E. Richard Hart's Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West asserts that "we may use the 'clues' provided by Native American tales, songs, dances, architecture, and other arts—provisionally, of course—as if they were snail shells, as objects that have meaning beyond their physical existence but nonetheless are readable through their details of style and substance" ("Cultural Patterns" 9). These texts are worthy of study, but not merely via the Western style of analysis and evaluation. Rather, these are living artifacts of an embodied, performed culture. Instead of projecting and prescribing our own meaning and beliefs systems upon these cultural constructions, we must "read out of the shell as text" (10); that is, explore the patterns of culture and performance arising from said text. For example, "we can as definitely describe the organization of Native American culture as circular. Circles abound in Native architecture, narrative, ritual, art, dance, and gesture […] to symbolize Native concepts of inclusion, balance, symmetry, and relationships" (11-12).
We recently read N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain for Dr. Armitage's Memoir and Identity course. In an attempt to demonstrate Hart's method for grappling with Native folk art, I'd like to share my discussion of this seminal text with you.
So much of Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain is about loss: the loss of Kiowa culture, history, identity. The loss of Tai-me, grandfather Mammedaty, the buffalo. Despite these grave losses, or because of them, the writing breathes life into the stories and rituals of this disappearing culture. In this sense, Momaday blurs the constructed "Western" lines between personal and private, self and society, between myth and reality, and between story and history. In doing so, this book challenges the oft rigid notions of what memoir is supposed to be, ought to do. As Hart suggests, "[f]or those tribes that are still flourishing, for those whose cultures have been partly demolished, and even those whose worlds were devastated, the expressions of folklore provide us with the best and most articulate records of perspectives that we cannot do without precisely because they embody the relatively unmediated cultural voices of the peoples who have shaped the realities of life in the Western Hemisphere" (16).
The circular design concept of Rainy Mountain acts as scaffolding for the journey through all of these levels and layers of cultural identity. Like the Worm Ouroboros forever returns to eat its own tail, this memoir is bookended by poems each touching upon the timelessness of nature and the eternity of the spirit. These metaphorical conceits extend throughout the narrative; as Momaday explains in the Prologue: "It is a whole journey, intricate with motion and meaning; and it is made with the whole of memory, that experience of the mind which is legendary as well as historical, personal as well as cultural. And the journey is an evocation of three things in particular: a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit which endures" (4). Momaday also admits that Rainy Mountain is evidence of how the human mind processes and recreates traditions and stories and cultures.
It is clear that Momaday's purpose here is not to navel-gaze and voice self, but to facilitate a chorus of the Kiowa people, throughout the ages, through the rise and fall of a precious and subaltern culture. It should come as no surprise, really, that Rainy Mountain was published in 1969, when factions of the voiceless and powerless were emerging with force and fighting for the preservation and commemoration of their contributions to history and to our shared future. As such, this text can clearly be understood as protest art, as capable of shaping and influencing knowledge construction and meaning making.
Perhaps what we can take away from Hart's chapters is the important lesson of how not to approach the study and analysis of the artifacts of other cultures. Rather than asking "'What do you think this really means?'" we should instead inquire "'What's being acted out, or dramatized, or made concrete here?'" (10).
I wonder how this shift in inquiry reshapes your understanding of a particular text or artifact, or if it ultimately leads you to draw the same conclusions.
Works Cited
Hart, E. Richard. "Cultural Patterns in Native American Folklore: An Introduction." Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West. Utah State University Press. 9-35.
Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. University of New Mexico Press, 1969. Print.
Elizabeth M. Aiossa, M.F.A.
English Instructor
Communication Arts Department
College of Lake County
19351 West Washington Street
Grayslake, IL 60030-1198
Elizabeth writes that “These texts are worthy of study, but not merely via the Western style of analysis and evaluation. Rather, these are living artifacts of an embodied, performed culture” (Aiossa). These words are so very true regarding The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West. The author invites us to consider the hazards of approaching such a text through a Western lens of epistemology marked by empiricism. In the prologue, Toelken speaks to this notion through reflexivity when he writes “For these reasons, the book contains more than a little emotion and personal bias and demonstrates a less than standard reverence for academic circumspection. I admit these things freely in advance, and I ask scholarly readers in particular to spare me the automatic sermon on objective empiricism” (1). Instead of measuring all the reader comes across against the ‘traditional’ yardstick of Western academic inquiry, he asks us to go “along this cultural riverbank together, paying attention to what we actually see and hear that may offer us common ground for speculation, discovery, insight” (8).
ReplyDeleteWhat struck me most about Elizabeth’s response was her willingness to elucidate a personal instance of traveling “along this cultural riverbank” through sharing her discussion of Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. In her response to Momaday we see a movement away from inquiry that perpetuates the power relations that much folklore aims to resist and see an embrace and appreciation of an analysis of patterns – a close consideration of other ways of knowing and being in the world. In this regard the analytical response to Anguish of the Snails is brought forward through an example of just such a mindful inquiry in action through the response to Momaday. In both instances, personal assumptions are carefully kept in check and care and respect for the idea that, as Toelken writes, “our cultural indebtedness to Native people can be partly addressed by paying serious attention to the kinds of expressions that are appropriate for us to see, hear, and respond to. This kind of serious attention and propriety requires respect, not adulation; it requires us to share, not intrude and plunder; it requires us to listen for Native voices, not trumpet our own assumption” (Toelken 4-5).
Toelken, Barre. The Anguish of the Snails: Native American Folklore in the West. Logan, UT:
Utah State University Press, 2003. PDF.
Yes the argument for privileging the personal--the emotion--the connectedness we have to the things we study is so important. In many ways, I think issues of culture defy objective analysis because culture is inherently personal and holds meaning for each person. What communities leave behind for us to enjoy, share, and understand are in fact proofs of existence a small snapshot of the full life that was once inside of the shell. But they do say clearly "We were here."
ReplyDeleteElizabeth,
ReplyDeleteYou and I both seem to have been struck by the same passages and I too am led to consider what we might draw from “a particular text or artifact,” were we to approach it from a different angle.
Toelken makes it a priority to delineate the differences in “Euro-American” perspectives and patterns of thought and charges us to leave it behind as we venture into the realm of the Native. Toleken writes,
“In our scrutiny of any culture, we easily run the risk of seeing mainly the shell and believing that it is only a shell; thus, we may hastily assume that a narrative is “just a story.” But if a snail’s shell is not just a shell, if it is an accumulated record of the “agonies” experienced by snails, then its full meaning cannot be captured merely by analyzing its calcium content but will be implied by the style and context of the record, and will lurk quietly in the field of implication, waiting to be brought into focus by an eye willing to read and “unpack” the suggestions of the patterns.” (10)
In short, we must become willing participants of and within the experience, abandoning judgment that might, in turn, have us miss what is really being “made concrete.”
I was also taken aback by the imagery as she elucidates the meaning of the circle as it pertains to architecture. Specifically, the distinction made between the Euro-American standpoints as linear. Thinking visually, I was led to consider how one could only be truly on one side of the line, dividing us from the other. What a powerful statement, especially against the backdrop of this heated presidential debate.
The idea of “round dwellings” as a vehicle for the development of community and the building of solidarity amongst “closely associated members” is a beautiful concept.
Jesse