We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Maclntyre sought to raise a series of crucial questions in an address before the Eighty-First Annual Meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. What is the best way to evaluate two competing languages, conceptual schemes, or cultural approaches to being in the world? May conceptual schemes or theoretical languages be so radically different as to be fully incommensurable, that is, incapable of intertranslation or meaningful comparison?2 Maclntyre, drawing upon the example of the sixteenthcentury Zuni Indian and Spanish colonial frontier, contended that some languages or conceptual schemes might well be partially untranslatable, but this did not necessarily preclude commensurability. His remarks suggest additional questions, namely, what does constitute a frontier situation? What is involved in the symbolic differentiation of one conceptual scheme, one interpretive group—one culture—from another? We might recognize here the familiar problem of boundary construction, the social process of creating a common group identity that marks it as different from others.3
1 Maclntyre, Alasdair, “Relativism, Power, and Philosophy” (1985; reprint, Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, Krausz, Michael. ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 182–204.Google Scholar
2 For surveys of these discussions, see Wilson, Bryan R., Rationality (1970; reprint, London: Basil Blackwell, 1977);Google Scholar Meiland, Jack W. and Krausz, Michael, eds., Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982);Google Scholar and Krausz, Relativism.
3 There is a vast and growing body of literature on this topic. I have found especially useful Barth, Fredrik, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1969);Google Scholar Sollors, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);Google Scholar Boelhower, William, Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature (1984; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);Google Scholar Scollon, Ronald and Scollon, Suzanne, Narrative, Literacy, and Face in Interethnic Communication (Norwood, N.J.: ABLEX, 1981);Google Scholar Pearce, Roy Harvey, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (1953; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988);Google Scholar Said, Edward W., Orientalism (1978; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1979);Google Scholar and Basso, Keith H., Portraits of “The Whiteman”: Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols Among the Western Apache (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 On narrative, see Barthes, Roland, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1966), in New Literary History, 6:2 (Winter 1975), 237–72;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Chatman, Seymour, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978);Google Scholar Genette, Gerard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Lewin, Janet E., trans. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980);Google Scholar Jameson, Frederic, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981);Google Scholar and Martin, Wallace, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
5 On history, see Hayden White's three books: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973),Google Scholar Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978),Google Scholar and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987);Google Scholar Mink, Louis O., Historical Understanding, Fay, Brian et al. , eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987);Google Scholar Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, McLaughlin, Kathleen and Pellauer, David, trans. (1983; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984);Google Scholar Carr, David, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986);Google Scholar and Kellner, Hans, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).Google Scholar On ethnography, see Marcus, George E. and Cushman, Dick, “Ethnographies as Texts,” Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 11 (1982), 25–69;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Pratt, Mary Louise, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land Coloraof the Bushman,” Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (Autumn 1985), 119–43;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Clifford, James E. and Marcus, George E., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);Google Scholar Clifford, James E., The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988);Google Scholar Bruner, Edward M., “Ethnography as Narrative,” in The Anthropology of Experience, Turner, Victor W. and Bruner, Edward M., eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986);Google Scholar Medick, Hans, “Missionaries in the Row Boat? Ethnological Ways of Knowing as a Challenge to Social History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29:1 (01 1987), 86–98;Google Scholar and Bowen, John R., “Narrative Form and Political Incorporation: Changing Uses of History in Aceh, Indonesia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31:4 (10 1989), 671–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1 For overviews, see Swann, Brian and Krupat, Arnold, eds., Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);Google Scholar Sherzer, Joel and Woodbury, Anthony C., eds., Native American Discourse: Poetics and Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);Google Scholar Krupat, Arnold, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989);Google Scholar and Murray, David, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts (London: Pinter, 1991).Google Scholar
7 Morgan, Neil, Westward Tilt: The American West Today (New York: Random House, 1961), 126.Google Scholar
8 There is nothing approaching an adequate history of the Palm Springs area but see Bogert, Frank, Palm Springs: First Hundred Years (Palm Springs: Palm Springs Heritage Associates, 1987); Edward Madden Ainsworth's two books: Beckoning Desert (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962)Google Scholar and Golden Checkerboard (Palm Desert, Ca.: Desert Southwest, 1965);Google Scholar and Jensen, Thomas A., “Palm Springs, California: Its Evolution and Functions” (M.A. Thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1954).Google Scholar
9 The most accessible information on Chase in found in Powell, Lawrence Clark, California Classics: The Creative Literature of the Golden State (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1971), 197–207.Google Scholar The Palm Springs Public Library Center and the Palm Springs Historical Society, Palm Springs, California, each have fragmentary biographical files on Chase. Chase also surfaces briefly in Starr's, Kevin Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (1973; reprint, Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1981), 433–41.Google Scholar
