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BEFORE CULTURES
The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920
By BRAD EVANS The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2005
The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-22264-6
Chapter One ECCENTRICITY
Cushing's Zuni Sketchbooks and American Notions of Culture
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My dear Cushing: I want to introduce the bearer, Mr. W. E. Curtis, Managing Editor of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, who will, in turn, introduce you to the ladies, and other gentlemen, in his party. They all desire to become members of the Zuni Tribe, and, not being acquainted with any others, I am forced to call upon you to have them initiated. Please put them through in good shape, and draw upon me for the amount of the initiation fees. Yours very truly, W. F. White
In the summer of 1882, a physically scarred white man pictured in the ceremonial garb of the Zuni Pueblo tribe, along with his Indian "brothers," made it onto the pages not only of Popular Science Monthly, but also of three of America's elite literary magazines: the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Monthly, and the Century Illustrated Monthly. On pages declared by their editors to be participating in the "wholesome movement ... for the purification of American public life," Frank Hamilton Cushing held forth on his ritual initiation into the Priesthood of the Bow, the highest priestly society of the Zuni, and of the trials he endured to do so. Alongside Henry James writing about Venice and the influence of Punch illustrator George Du Maurier on London society, one reads of the Zunis piercing the lobes of Cushing's ears while doing "a little shuffling dance ... in time to a prayer chant to the sun" ("My Adventures," 511). Paired with the serialization of a new novel by the dean of American realism, William Dean Howells, one finds Cushing's description of a dog's horrible mutilation at the hands of two Zuni clowns during "the Dance of the Great Knife" (207). By thus situating
Cushing's adventures, America's new class of genteel magazines created a stark juxtaposition, quickly becoming de rigueur, between "high Culture" and the first portents of an anthropological concept of culture.
Cushing has been remembered historically as not only the colorful figure who helped invent the ethnographic practice of participant-observation but also as one of the few American anthropologists, perhaps the only one, to have predated Franz Boas in using the term "culture" in its plural, relativized form. As such, he can be used to mark the early end of Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn's "cultural lag"-that stalled period before the paradigmatic shift from social-evolutionary to cultural anthropology, from a universalistic understanding of tribes like the Zuni as ancient ancestors of modern western civilization to a relativistic understanding of them as having a local and particular historical trajectory and complex social organization. If it was Boas who established the institutional structures needed to finally shift anthropology toward a cultural paradigm in the 1910s and 1920s (by 1926, every major anthropology department in the United States was headed by one of Boas's former students), it was probably Cushing who first coupled a notion of "culture" with both the impulse to see life from the native's point of view and doubts about westward expansion, giving the word its relativist twist.
But the articles by and about Cushing make it necessary to complicate any purely anthropological genealogy of the culture concept, for they force the anthropological history of the term back into contact with the contemporaneous solidification of culture in the sense made most famous by Matthew Arnold: "culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know ... the best which has been thought and said in the world and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions." As pointed out by Raymond Williams in his keyword definition of the term, the Arnoldian notion of culture, though long in the making, did not become common before the mid-nineteenth century. Returning the term to the context of the United States, we can add that the corresponding stratification of the concept-giving us what has typically been identified as "highbrow" and "lowbrow" culture, but which might better be understood as varying modalities of producing and consuming cultural commodities-did not occur until the heavy commercialization of the late nineteenth century, roughly at the time of Cushing's adventures in Zuni.
All of these versions of culture were emerging not only at the same time but also in many of the same venues, such that we might say the interplay between them became largely codeterminative. Just as the literary magazines began to give space to something like Cushing's version of anthropological cultures, high Culture was being made conspicuous by its intimacy and comfort with the circulation of ethnographically coded peoples, tales, and objects. The anthropological, the Arnoldian, and the material commingled on the pages of the quality magazines not only in the juxtaposition of Cushing and James, but in that of Joel Chandler Harris's dialect tale "At Teague Poteet's" and the refined poetry of Edmund Clarence Stedman; C. E. S. Wood's narrative of an expedition "Among the Thlinkits in Alaska" and the revered American music critic, Richard Grant White, on "Opera in New York"; and in Charles G. Leland's exposé on "Visiting the Gypsies" and an article by John Burroughs remembering the great Henry David Thoreau.
