Worldviews and the American West: the Life of the Place Itself
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Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 2000 Worldviews and the American West: The Life of the Place Itself Polly Stewart Steve Siporin C. W. Sullivan III Suzi Jones Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Folklore Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Stewart, P. (2000). Worldviews and the American West: The life of the place itself. Logan: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Worldviews and the American West The Life of the Place Itself Worldviews and the American West The Life of the Place Itself Edited by Polly Stewart, Steve Siporin, C. W. Sullivan III, and Suzi Jones Utah State University Press Logan, Utah ISBN 0-87421-456-4 (E-BOOK) Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322–7800 Copyright © 2000 Utah State University Press All rights reserved “Faith of Our Fathers” by George Venn is printed by permission of the author. Copyright © 2000 George Venn “Icons of Immortality: Forest Lawn and the American Way of Death” by Elliott Oring is reprinted by permission of the author. It originally appeared, in slightly different form, as “Forest Lawn and the Iconography of American Death,” Southwest Folklore 6, no. 1 [1985]. Copyright © 1979 Elliott Oring. “John Campbell’s Adventure, and the Ecology of Story,” by Jarold Ramsey is reprinted by permission from Northwest Review 29 (1991). “The Language of Animals” by Barry Lopez is reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright © 1998 Barry Lopez. “Local Character” by Kim Stafford is reprinted by permission of the author from Having Everything Right: Essays of Place (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1997). Copyright © 1997 Kim Stafford. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Worldviews and the American West : the life of the place itself / edited by Polly Stewart ... [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-87421-407-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) —ISBN 0-87421-408-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. West (U.S.)—Ethnic relations. 2. Minorities—West (U.S.)—Social life and customs. 3. West (U.S.)—Civilization. 4. Ethnophilosophy—West (U.S.) 5. Folklore—West (U.S.). 6. Group identity—West (U.S.). 7. West (U.S.)—In Literature. I Stewart, Polly, 1943- F596.2.W67 2000 306'.0978—dc21 00-010268 Contents Acknowledgments vii 1. Introduction 1 The Editors Personal Essay 7 2. The Language of Animals 9 Barry Lopez Song 17 3. Faith of our Fathers 19 George Venn 4. Blue Shadows on Human Drama: The Western Songscape 31 Hal Cannon Objects 37 5. A Diversity of Dead Helpers: Folk Saints of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands 39 James S. Griffith 6. Icons of Immortality: Forest Lawn and the American Way of Death 54 Elliott Oring 7. Ride ‘Em, Barbie Girl: Commodifying Folklore, Place, and the Exotic 65 Jeannie B. Thomas 8. Tall Tales and Sales 87 Steve Siporin Narrative 105 9. Jesse James: An American Outlaw 107 C. W. Sullivan III 10. John Campbell’s Adventure, and the Ecology of Story 118 Jarold Ramsey 11. Raven and the Tide: A Tlingit Narrative 135 Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, editors Groups 151 12. “Two Moonlight Rides and a Picnic Lunch”: Memories of Childhood in a Logging Community 153 Twilo Scofield 13. In Her Own Words: Women’s Frontier Friendships in Letters, Diaries, and Reminiscences 162 Margaret K. Brady 14. The Concept of the West and Other Hindrances to the Study of Mormon Folklore 179 William A. Wilson 15. The Coquelle Indians and the Cultural “Black Hole“ of the Southern Oregon Coast 191 George B. Wasson 16. Visible Landscapes/Invisible People: Negotiating the Power of Representation in a Mining Community 211 Robert McCarl Personal Essay 227 17. Local Character 229 Kim Stafford References 237 Notes on Contributors and Editors 253 Acknowledgments his anthology started taking shape almost a decade ago, independently T and more or less simultaneously, in the minds of two of the volume’s editors. We were widely separated geographically but alike in our regard for a teacher and mentor whose impact upon us and upon our field has been immense. Each of us imagined putting together a volume of essays in honor of him, and before long each learned, quietly networking among old school- mates, that the other had the same bright idea: Say, kids, let’s put on a show. We are deeply grateful now to the people without whom we surely could not have put this show on. Polly Stewart thanks Jennifer Chatfield for early help with the mysteries of scanning, word processing, and file man- agement. We editors wish also to express our gratitude to Simon Bronner, who generously gave us advice early on; to Miiko Toelken, who kept this venture a secret far longer than a spouse ought to