[MD] Teachings from the American Earth (Part I)

[skutvik at online.no]

Arlo and all.

On 1 Feb. you spaketh.

> I've recently pulled off my shelf a copy of Dennis and Barbara 
> Tedlock's "Teachings from the American Earth, Indian Religion and
> Philosophy", published in 1975.
 
> In the Introduction, which I will include in a series of posts to
> follow, I think you will see a lot of similarity between Pirsig's
> exposition on Indians in LILA, as well as some groundwork for
> considering the non-S/O culture (painted broadly) which draws Pirsig
> to use the Indians as exemplars. 

What is all this about American Indians' culture being non-S/O 
supposed to prove? We know that the social level along with all 
levels below intellect are non-S/O. If it is to indicate that they had 
reached a Quality-like meta-level it's wrong, they were no 
different than any other "aboriginals" in this respect.     

Bo



















I am about halfway through the book,
> and I do recommend it (your public library should be able to get you a
> copy). I've made a few notes within the text, to point out specific
> points of commonality or interest. (No, I did not type all this in, I
> used a scanner, and its been known to produce a typo or two, I've
> tried to catch all I could, but you know how that goes.)
> 
> ========================
> 
> "The American Indian has already taught us a great deal, whether we
> remember it or not. In the far north of this continent, life is still
> dependent in part on the technology of the Eskimo and Indian, who gave
> us among other things the parka, snowshoe, toboggan, and kayak. Maize,
> potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc, which today make up more than
> half the world's tonnage of staple foods, were first domesticated in
> the New World. Most modem cotton, including that grown in the Old
> World, is the long-staple cotton of the American Indian. Some 220
> American Indian drugs have been or still are official in the
> Pharmacopeia of the United States of America or the National
> Formulary. Even in these practical areas, we have sometimes been slow
> to learn. As recently as thirty years ago, Indian oral contraceptives
> were dismissed as mere magic; later, when these same botanical drugs
> were found to suppress ovulation, they set medical researchers on the
> road to "the pill."
> 
> Although we have accepted a great deal of technology from the 
> American Indian, we have not yet learned his more difficult lessons,
> lessons about the mind and spirit. Some of these lessons concern the
> very things we have borrowed, as in the case of that most famous of
> Indian stimulants, tobacco. For the Indian, tobacco always had a
> sacramental meaning: the smoke was exhaled east and west, north and
> south, above and below, and then the smoker blew smoke on himself. In
> this way he joined the self with the cosmos. When we adopted tobacco
> we turned it into a personal habit, and we have overused it to the
> point where it has killed many of us. The final irony is that there
> should be a righteous public campaign against this sacred gift of
> America, as if there were something inherently wrong with smoking.
> Beeman Logan, a Seneca medicine man, suggests that the trouble is with
> ourselves: tobacco kills us, he says, because we do not respect it.
> 
> An easy way of reading Logan's message is to say that the Indian has a
> different relationship to the natural world than we do. If he can
> "respect" a plant, he must be "closer" to nature than we are, and we
> imagine ourselves more like him in our own distant past, before we
> started to dominate nature. Those of us who are believers in material
> progress see our task as elevating the Indian to our level by teaching
> him how to make nature better serve material ends. If, on the other
> hand, we are suspicious of material progress, we envy the Indian and
> wish that we could somehow "return to nature," suspecting all the
> while that there is really no way to recover our own innocence. The
> trouble with both of these views is that they allow us to picture the
> living Indian as a fossil from which to learn about the past. If there
> are any lessons to be had about the present, we think they are ours to
> teach him, whether we wish to initiate him into the present or to warn
> him away from it "for his own good."
> 
> There is quite another way to approach Logan's message, and that is to
> defer the question of its meaning and call attention instead to a
> supposed error in the thought process which produced it. "From the
> point of view of Lucien Levy-Bruhl, it would be argued that the
> Indian's characteristic participation mystique, his feeling of oneness
> with the world, has here blinded him to the difference between himself
> and the tobacco plant. If he only had a "logical" mind, he could see
> that a plant is an inanimate object and is neither owed respect nor
> able to punish [scare quotes on logic point towards S/Oism- Arlo].
> From the more recent point of view of Claude Levi-Strauss, the
> supposed error is not in a lack of logic but in an overzealous and
> premature application of it, which in this case seeks" to link facts
> from the disparate realms of psychology (the attitude of "respect")
> and biology (tobacco and death) in a single system of cause and
> effect. ["... to be part of the world, and not an enemy of it", ZMM -
> Arlo]
> 
> All of the approaches presented so far permit us to sidestep the
> possibility of learning directly from the Indian. It is true that
> anthropologists sometimes describe themselves as students of the
> Indian; they may indeed appear to be his students while they are in
> the field, but by the time they publish their "results," it is usually
> clear that the Indian is primarily an object of study [sound familiar?
> -Arlo]. If anthropologists would seriously put themselves in the
> position of being the Indian's students, they would have to take more
> seriously what he considers to be important. But instead of learning
> to experience respect for tobacco, for example, they simply wish to
> find an explanation for why someone like Beeman Logan might respect
> it, thereby keeping him and his lesson at arm's length. They may
> listen to him, but they do not hear him.
> 
> In order to become the Indian's students, we have to recognize that
> some of what he has to teach transcends cultural or historical
> boundaries. Paul Radin took precisely this position with respect to
> American Indian religion, saying that we would never make any progress
> in our understanding "until scholars rid themselves, once and for all,
> of the curious notion that everything possesses an evolutionary
> history; until they realize that certain ideas and certain concepts
> are . . . ultimate for man. " Mircea Eliade, in his classic study of
> shamanism, puts the matter this way: "The various types of
> civilization are, of course, organically connected with certain
> religious forms; but this in no sense excludes the spontaneity and, in
> the last analysis, the ahistoricity of religious life." And the Sioux
> holy man Lame Deer, fully aware of the diversity of external religious
> forms among American Indians, says, "I think when it comes right down
> to it, all the Indian religions are somehow part of the same belief,
> the same mystery." [recognition of metaphoricity? -Arlo]
> 
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