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Contents
Background
Content
Key Terms
Dialogue
References
External Links
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Background
Keith H. Basso is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, having retired in 2006 from the Anthropology Department. He received his PhD from Stanford in 1967. Basso has been described as a cultural and linguistic anthropologist due to his use of “anthropological and linguistic tools . . . to the service of documenting apache vernacular intellect and of carefully considering the challenges it presents to hasty over-generalization.” His study of the Apache began when he spent a summer as Harvard graduate on the Ft. Apache reservation in 1960. Wisdom Sits in Places received the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing in 1997, the Western State Book Award for Creative Nonfiction in 1996, and the J. I. Stanley Prize from the School of American Research in 2000.
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Content
Basso introduces his project by identifying what he considers an untapped location of meaning: People tend to not think space is complex, he argues, because our “attachments to places, like the ease with which we usually sustain then, are unthinkingly taken for granted” (xiii) However, once we are deprived of our attachments to place, we see that they are “nothing less than profound.” (xiii). Place is a part of identity. Ethnographers are similarly guilty of taking senses of place for granted, and there is lack of ethnographic work that explores the cultural and social dimensions of sense of place.
This book records the project of making Apache maps with Apache names, which were in short supply (It’s interesting to note that this maps, though finished, were not published but rather retained by the Apaches). To collect his data, he traveled with Apache consultants as they explained place-names. As a result, he quotes extensively the words of his guides, often allowing them to be both descriptive and analytical. Each chapter of the book offers a different perspective on the “significance of places in Apache thought and practice.” By studying the place-names, one is exposed to Apache notions of wisdom, morality, spoken discourse, and ways of imagining the tribal past.
Basso’s conclusions are based in the belief that “place-making involves multiple acts of remembering and imagining which inform each other in complex ways.” (5). Place-making is a method of constructing history, and thus social tradition and personal and social identities as well. In chapter one this is felt the strongest perhaps in the conflict created when Basso is unable and unwilling to pronounce the name of a place correctly, thus disregarding the fact that saying a place-name is considered by some as quoting their ancestors. In addition, place-names describe what was seen by those who named the places, and are useful indicators of how the environment of a place has changed over time. Place-names as used in discourse are also infused with moral teachings and influence individuals’ conceptions of themselves and patterns of social action.
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Key Terms
place
place-name
wisdom
discourse
place-making
place-world
“go to work on”
landscape
conversation
“speaking with names”
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Dialogue
Basso concisely identifies his conversation partners in the preface, placing himself in the middle of dialogue in a variety of fields. He claims to draw from modern philosophy (Sartre, Heidegger, Nelson Goodman, Merleau-Ponty, Edward Casey), history (L.P. Hartley, William David Chapman, Lowenthal), novels and poetry with a strong sense of place (Faulkner, Welty, Stegner, Cormac, McCarthy, Larry McMurty, T.S. Elliot, Heaney), writings on nature (Dillard, Ehrlich, Lopez, McPhee), physics (Niels Bohr), American Indian Studies (N. Scott Momaday, Vine Deloria, Jr., Leslie Silko, Alfonso Otiz), the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, the sociology of Erving Goffman, and the sociolinguistics of Dell Hymes.
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References
Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
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External Links
http://www.unm.edu/~anthnews/pdf/spring06web.pdf