have; to Kim Stafford, from whose essay we appropriated a resonant and fleeting line—the life of the place itself—for our volume’s subtitle; to John Alley and his colleagues Michael Spooner and Anna Furniss of Utah State University Press, who went well beyond the call of duty to make this book a reality; to Randy Williams and Jeannie Thomas, who made the local arrangements for a long-awaited surprise party; and—most of all—to our contributors. They stood by us and were patient. Introduction his book, a collection of essays on worldview and the American West, T started life some years back as a festschrift honoring Barre Toelken. The four of us who edited this volume are all past students of Barre’s. We want- ed to assemble essays written by students and colleagues who over the years had, like us, benefitted from Barre’s thought and wished to celebrate him as friend, colleague, and mentor. Yet, as we four eagerly began consulting (we hoped clandestinely) with a few trusted colleagues and publishers, we real- ized that although the traditional potpourri of festschrift-as-testimonial might have its special pleasures, we could honor Barre best by producing an anthology meant to stand on its own merits. We think readers will like the resulting book, which is diverse in approaches and writing styles but har- monious in its venture, variously applying Toelken’s path-breaking ideas about worldview to the topic of the American West, a region that is both prominent in his work and a source of endless fascination to the rest of us. In our selections, we have aimed for a range of voices, methods, and visions but have integrated them through the focus of one theme, worldview, in one region, the American West. What is worldview? Toelken gives us an entry point in The Dynamics of Folklore: “‘Worldview’ refers to the manner in which a culture sees and expresses its relation to the world around it” (1996a, 263). A simple claim— with complex implications. As members of the species Homo sapiens, we possess five senses for collecting information, but the ways in which we use these physiological structures to do the collecting are dramatically condi- tioned by the particular culture in which we are raised. The worldview we acquire from those around us becomes as much a part of our perceptual equipment as the physical engineering of our senses. Worldview is social as well as material, spiritual as well as physical. It refers to the socially agreed upon way in which a group with continuity in time and space shapes and expresses its reality. Thus worldview inevitably perme- ates all of every group’s culture, yet, as members of a specific culture ourselves, it is hard for us to understand that worldview is only our take on reality (and our only take on reality) since it is the very conceptual tool with which we see and communicate. As Toelken puts it, “each culture has a distinctive way of 1 2 Worldviews and the American West thinking that it passes on to its young, and this way of thinking is made up of codes so deeply represented in language that they become . the primary way in which people of that culture can understand anything” (1996a, 263). Features of worldview extend beyond folk groups and may be surpris- ingly consistent at the folk, popular, and elite levels of a nation or even throughout a whole civilization over a long period of time, as Alan Dundes showed so powerfully in a series of pioneering essays (1968, 1969, and 1971). But even when folk and elite culture share the same worldview—as with the reliance on the number three in Euro-American culture for organizing every- thing from deity to small, medium, and large clothing sizes, to joking formu- las—we are likely to acquire such fundamentals initially (as infants and chil- dren) at the informal, folk level and then find them reinforced through folk- lore on a daily basis throughout our lives. Worldview is also an analytic tool, a holistic concept that we can use to attempt to grasp a culture’s way of seeing “from inside the culture rather than outside” (Mendelson 1968, 576). Rather than leading us to regard national, mass, or elite culture as more highly developed or more scientific or more all-encompassing than “primitive,” folk, and local culture, the con- cept assumes that there are legitimate, varied, logical systems of perception and expression flowing out of different, time-tested assumptions. Perhaps no scholarly concept involves so profound a move away from ethnocentrism as does the concept of worldview.1 How, then, have we involved worldview in the interpretation of the American West in this collection of essays? A first answer, through analogy, might be this: imagine a huge, powerful, revolving telescope somewhere on the crest of the Rockies, swinging to focus on different places in the West— ethnic places, occupational places, places at a remove in time, gendered places.