What Cushing's presence-and particularly his presence as "a savage"-in the periodicals thus forces is a refusal of the dichotomy established by Norbert Elias in his pathbreaking work, The History of Manners (1939), between German Kultur and French civilisation, the folk and the civilized, the vernacular and the courtly, the low and the high-and, in the contemporary academic context, the anthropological and the literary. In the American situation, this dichotomy was purposefully collapsed, producing juxtapositions like that of Cushing and James, which have been little attended to from either historical or theoretical perspectives.
The excitement generated around such juxtapositions clearly had to do with a more generalized turn-of-the-century fascination with the exotic and oriental; however, it also came from a particularly social-scientific task the magazines seem to have set themselves. Much of the work carried on in the periodicals-carried on in the absence of a named anthropological concept of culture-concerned exploiting pictures of difference and also trying out new categorical frames by which to understand it. There was a provocative element of experimentation in this framing that encouraged a desire for the magazines not only as vehicles for Arnoldian self-cultivation but also as objects representative of a particular, Cushingesque socio-anthropological group. Beyond all else, however, what was generated was a desire for both versions of culture as a commodity-a desire that explains the facility of Cushing's penetration both into the Zuni Pueblo and into the salons of American high society. Cushing's presence in the magazines can be used to piece together the logic of this desire, as well as the preliminary steps that would have been necessary for readers to conceptualize not only the Zuni and Cushing, but also themselves along cultural lines-to think of themselves as being cultivated, and also as being part of a culture. What we can uncover in rereading Cushing, in other words, is how, avant la lettre, readers of the magazines might have begun to formulate a notion of anthropological cultures that was both self-encompassing and worthy of possession.
ECCENTRICITY
"Borders" currently have a popular double life, being central both to critiques of the culture concept in anthropology and to a project of remapping United States cultural history in literary and cultural studies; the border paradigm can be misleading, however, when thinking about Cushing on the pages of the monthly magazines.
At least since James Clifford and George Marcus's Writing Culture (1986), it has repeatedly been made clear that to conceptualize difference in terms of culture requires the construction of borders, leading to the axiom that cultures are made, not given. And so, along with a debate about the extent to which boundaries actually were important to the classical anthropologists of the twentieth century, there has been a move to get beyond culture by focusing, instead, on the permeability and shiftiness of borders-on "travel," "hybridity," "diaspora," and "flow" as less essentializing ways of focusing ethnographic attention. At the same time, and in large measure moving out from these interventions in anthropology, the border has become a key modality in U.S. cultural history for thinking through the racial, national, and colonial contours of interactions between diverse cultures in the Americas. Already in 1995, Donald Weber had drawn on Renato Rosaldo to recognize "border" as "a key word-perhaps the key word-in current American studies and in cultural studies" because it served "as compensation for political erasure on the part of marginalized groups in the academy." This move, propelled in particular by new attention to globalization and a number of wonderful pieces of auto-ethnographic fiction, is already becoming well-trodden ground. One thus sees scholars like John Carlos Rowe and José Saldívar leading a push for a "comparative" approach to U.S. cultural studies, which, with respect to literature, implicitly means reading for borders, where texts reflect and enact the conflict between cultures, nationalities, languages, races, and ethnicities in particular places and times.
While this methodological and theoretical reorientation has given us a new sense of both fields, it can also be extraordinarily misleading when used to think of the historical situation of Cushing on the pages of the genteel monthly magazines. For one thing, it is simply anachronistic to think that the borders describing Cushing's situation in 1882 would then have been understood as being cultural. Because the idea of a border draws implicitly on conceptual categories, there could not have been a cultural border before the culture concept. There were, by contrast, recognized differences between stages of social-evolutionary development, language stocks, religions, races, and geographical locales. For each of these categories, however, it also should be remembered that the character of the border-its relative permeability or impermeability, for example-would have been imagined differently. For evolutionary anthropologists like Lewis Henry Morgan and John Wesley Powell, whites and Native Americans shared a common humanity but were separated by what was a nearly indelible border, marked in centuries of unilinear development. Powell once noted that although whites who came in contact with Native Americans tended "to overlook aboriginal vices and to exaggerate aboriginal virtues," it was not "to be forgotten that after all the Indian is a savage"-and presumably would continue to be so in future generations. For religious missionaries, by contrast, the border between "pagan" and "Christian" must have been much more readily traversed.