10 Chase, California Desert Trails, 35.
11 See Ibid., 36–37; also, Chase's, Our Araby: Palm Springs and the Garden of the Sun (Pasadena: Star News, 1920), especially 14–15Google Scholar, 26–27; and his article, “One More National Park,” in St. Nicholas, 50 (12 1922), 209–10.Google Scholar
12 The single best introduction to the Cahuilla Indians remains Bean's, Lowell John Mukat's People: The Cahuilla Indians of Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).Google Scholar See also Barrows, David Prescott, The Elhnobotany of the Coahuilla Indians of Southern California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900);Google Scholar Kroeber, Alfred L., Ethnography of the Cahuilla Indians (Berkeley: University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 8, 1908);Google Scholar Gilford, Edward W., Clans and Moieties in Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 14, 1918), 155–219;Google Scholar Hooper, Lucile, The Cahuilla Indians (Berkeley: University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 16, 1920);Google Scholar Strong, William Duncan, Aboriginal Society in Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 26, 1929);Google Scholar Bean, Lowell John and Saubel, Katherine Siva, Temalpakh: Cahuilla Knowledge and Usage of Plants (Banning, Ca.: Malki Museum Press, 1972);Google Scholar Wilkie, Philip J. et al. , The Cahuilla Indians of the Colorado Desert: Ethnohistory and Prehistory (Ramona, Ca.: Ballena Press Anthropological Papers No. 3, 1975);Google Scholar Bean, Lowell John, “Cahuilla,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 8, Sturtevant, William C. and Heizer, Robert F., eds., (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 575–87;Google Scholar and Bean, Lowell John, Vane, Sylvia Brakke, and Young, Jackson, The Cahuilla and the Santa Rosa Mountain Region: Places and Their Native American Association (Riverside, Ca.: United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, California Desert District, 1981).Google Scholar
13 See Sutton, Imre, “Land Tenure and Changing Occupance on Indian Reservations in Southern California” (Ph.D. disser., University of California, Los Angeles, 1965), especially 139–43;Google Scholar Ainsworth, Golden Checkerboard; and Jensen, “Palm Springs,” 42–43.
14 On the reservations, see Bean, “Cahuilla,” 575–87, and Sutton, “Land Tenure.” The popular histories emphasize consensus, harmony, and progress in the development of Palm Springs as an urban center. Nonetheless, uncatalogued archival files at the Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, suggest a story of interminable legal and political conflict. See, for example, Walter V. Woehlke, Office of Indian Affairs, Statement on the Palm Springs Situation (circa 1941), in the archival collection of the Earl Coffman papers, Indian Affairs Files [hereinafter cited as Coffman Papers].
15 Unfortunately, the origins of this book remain obscure. The title page of the first edition reads, “Printed for J. Smeaton Chase, Palm Springs, California, by Star-News Publishing Company, Pasadena, California.” Other people may have been involved in the publication of this volume; by 1920 Chase had already published four books with Houghton-Mifflin, and the appearance of this book on a vanity press underlies its status as booster literature. A second edition appeared in 1923, “printed for” Chase by J. J. Little and Ives Company, New York. All page references in the body of this essay are to the first edition.
16 This refers to what the Cahuilla labeled nukil, an annual or biennial ritual, that could involve up to hundreds of Cahuilla from the surrounding areas. See Bean, Mukat's People, 135–59.
17 Frye, Northrop, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).Google Scholar See also, White, Metahistory, 1–42.
