reply to mary churchill

Reply to Mary ChurchillAuthor(s): Charles HudsonSource: American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Summer, 2000), pp. 494-502Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1185919 .

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Reply to Mary Churchill

CHARLES HUDSON

Mary Churchill has criticized my interpretation of certain aspects of the belief

system and religious behavior of the Native peoples who are the subject of my book The Southeastern Indians.' By far the richest information on such beliefs and behavior is that on the Cherokees, collected by James Mooney in the late nineteenth century.2 Hence, the Cherokees figure prominently though not ex-

clusively in my book. Churchill criticizes my documentary sources as well as the use I make of them, and she criticizes my use of the theoretical and inter-

pretive approaches of the time in which I wrote. In particular, she criticizes my contention that (1) polarity or opposition was a salient feature of Southeastern Indian thought and that (2) an important theme in their ritual behavior was

purity and pollution. I must say that reading her attempt to reconstruct my thought processes as

I wrote The Southeastern Indians has been something of an out-of-body experience for me. It has been twenty-five years since I have thought intensively about these matters, and it has not been easy for me to conjure up the mental

furnishings of the person I was. Let me first try to recall the theoretical influences on my thinking when I

was writing The Southeastern Indians. Churchill is correct in saying that I re-

garded Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger as a seminal work.3 In refreshingly clear, sprightly prose, Douglas set forth a new way of interpreting taboos and prohibitions, not as irrationalities to be explained by one or another psycholog- ical or sociological theory but as proceeding from the structure of folk classification systems-as by-products of a people's attempt to impose order on the world. I particularly admired her analysis of the abominations of Leviticus, for it implied that her analysis held for ancient Hebrews as well as for such people as the Lele of Africa.

In retrospect, I now see that I was perhaps too admiring of Douglas's analysis of the Book of Leviticus. Even though I always thought of symbolic anom-

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alies as purely logical constructs, as things that fell into two or more categories (in the same way that a bat has mammalian fur and teeth but flies with the birds), I sometimes referred to anomalies as "abominations," after the manner of the Book of Leviticus.4 I will have more to say about this later.

I must say that I am concerned that Churchill implies that I do not sufficiently acknowledge my debt to Douglas. I had thought that my citing her book in footnotes was sufficient.

Whether Douglas's Purity and Danger was influenced by the work of Claude Levi-Strauss I cannot say. But if her own words matter, she was more influenced

by her mentor, the anthropologist Franz Seiner, himself an orthodox Jew who had written on the subject of taboos. For my part, I can say that I never drew

heavily on the work of Levi-Strauss, though I was surely aware of his recogni- tion of the importance of opposition in human thought generally. And I well remember that the logical relation of opposition was very much in the air at the time I wrote. Even before I read Levi-Strauss I had read Robert Hertz's essay on the symbolism of the right and left hands, and I had read works on the same

phenomenon by Rodney Needham, the classical scholar G. E. R. Lloyd, and others.5

Churchill missed or ignored the strongest influence on my thinking in the

early 1970s, namely Robin Horton's two-part paper on African traditional

thought and Western science.6 Central to Horton's schema is a presumably universal distinction between common sense and "theory." According to Hor- ton's intellectualist approach, when people can render their experience intelli-

gible through the common sense of their culture, they will do so. But when the events in life defy explanation in commonsense terms, then people resort to a

higher level of explanation that postulates the existence of causal agencies that are commonly called spiritual, but may properly be called theoretical because of their abstractness. One attractive aspect of Horton's approach is that it did not require me to identify any particular piece of Cherokee belief as magic, re- ligion, or science, as was usual at the time in which I wrote. Instead, I could speak of Cherokee conceptions as a belief system or "native folk theory." 7

Yet another theoretical influence on my thinking was so deep in my assump- tions it did not occur to me to mention it. Namely, I have always been in agree- ment with E. E. Evans-Pritchard that the most basic interpretive act in social anthropology is properly characterized as a kind of translation.8 Just as one translates from one language to another, more or less accurately, the social anthropologist translates from one culture to another, more or less accurately. This is one of the reasons I used the term "abominations," assuming that Jews and Christians familiar with the Book of Leviticus would thus possess en- hanced access to a framework for thinking about Southeastern Indian concep-