Another kind of problem awaits readers of literary texts looking to deploy the border paradigm, namely, that stemming from the indeterminacy of the space Cushing and the Zunis inhabited once they had appeared on the pages of the magazine. Indeed, one might well ask how to figure the implicitly geographical metaphor of the border in this monthly magazine context, for the metaphor itself leads to the confusion of a place like Zuni with the space of the literary market. Rather than thinking of Cushing's experience as a "border" situation, we would do well to consider the extent to which his adventures with the Zuni mirrored what I will be describing as the "eccentricity" of his eastern, magazine reading, club-attending audience. Of interest is the alacrity with which Cushing was incorporated into the overriding logic of these magazines. Cushing's adventures in Zuni found a natural home on the pages of the journals, which leads me to suggest that the success of this phenomenon had already moved well beyond the initial "contact zone" at Zuni. Rather, the border as a place had been enveloped by and reproduced within genteel parlors and on the pages of the quality magazines, which, themselves, circulated with great ease from coast to coast, across any variety of imagined boundaries.
Let me be clear on how my approach in the next pages differs from other historical and ethnographic accounts. Implicitly focusing on Cushing as a "border" figure, historians Curtis Hinsley and Jesse Green have demonstrated the anthropologist's impact on Zuni and the role played by various institutional forces shaping anthropological investigation of Native Americans at the end of the nineteenth century. Hinsley, in particular, has produced a series of superb examinations of Cushing's role with regard to the ideological framework of the Smithsonian's collecting practices. What I want to suggest, by contrast, is that Cushing's appearance in the genteel monthlies also provides an impetus for taking the examination of him out of this frontier context in order to think more broadly about what must have changed in order for the new anthropological conception of culture to emerge popularly. Although Cushing's trip to the Southwest literally took him to a reservation border, Cushing himself was framed in Harper's and the Century neither as a frontier figure, nor as someone inhabiting shifty border zones. In their sketches of the young ethnographer, the magazines gave little hint of any transgressions of which Cushing might have been guilty; nor did they even offer many signs of the existence of two "cultures" sufficiently homogenized to enact an "encounter." In thinking about Cushing, then, I will not be concerned with rehearsing questions about how the Zuni actually reacted to Cushing or to Cushing's role in the institutional history of anthropology, topics which have already been covered in some depth. Instead, what this chapter tries to work out is the process by which difference would have been understood by readers of and writers for the magazines in this period before cultural borders-for participants in the emergent culture industry who had no immediate recourse to anthropology's culture concept.
The imaginative borders between Cushing, his audience and the Zuni had already been brought into question by historical events in the late 1870s and 1880s. In 1893, ten years after Cushing's magazine appearances, Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the "closing" of the American frontier. From materials contemporary to Cushing's journey to the Southwest, we might safely conclude that it had been closed some time before Turner's declaration. Cushing, a twenty-two-year-old prodigy of the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Spencer Baird, arrived in New Mexico in 1879, just two days after the last spur of the Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad had been laid-an act that effectively incorporated Zuni and the other New Mexican pueblos into the transcontinental rail system. The situation was analogous to that being duplicated on reservations throughout the country, the railroad encircling the West in preparation for the mechanically regular filling up of space with settlements. As one reviewer put it in an article on the "New Northwest" for the Century, the "companies know that settlers will follow the new road and occupy a broad band of country on either side of it. A given population will afford a given amount of freight and passenger business; thus the problem is as simple as a sum in arithmetic."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BEFORE CULTURES by BRAD EVANS Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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