18 Bruner, “Ethnography as Narrative,” provides a lucid overview of ethnographic fashion during these years. See also Stocking, George W. Jr., “The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradition,” in Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, History of Anthropology, vol. 6, Stocking, George W. Jr., ed., Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 208–76.Google Scholar
19 Grey, Zane, The Vanishing American (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1925).Google Scholar
20 Hodge, Frederick Webb, “Nestor of the Amerinds,” Touring Topics, 24:2 (February 1932), 20–21, 36;Google Scholar Kroeber, Alfred L., “They Learn About Indians From Kroeber,” Touring Topics, 21:6 (06 1929), 32, 34–38;Google Scholar Hubbell, John Lorenzo, “Fifty Years an Indian Trader,” Touring Topics, 22:12 (12 1930), 24–29, 51.Google Scholar
21 Syee Ziegler, Louis, “A Cahuilla Fiesta,” Touring Topics, 23:1 (01 1931), 50–51, 53;Google Scholar and his “A Plea for Old Romance,” Touring Topics, 23:1 (01 1931), 50.Google Scholar
22 Ziegler, “A Cahuilla Fiesta,” 50. All page citations will appear in the body of the text.
23 For an overview of Boasian anthropology in North America, see Stocking, George W. Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 133–307;Google Scholar and Stocking, “Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s.”
24 On salvage ethnography, see Gruber, Jacob W., “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist, 72:6 (12 1970), 1289–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 Kroeber, Alfred L., Ethnography of the Cahuilla (Berkeley: University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology, vol. 8, 1908).Google Scholar
26 Kroeber did not, however, see a “culture” as the simple sum of its constituent elements. See his “The Superorganic,” American Anthropologist, 19:2 (04/06 1917), 163–217,Google Scholar and his textbook, Anthropology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1923), especially 5–9,Google Scholar 110–4, and 326–41. Steward, Julian, Alfred Kroeber (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973),Google Scholar provides a brief analysis of Kroeber's anthropological theory.
27 Kroeber, Alfred L., Handbook of the Indians of California (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, vol. 78, 1925).Google Scholar
28 Lucile Hooper, The Cahuilla Indians; Strong, Aboriginal Society.
29 Strong, Aboriginal Society, 2. Portions of this work appeared in Strong's published dissertation, “An Analysis of Southwestern Society,” American Ethnologist, 29:1 (01/03 1927), 1–61.Google Scholar Unfortunately, Strong's field notes have been lost.
30 This claim was conventionalized by the 1920s. According to Kroeber's textbook, Anthropology: “the cause of the seeming preoccupation of social or cultural anthropology with ancient and savage and exotic or extinct people [is] the desire to understand better all civilizations, irrespective of time and place, in the abstract or in the form of generalized principle if possible” (p. 5). This aim for laws that could be generalized distinguished anthropology from history in the eyes of Kroeber. Ruth Ann Benedict, in her vastly influential Patterns of Culture (1934; reprint, New York, Mentor Books, 1960), 29–30, made the presentist significance of this much more explicit, claiming that a “knowledge of cultural forms is necessary in social thinking” and that “primitive cultures” provide the best possible “laboratories” for study, since their “problems are set in simpler terms than the great Western civilizations.”
31 I am not suggesting that all these ethnologists subscribed to identical conceptions of culture but rather that they shared a certain common notion of the determinability of distinctive cultures while disagreeing on exactly which factors distinguished one from another. See Boas, Franz, “Evolution or Diffusion?” American Anthropologist, 26 (1924), 340–344Google Scholar (Strong cited this article in his dissertation); Kroeber, “The Superorganic”; Sapir, Edward, “Do We Need a Superorganic?,” American Anthropologist, 19:4 (12 1917), 441–7;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sapir, , “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” American Journal of Sociology, 29:4 (01 1924), 401–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Edward Sapir: Culture, Language, and Personality, Mandelbaum, David G., ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 78–119;Google Scholar and Benedict, Patterns of Culture, especially 196–203. For secondary discussions, see Kroeber, A.L. and Kluckholn, Clyde, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 292–300;Google Scholar Stocking Race, Culture, and Evolution, 195–233; Stocking, “Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s,” 212–19; and Darnell, Regna, Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 143–50.Google Scholar
32 Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” 83. Sapir's essay was widely read at the time and has since attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. See Thomas De Zengotta, “Speakers of Being,” in Romantic Motives, 74–123; Stocking, “Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s,” 216– 20; Handler, Richard, “The Dainty and the Hungry Man: Literature and Anthropology in the Work of Edward Sapir,” in Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, History of Anthropology, vol. 1, Stocking, George W. Jr., ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 208–31;Google Scholar Darnell, Edward Sapir, 148–9, 168–9; and Michaels, Walter Benn, “The Vanishing American,” American Literary History, 2:2 (Summer 1990), 240–51.Google Scholar
33 Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” 93, 91.
