BOOK REVIEWS: Zuni and the American Imagination

Zuni and the American Imagination

By Eliza McFeely

Hill and Wang, 204 pages, $24

South of Gallup and west of Albuquerque is the largest of the 19 pueblos in New Mexico, the Pueblo of Zuni. It covers an area about the size of Rhode Island. Isolated from other human settlements, as it has been for centuries, some 7,000 Zuni live there.

For almost 500 years, Europeans and Americans have been crossing the desolate, high desert landscape of the Southwest to find the Pueblo of Zuni, seeking treasures, souls, knowledge, adventure. The Spanish came first, in 1540, looking for fabled cities of gold. They found no gold--only a crowded village full of people who made it clear, through arrows fired, that they did not wish to become subjects of the Spanish king. Eventually, in 1629, the Spanish built a mission, the Church of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe (reconstructed several times, it is still there), to convert the Zuni to Christianity, an effort that produced only modest success.

In the 19th Century, Americans began to arrive. First were traders, Protestant missionaries and military men. Toward the end of the century ethnographers, funded by the federal government, appeared to record a way of life they assumed would soon be gone. Hard at their heels, spurred by railroad development, came a few adventurous tourists.

Today, New Mexico Highway 53 regularly takes tourists to the pueblo, where Zuni craftsmen sell them jewelry, pottery and other wares. Every December, hundreds of visitors--a surprising number from Germany, where love of a mythic American West runs strong--crowd into the pueblo to witness the shalakos, joined by longhorns, mudheads and other kachinas and priests, make their ritualistic annual appearance. All night the Zuni dance, watched by the visitors from Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Chicago, Berlin and other points on the map of modern life.

Eliza McFeely, in her richly researched and elegantly written new book, "Zuni and the American Imagination," explores one of these many points of contact between the Zuni and their visitors. She writes about the first of the American ethnographers, though that is probably too scientific sounding a title, as she tells us, for her cast of primary characters. Above all, McFeely, a history professor, wants us to think about how and why Americans at the turn of the last century found the Zuni useful for thinking about themselves.

The relatively new discipline of anthropology had a far-reaching hold on the imagination of Americans by the late 19th Century. Collectors gathered up, by means fair and foul, thousands of Indian artifacts, which flowed into newly created natural history museums in America's great industrial cities. These museums popularly entertained a cross-section of the new mass urban population with lifelike Indian manikins, decked out in their native garb, surrounded by tools and sacred objects, often in naturalistic settings. Mass-circulation magazines featured articles on American Indians--and other peoples from far reaches of the world--written by anthropologists, based on field research, not romantic imaginings. And the great fairs of the era, not least the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, featured ethnographic exhibits of American Indian cultures that fascinated the passing throngs.

McFeely argues that such representations of American Indians, in general, and the Zuni, in particular, served a specific need for Americans during this era of unbridled industrialization and urbanization. She writes that Zuni supplied "these inhabitants of an industrial world with a stage set against which they could play out their fantasies of pre-industrial wholeness and cultural superiority. . . . When they shipped back Zuni artifacts and set up exhibits, and when they brought Zuni people east, they offered up for comparison a new rendering of American social identity. Here was a way to make peace with the tantalizing and troubling realities of an industrial consumer society."

Because the Zuni lived unconquered, not on a reservation but in their traditional pueblo as they had for centuries, they made, in the eyes of American anthropologists of the era, a perfect object of study and backdrop to American life.

To understand this process and give narrative life to it, McFeely details the lives of her anthropologist protagonists among the Zuni. She begins with Matilda Stevenson, among the first women to make a name for herself as an anthropologist. Stevenson arrived in Zuni in 1879 with the first ethnographic research team. Originally there only as the wife of one of the leaders of the team, she proved herself to be a gifted ethnographer who gained access to Zuni women and their everyday lives. She became particular friends with a Zuni named We'wha. After Stevenson returned home to Washington, D.C., We'wha went and stayed with her for six months, becoming a celebrity. We'wha called on President Grover Cleveland, House Speaker John Carlisle and other notables.

As Stevenson may or may not have known, the Zuni princess was a berdache, a man who had, in accord with Zuni custom, chosen to live and be accepted as a woman. This aspect of Zuni culture was not something Stevenson--or the savvy We'wha--chose to share with Washington society. (McFeely does not tell us much about We'wha because her book does not focus on the Zuni but on how the Zuni were perceived by their American ethnographers. But for those who want to know more about this extraordinary person, Will Roscoe's 1991 book, "The Zuni Man-Woman," features We'wha.)

Stevenson was an advocate of the dominant form of anthropology in her time, evolutionary anthropology, which saw different cultures fitting on a hierarchical ladder of development. Thus, she typed the Zuni as "barbaric," which was better than "savage," but nowhere near as evolved as the "civilized" United States. Such views served an American society wrestling with the unpleasant fallout of industrialization (think about Upton Sinclair's more-or-less contemporary portrait of Chicago's stockyards in "The Jungle").

Stevenson's better-known contemporary ethnographer of the Zuni, Frank Hamilton Cushing, was far less conventional in almost all regards. Cushing lived the fantasy that wove its way through at least a part of the upper-middle-class, sophisticated-American-male culture of the time. Cushing did not just observe the Zuni from a scientific distance: He became an accepted member of Zuni society. While researching the Zuni he wore their clothes, lived among them and participated, to a remarkable degree, in their cultural life. As McFeely writes: "Empathetic, imaginative, craving the life of the Indian as well as the life of the scientist, he experienced Zuni as a sort of magical amusement park full of puppets without strings."

Here was the best of both worlds: Cushing was a successful writer and professional, celebrated in New York and Washington, and at the same time he lived out fantastic adventures among an Indian people. In a series of popular magazine pieces titled "My Adventures in Zuni," Cushing helped to develop a new, modern American lifestyle. Cushing challenged Victorian ideals of fixed character and unalterable principles with an emergent modernist belief in the exciting rewards of a mutable personality and an openness to cultural experimentation and relativity.

Zuni culture was no more valued in Cushing's accounts than it was in Stevenson's. But, as McFeely concludes, "The Zuni culture that Cushing imagined for his readers was a sort of stage set of a strange land in which appeared living, sometimes dangerous adversaries whom he mastered and tamed." Well before Indiana Jones, Frank Cushing was entertaining Americans with his ability to use his wiles to wrest treasures (many, many valuable artifacts) from the Zuni and bring them back to civilization for all to admire.

More than 100 years after the first ethnographers visited Zuni, people from around the world still make their way to the pueblo, fascinated by a way of life they perceive as so different from their own. McFeely argues that "our fascination with Zuni is still a fascination with ourselves." She has thought well and hard about Zuni and the American imagination, and she may be right. Perhaps, too, she would agree that Zuni is not only a mirror for its visitors; for many it is also a living testimony to courage and adaptability, and one source, among many, of artistic creativity and spiritual vitality.
 
 

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