AMERICAN INDIAN QUARTERLY/SUMMER 2000/VOL. 24, NO.3 495



tualizations. I now regret having used "abomination" as a kind of synonym for anomaly, but nowhere do I say that all anomalies are "detested and loathsome," as Churchill claims I do, and I surely never thought that they were.9

In her review of some of the more important documentary evidence used in The Southeastern Indians, Churchill seems intent on proving that the conceptions of purity and pollution were seen by me as "given facts" recorded by naive observers long ago. I am compelled to point out that her remarks about John Lawson's report about Southeastern Indian "purgations" are off the mark. When Lawson speaks of Indian "purgations" after drinking yaupon tea-a possible emetic-he is specifically referring to self-induced vomiting. When he speaks about the purgations of women in menstrual isolation, he is referring specifically to the purging of menstrual blood. When he refers to the fast- ing and isolation of youths undergoing a puberty rite, he uses the term "pur- gatory" to refer to their liminal position in society. In fact, Lawson appears to have had little grasp of the phenomena of belief and behavior I refer to as purity and pollution.10 And it should be noted that, for the most part, Lawson saw the Indians from an outsider's point of view.

James Adair, whom Churchill refers to as a "non-Indian trader," is another matter." By characterizing him thus, she presumably wishes to weaken any claim that his description of eighteenth-century Southeastern Indian life is ac- curate or to be trusted in any way. She neglects to note that Adair spent several decades living among several different groups of eighteenth-century South- eastern Indians, and he made a concerted attempt to understand them from the inside out, so to speak. Remarkable for his time, he attempted to understand the beliefs and conceptions that lay behind their outward behavior. Specifi- cally, Adair theorized that the Indians were in fact descended from ancient Is- raelites, and a substantial part of his book is intended as a proof of this thesis. Hence, there is no question that Adair was fully cognizant of Judeo-Christian conceptions of purity and pollution when he described the beliefs and behavior of Southeastern Indians.

Some years ago I published a paper arguing that we should not dismiss Adair as an ethnocentric and wrong-headed observer. While no modern scholar would give any credence to his argument that Indians were descended from ancient Israelites, we should not dismiss him for attempting to do what so few of his contemporaries attempted-to grasp Indian culture and society from the inside. One of my main points was that his extended use of Biblical culture helped him to see what others missed. With ethnology or social anthropology in its merest infancy in the 1700s, where was Adair to turn to find cultural and social parallels? Greek and Roman history and the Bible were virtually his only sources, and of these the Bible was the better choice. But a downside of his argument and approach was that the Bible misled him in a number of instances,

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and in some ambiguous instances we cannot know whether his Israelite theory helped or hindered his interpretation.12

Subsequent Euro-American observers also used the concept of purity and

pollution to describe Southeastern Indians. William Bartram occasionally used the concept of purity, but with little elaboration, and there is no reason to think that he got it from Adair, or that he had even read Adair.'3 I have never made use of the John Howard Payne papers, but as Churchill makes clear, Payne used the terminology of purity and pollution.14 Whether he ever read Adair is unknown to me.

Hence, it would seem that several observers from the early 1700s until the

early 1800s perceived something in Southeastern Indian belief and behavior that

they described as purity and pollution. They may have done so independently. And clearly, in so doing, they used Judaic and Christian beliefs uncritically.

James Mooney and John Swanton occasionally mentioned purity and pollution, though such concerns were rather marginal to their particular interests in Southeastern Indian beliefs and behavior, and both of them had read Adair's work closely.'" Neither Mooney nor Swanton is especially germane to the is- sues at hand.