34 Ibid., 96, 97.
35 Michaels, in “The Vanishing American,” pursues this argument at greater length. The point here is not to demonize William Duncan Strong. I do not mean to argue that all Boasian ethnologists were closet racists, nor do I wish to efface the presumed ideological value of cultural relativism. The point is that these individuals and texts were located in a particular historical moment and that it is as unreasonable to expect them magically to transcend that moment as to denounce them for their failure to do so.
36 Chief Francisco Patensio [sic], as told to Boynton, Margaret, Stories and Legends of the Palm Springs Indians (Los Angeles: Times-Mirror Press, 1943).Google Scholar Unfortunately, not only are the original notes and typescript lost, virtually nothing is known of Kate Collins, the interviewer, who seems to have been one of a host of desert residents who came and went with no particular career or familial ties to the community. Margaret Boynton apparently financed the publication of this book by the Times-Mirror Press [this information comes from a conversation with Lowell John Bean, March 1991]. With such publications it is impossible to reconstruct the interview environment accurately or even to know how carefully Patencio's stories were edited. As the bilingual Patencio spoke in English, this text does avoid some of the problems of narratives translated by the editor or by a third party. This text falls more or less within the genre of oral literature described as autobiography, and I have benefited from the work of Brumble II, H. David, American Indian Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),Google Scholar and Krupat, Arnold, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).Google Scholar
37 Hudson, Roy F., ed., Desert Hours with Chief Patencio (Palm Springs: Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1971),Google Scholar as told to Kate Collins by Chief Francisco Patencio. The publication history of this pamphlet is almost as obscure as that of Stories and Legends. The introduction to this text affirms that the “words of Chief Patencio are exactly as they were recorded,” but again we do not have the original typescript and notes for comparison.
38 This allusion, “the First Fiesta for Mo-Cot,” is to the creation tale. Condensed narrative versions of this story, which in a ritual performance would stretch across a week and require the assistance of multiple singer-storytellers, are found in Strong, Aboriginal Society, 130–43, told by Alejo Patencio and translated by Nortes, Jolian; Seiler, Hansjakob, Cahuilla Texts with an Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970),Google Scholar told by Joe Lomas and translated by Seiler, ; and Curtis, Edward S., Handbook of North American Indians (1925; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970), as told by William Pablo, 110–21).Google Scholar See also the closely related Cupefio creation tale in Joughlin, Roberta and Valenzuela, Salvadora G., “Cupeño Genesis,” El Museo, 1:4 (06 1953), 16–23,Google Scholar and Bean's discussion in Mukat's People, 160–83.
39 Patencio is insistent on the masculine qualities of leadership. Bean, Mukat's People, claims that in traditional Cahuillan culture, “Throughout Cahuilla cosmology the male is dominant in leadership, creativity, and political power.… All political and religious roles were held by men in contrast to the subsidiary role of women in Cahuilla society, who, although always members of their fathers' lineages, had no formal decisional power within the lineage” (p. 172). Bean, in functionalist fashion, argues that this patriarchal structure “would have significant long-range adaptive value in the Cahuilla system” (p. 173). Allen, Paula Gunn, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986),Google Scholar disputes such androcentric interpretations of Native American cultures, arguing that “traditional tribal lifestyles are more often gynocratic than not, and they are never patriarchal” (p. 2). While in the case of the Cahuilla there seems to be comparatively little support for Allen's position, one might be wary of claiming significant adaptive functions for patriarchy.
40 John Collier, Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA], letter to Earl Coffman, November 15, 1937, Coffman Papers, advised the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce member that “the [Agua Caliente Cahuilla] are few enough to be dealt with in general council open to all adult enrolled members.” During this period assorted Palm Springs politicians and developers sought the dissolution of the Tribal Committee of the Agua Caliente (which did not enjoy the official sanction of the BIA). In 1937 they succeeded (with the assistance of local Special Officer of the BIA, H. H. Quackenbush) in having a federal grand jury indict members of the Committee, including Francisco Patencio, for conspiracy and embezzlement. Although Committee members were briefly detained, both Collier and the Office of the Solicitor interceded, arguing that the charges were unfounded and would in any case be counterproductive. All charges were dropped, the unofficial Committee returned to Palm Springs, and Special Officer Quackenbush was relocated. See, among many other documents, Earl Coffman, letter to Phil D. Swing, November 20, 1937, and Kenneth Meiklejohn, Assistant Solicitor, Memorandum to Commissioner Collier, February 25, 1938, Coffman Papers. This debacle was undoubtedly still fresh in the memory of Francisco Patencio as he conversed with Kate Collins.
