Farella on
the Culture of Permanence
John Farella's 1993 The
Wind in a Jar, full of stories on some
fieldwork among the Navajo of the southwestern US, is a wonderful little
book about many things, including the disjuncture between the anthropologist's
"culture" hunt and the Navajo world. Here's a fragment of the story which
gave the book its title. With state-of-the-art recording equipment, he
and a colleague set out to record the Night Chant on archival-quality tape.
But the constant wind had to be shielded from the microphones, and that's
not easy. Their technique was perfect, and the result must be stored somewhere.
In the Night Chant there is knowledge and there is power. In the Navajo
world, the one derives from the other. The knowledge is acquired; one person
teaches it to another; the student memorizes it over a period of years.
Once you have learned it, it belongs to you: it is yours to do with as
you want. But it is only momentarily yours because everything that is known
ultimately returns to the universe and is forgotten.
This certainty about knowledge
ultimately being lost is a part of the Navajo story of things. "One day
we will wake up and it will be forgotten; it will be as if we never knew
it. The words will all be forgotten and with that, the Navajo way will
be gone." This is a powerful idea -- that we possess, hold, and control
things only for a moment, that we keep nothing forever. You find it everywhere.
The thread that goes out to the side of the rug exists so as to free the
animating force of that creation. The design of a pot is interrupted so
as not to hold those powers in check. A sandpainting is created over a
period of days. It beckons and then contains the powers it depicts. These
are used by the medicine man to aid the patient and then released. The
sandpainting is destroyed and the remnant is disposed of so as not to imprison
these deities. A prayer ends with a portion that releases the powers it
has beckoned, as does a song, as does a ceremony....
The only stories of permanence,
of things lasting forever, are about witchcraft (and today about Christianity),
which is always concerned with personal immortality, sacrificing the life-stuff
of relatives and using it to live on. Immortality is not a personal thing;
continuity and connectedness are in future and past generations.
In this knowledge is a respect
for the powers in the world, an acceptance of correct and proper use but
a prohibition against the permanent possession of what is ephemeral. In
the ceremonies you can see a willingness to nudge things very slightly,
but beyond that to accept the course of things. Contained within this concept
of knowledge is something very personal, something that happens between
people. Knowledge is in interaction. A man teaches other men; the gods
have taught man and in the prayer, the song, the ritual, the interaction
continues; and there is also thought and reflection, man interacting with
himself about knowledge.
The Night Chant and everything
else are about this, about process, not about things....
Against this backdrop of essential
process, we anthropologists arrived to preserve this ceremony, to record
it and place it in a vault somewhere so that it would never be "lost."
We were there to build [a] dam, to take a world of movement and make it
hold still, to embalm it. Even when the Navajos had forgotten it all, we
would have it preserved in jars somewhere, forever....
When you attempt to discover
the world of others, you end up with a caricature of yourself. As a people
we believe in things and we believe in these things as separate from and
often instead of people and relationships. Knowledge is one of those things.
It exists in books and even in vaults, or, better yet, in books in vaults
in universities. When it is in minds, we still think of it as a thing,
an artifact, not as something that is alive, that is moving and changing.
When we teach we are supposed to put things called facts into people's
heads. And then we give objective tests, to measure how many things the
students have in their minds. Or we create an encyclopedia -- a compilation
of knowledge. It is fixed, an artifact rather than a product of interaction.
It exists on its own, apart from people.
And of course all of this
shows that we weren't listening, that we had missed the point of the epistemology
we were treating as an object. We were at this Night Chant in another attempt
to transform the Navajo account of process into an entity that would last
forever. And in this case we were going to preserve what was very much
alive. We weren't trying to discover something that was Navajo; we were
trying to make their ideas into our own Their epistemology and ours are
opposed and incompatible, and if you care about any sort of truth you have
to decide on the correctness of one or the other....
And like all preservationists,
we operated on the premises of technology and attention to detail. We would
be able to preserve more completely and more accurately because we had
better stuff, better equipment, and we had better methods to rationalize,
to ideologically power these machines.... We had earphones on and wind
shields over the microphones. One constant about the Navajo Reservation
is the wind. It either blows hard or is intolerable. So there we were with
these tape recorders; there were always two of us doing the recording.
One of us was a "backup". An essential part of any technological endeavor
is to have a backup. Don't want to miss anything. When you obsess about
technology, you exclude understanding. But you don't see this. In fact,
you rationalize the use of technique as a means to, or as part of the effort
to, understand. It is one of those highly addictive sorts of endeavors.
Once you start this process
there is no escape, recording without understanding, paying attention to
the machines, keeping the arrows on the dials from entering the red zone.
Having recorded it accurately and not understanding, we think that a better
recording, a more accurate machine, will bring comprehension. So we improve
methods and machines, use video instead of just audio, and when that fails
add more cameras and recorders. We still don't understand, but once the
process is begun, reflection, thought, and questioning vanish. We instead
keep trying for the perfect recording, the perfect representation that
will last and not change, the picture of Dorian Gray.
What matters in the ceremony
that we were trying to put in a mason jar is what is meant; what it said
about that moment; what it said about the beginnings, the Navajo, man in
general.... We tried to preserve and control the sound and the wind so
as to preserve what we didn't understand. The illusory promise was always
that you could go over it anytime. The wind that we eliminated from the
recording was an important part of what we should have kept. It was a part
of the meaning, a part of the story and of the chant. We thought it was
noise rather than information.
We looked totally ridiculous
in this setting. I can't remember if we knew this or not. I'm fairly certain
that I felt it and that Allen felt it. Navajos take it for granted that
Anglo anthropologists look silly; in fact they probably regard it as an
essential part of the job description. In addition they ask stupid questions
and say even stupider things. We fit this description quite nicely... looking
like two of the original Mouseketeers monitoring the launch of a space
ship. There was nothing about what we were doing that was funny.
What a strange contrast. We
were witnessing a part of what had gone on in the beginning when the ancestors
of these people were still inside the earth, still trying to create the
future. And we were trying to transform the ancient into the modern with
our machines while the ancient remained aloof and indifferent to our success
or failure.