Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene Community (review)

There are a number of ways to fault Loon, but virtually all are ultimately dismissible for what the book offers: a well-told narrative ethnography of the Dene people of Mission, Canada, during the last decades of the twentieth century. In the course of revealing Dene culture, Sharp tackles some of the perpetually amorphous concepts that have both plagued and exhilarated folklorists and anthropologists: reality, experience, time, memory, and meaning. These discussions, while often familiar, are convincingly argued through the Dene case study and through analogies to Western thought and Western science. The result is a well-reasoned, well-argued contribution to the literature on Northern Athapaskan ethnography and to the anthropological and folkloric literature on cultural interpretation and ethnohermeneutics.

Loon is constructed from a number of articles and essays that Sharp has written over the past two decades, during which he conducted in-depth participant observation research among the Dene (Chipewyan) of Mission, a Northern Athapaskan community. Sharp has ambitiously attempted to address the full complexity of how the Dene order their shared reality through the single event of sighting a loon during a hunting expedition at Foxholm Lake one afternoon in August 1975. The attempt could be read as a response to twenty years of performance analysis scholarship to fully engage with the context of an event (though he makes no reference to this body of literature). For the first two-thirds of the book, Sharp is successful. Each chapter reveals one more layer, one more theme of Dene culture that contributes to the contextual frame in which the encounter with the loon can be interpreted. The exercise clearly establishes the complexity and depth of cultural knowledge needed to interpret an event from a native perspective.

In the last third of the book, however, Sharp departs entirely from the encounter with the loon and embarks upon a series of other encounters to clarify the broader themes of experience, reality, and memory that interest him. At this point, Sharp loses sight of both his main conceit and the Dene. Although the interactions remain in Mission, the conclusions Sharp draws are more frequently about general human experience than about Dene experience. The departure is ultimately rewarding; Sharp's discussion of memory, experience, meaning, time, and the role of narrative in structuring and even creating experience support and in some cases extend the recent scholarship on the social construction of human experience.

Other problems with the book are similarly balanced either with practical considerations or unfortunate cultural circumstances. One is Sharp's discovery that the Dene did not like to be interviewed, though they would allow participant observation. The result is that we never hear the voices of the people themselves, unfortunate for a book devoted to understanding how a specific group constructs their own reality. Another is the irony of arguing strenuously that reality is socially constructed and often indeterminate when dealing with human behavior, yet opening the book with a seemingly objective description of the encounter with the loon. Sharp may intend this description to encompass merely the "chaotic and variable raw data of the experience" (p. 31), but throughout the book the description is never disputed and never shown to vary.

Perhaps the greatest potential fault of the book lies in Sharp's insistence that the crucial element to interpreting the encounter with the loon is that the loon is displaying inkoze—supernatural power and knowledge. Sharp proceeds to spend a major portion of the book discussing inkoze and its role in Dene life. This interpretation, however, is not clearly accepted by the Dene, who dismiss the event as "just Phil shooting at a loon" (p. 116). Sharp argues that this response is in keeping with Dene constructions of reality since meaning must often be developed long after an event has occurred, but the claim seems tenuous...