sometimes blend it, at least at the margins, with other ethnic groups" (p. 3). Indeed, what I find to be the most compelling feature of her book is her consistent and strategic use of bits and pieces of fieldwork that take her well beyond mere assertion and offer telling illustrations of the syncretic principle at work.

The chapter entitled "Mountains Don't Move, but People Do" presents an especially wide range of such cases in point, including the description of a Thanksgiving turkey as it was prepared in one Basque American home. Dorothy Ansotegui, whose mother was the cook in question, explains that the bird was stuffed with ham, chorizo, and pimento to, as Thursby explains it, "give it a more Basque flavor" (p. 107). Of course, food preparation often offers the most obvious illustration of the syncretic principle within the cultural life of any transplanted ethnic group. But Thursby's examples extend well beyond the parameters of the dinner table. One interview—with Janet Inda, of Reno, Nevada—mentions a "Basque" golf tournament at Gardnersville, Nevada. "Here, golf is a part of today's American culture," Ms. Inda explains, "and we want people to do what they want to do, but with a cultural connection too" (pp. 82-83). Another of Thursby's illustrations of syncretism mentions the dances held at parochial school fundraisers, which feature "Basque foods and music but include openly non-Basque clogging performances and auctions" (p. 78). As Thursby quotes one of her subjects, readers are afforded an illuminating narrative description of just how a Basque American flavor becomes part of what might otherwise have been marked as a singularly American experience: "We had a great Basque dinner and school fundraiser at the Elk's Club last Saturday night. They served lamb and beans and we danced the jota afterwards. We sold sheepherder bread at the auction and one loaf went for $100. Nobody raises money for the school like the Basques!" (p. 78). "In a world threatening to become a melting pot," Thursby explains, such descriptions emphasize the ethnic origins of so much of what is often contained within an ostensibly...