“She always says she will come, and sometimes she comes and sometimes she doesn’t come. I was so surprised when I first came out here to find that Indians were like that,” the wife of the Presbyterian Missionary in an Indian town in New Mexico was speaking, as you readily infer, on her servant question. “Where did you get your impressions of Indians before you came here?”
“From Fenimore Cooper. I used to take his books out, one right after the other from the library at New Canaan, Connecticut, where I grew up.”
At that time, during the youth of this New Englander past middle age, few anthropological monographs on Indian tribes had been written, but it is doubtful if such publications are to be found in New England village libraries even to-day, and it is more than doubtful that if they were in the libraries anybody would read them; anthropologists themselves have been known not to read them. Between these forbidding monographs and the legends of Fenimore Cooper, what is there then to read for a girl who is going to spend her life among Indians or, in fact, for anyone who just wants to know more about Indians?
From these considerations, among others, this book was conceived. The idea of writing about the life of the Indian for the General Reader is not novel, to be sure, to anthropologists. Appearances to the contrary, anthropologists have no wish to keep their science or any part of it esoteric. They are too well aware, for one thing, that facilities for the pursuit of anthropology are dependent more or less on popular interest, and that only too often tribal cultures have disappeared in America as elsewhere before people became interested enough in them to learn about them.
Nevertheless, the cost of becoming popular may appear excessive—not only to the student who begrudges the time and energy that must be drawn from scientific work, but to the scientist who is asked 2 to popularize his study in terms repugnant to his sense of truth or propriety. Hitherto, American publishers appear to have proposed only to bring Fenimore Cooper up to date, merely to add to the over-abundant lore of the white man about the Indian.
In this book the white man’s traditions about Indians have been disregarded. That the writers have not read other traditions from their own culture into the culture they are describing is less certain. Try as we may, and it must be confessed that many of us do not try very hard, few, if any of us, succeed, in describing another culture, of ridding ourselves of our own cultural bias or habits of mind. Much of our anthropological work, to quote from a letter from Spinden, “is not so much definitive science as it is a cultural trait of ourselves.”
For one thing we fail to see the foreign culture as a whole, noting only the aspects which happen to interest us. Commonly, the interesting aspects are those which differ markedly from our own culture or those in which we see relations to the other foreign cultures we have studied. Hence our classified data give the impression that the native life is one unbroken round, let us say, of curing or weather-control ceremonials, of prophylaxis against bad luck, of hunting, or of war. The commonplaces of behavior are overlooked, the amount of “common sense” is underrated, and the proportion of knowledge to credulity is greatly underestimated. In other words the impression we give of the daily life of the people may be quite misleading, somewhat as if we described our own society in terms of Christmas and the Fourth of July, of beliefs about the new moon or ground hogs in February, of city streets in blizzards and after, of strikes and battleships. Unfortunately, the necessarily impressionistic character of the following tales, together with their brevity, renders them, too, subject to the foregoing criticism. Of this, Dr. Kroeber in the Introduction will have more to say, as well as of his impression of how far we have succeeded in presenting the psychological aspects of Indian culture.
The problems presented by the culture, problems of historical reconstruction, Dr. Kroeber will also refer to, but discussion of the problems, of such subjects as culture areas, as the current phrase goes, as diffusion and acculturation, will not be presented in this 3 book—it is a book of pictures. But if the reader wants to learn of how the problems are being followed up, he is directed to the bibliographical notes in the appendix. If the pictures remain pictures for him, well and good; if they lead him to the problems, good and better. Anthropology is short on students.
E. C. P.