41 According to Seiler, Cahuilla Texts, “An indication of the (one-time) existence of native literary theorizing, however elementary, may be seen in the major distinction which the older informants made between their narration [sic]: they distinguished between ‘a’alxe'at which they translated as ‘true story,’ and selhisce'at for which ‘tale’ was given as an equivalent. According to them the Creation and related stories including the story of the migration were ‘true’” pp. 77–78).
42 Some linguists contend that all Native American oral literature should be translated as verse. See Swann and Krupat, Recovering the Word; Krupat, The Voice in the Margin; Sherzer and Woodbury, Native American Discourse; and Murray, Forked Tongues, for overviews of this debate. Here it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that Patencio's text really is either prose or verse. In the migration tale, one might place the text in verse form, but I am not sure what exactly would be gained from such an exercise. In the case of the creation tale, the decision is similarly difficult. As performed during the nukil the tale seems to have consisted largely of songs, but the versions collected by the ethnographers were narrated by individuals over relatively short stretches of time, perhaps as prose versions of the versified ritual poems. If one were concerned with maintaining the distinction between poetic and ordinary language, this would seem to support the notion that Cahuillan oral literature could be translated as either prose or verse, depending on the context of its performance.
43 Most contemporary observers translated this Cahuillan term as “chief.” It referred to a position of ceremonial and political leadership.
44 We do not have Strong's transcription of the text in Cahuilla, if indeed he made one. Only this translation is now available. Fortunately, a number of competent linguists and interested Cahuilla have created a useful body of literature on Cahuillan language. I have drawn on Seiler, Cahuilla Texts; Seiler, Hansjakob, Cahuilla Grammar (Banning, Ca.: Malki Museum Press, Morongo Indian Reservation, 1977);Google Scholar Seiler, Hansjakob, “Two Systems of Cahuilla Kinship Expressions: Labeling and Descriptive,” in American Indian and IndoEuropean Studies, Klar, Kathryn et al. , eds. (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1980), 229–36;Google Scholar Seiler, Hansjakob and Hioki, Kojiro, Cahuilla Dictionary (Banning, Ca.: Malki Museum Press, Morongo Indian Reservation, 1979);Google Scholar Fuchs, Anna, Morphologie des Verbs im Cahuilla (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1970);Google Scholar Bright, William, “Hispanisms in Cahuilla,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology Papers in Linguistics, vol. 1 (1979), 101–16;Google Scholar and Saubel, Katherine Siva and Munroe, Pamela, Chem' ivillu' (Let's Speak Cahuilla) (Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, University of California, 1981).Google Scholar
45 I have indicated what would seem to be the equivalents in Francisco Patencio's version of this story.
46 This attentive precision in the naming of geographic locales can be found in much Cahuilla literature. See Bean, Vane, and Young, The Cahuilla and the Santa Rosa Region. Basso, Keith H., in “ ‘Speaking with Names’: Language and Landscape among the Western Apache,” Cultural Anthropology, 3:2 (05 1988), 99–130,CrossRefGoogle Scholar finds that among the Cibecue Apache place namemnemonic devices referred to communally shared stories that in turn serve as “vehicles of ancestral authority.” Both Patencios seem to suggest a similar convergence of geography and culture.
47 Kroeber, Alfred L., Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (Berkeley: University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 38, 1939), 5.Google Scholar
48 The classic statement is found in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).Google Scholar This conception of culture is not, of course, universally shared by historians or ethnologists. For a very different understanding of culture, see Harris, Marvin, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (New York: Random House, 1979).Google Scholar For discussions of the etymology and discursive use of culture, see Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 76–82;Google Scholar Kroeber and Kluckholn, Culture.
49 Bean, Mukat's People, 15.
50 Seiler, Cahuilla Texts, 9.