I must say that I thought that I had done something rather more than merely "import" the discourse of purity versus pollution from their writing into my own.16 My contention is that Adair, Bartram, and Payne were attempting to translate aspects of Southeastern Indian culture into their own culture, and it is no surprise that the terms they employed came to them through Judeo- Christian sources. But let me hasten to say that while I confess to being "West- ern" in culture, I am not now nor have I ever been either Jewish or Christian, and hence I attribute to "purity" and "pollution" no meaningful content on that account. On the contrary, by defining "purity" as a spiritual state that is believed to exist when one strictly observes the dictates of one's cultural rules and categorical systems, and "pollution" as the spiritual condition that is believed to occur when one violates such rules, it makes it possible to use these concepts in cross-cultural applications.'7

Churchill says that Douglas's theoretical formulation quelled any suspicions I may have had about cultural descriptions from two centuries earlier, which "by virtue of age alone, should have been interpreted more thoroughly."18 As I said earlier, I regard cultural description, and at some level cultural analysis, as a kind of translation, one that yields an inherently imperfect product. It fol- lows from this that I would never claim finality or perfection for my analysis of the cultural and social arrangements of the Native peoples of the Southeast. But this does not mean that I concur that my analysis is wrong-headed or egre- giously flawed.

What appealed to me about Douglas's argument in Purity and Danger is that

AMERICAN INDIAN QUARTERLY/SUMMER 2000/VOL. 24, NO.3 497



it was a middle-range theoretical formulation that enabled me to see a com-

monality between beliefs and behaviors of Southeastern Indians on the one hand and Judeo-Christian and Lele beliefs and behavior on the other hand. In

addition, her observations on classificatory anomalies (none of which are so characterized by Adair, Bartram, and Payne) shed light on several puzzling long-term aspects of Southeastern Indian culture. Why is it that in both late

prehistoric Southeastern iconography and in myths collected in the Southeast from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries only certain native Southeastern animals (owl, bat, otter, rattlesnake, woodpecker) are represented over and over, while others are omitted or rare (deer, fox, opossum, squirrel, robin, bluebird)? Why is it that in both late prehistoric iconography and in later mythology, there are representations of fabulous beasts represented as

having the mixed features of normal animals? The most notable of these is the horned and sometimes winged serpent. It seemed to me that Douglas's formulation suggested the crux of a new interpretive framework.19

At this point I want to note two interpretive blunders on the part of Mary Churchill. I do not say now, and have never believed, that people regard all anomalies as detestable and loathsome. (I again reiterate my apology for using "abomination" as a careless but well-intentioned synonym for "anomaly.") As Churchill notes, I pointed out in my book that while the Uktena was a dan-

gerous being for Cherokees, they also regarded it as a useful source of power. My basic contention is that the classification systems of preliterate peoples, employing relatively few categories, must necessarily encounter anomalies in

everyday life. Once encountered, their cultural reactions to such anomalies may be various: (1) they may be abjured, kicked under the rug, ignored; (2) they may be regarded as unclean, polluting; (3) they may be held up as sources of religious or magical power; (4) they may be used to symbolize supreme social and political standing, and I am sure this does not exhaust the possibilities.

Churchill more seriously misrepresents my argument when she says that my mention of the purely logical relationship of opposition is in fact an un- conscious use on my part of a theological doctrine that is said to go back to Zoroastrianism. This, she says, is the religious assumption that behind every- thing are two opposed principles, or spiritual beings, and that one is good and the other bad.

That is not what I said, and I have never thought that such a notion is appli- cable to Southeastern beliefs and behavior. But as I have lectured on these matters to undergraduates for many years, I have found that my students are strongly conditioned to impart moral content to oppositions. I believe that this is in fact what Churchill has done.

Churchill pats herself and other postmodernists on the back, claiming that through their good offices they have undermined all that was once considered

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certain. Through the brilliant musings of postmodernists, "determinism has

given way to indeterminacy, univocalism to polyvocality, objectivity to partial perspectives, unity to montage, and canonical interpretations to postcolonial ones."'20 With the foundations of knowledge thus turned-presto chango- to quicksand, she says that my interpretation of Cherokee religious thought is at worst inaccurate and at best partial. On the basis of this modest intellectual claim, presumably the same could be said about anyone whose graduate studies predate the postmodernist mutation.

What, we may ask, does Churchill suggest as an alternative to my approach and interpretation? She claims that Cherokee thought could be more accu-

rately seen in terms of an "indigenous-based model of complementarity rather than oppositions." 21 I leave the reader to ponder over what "indigenous-based" can mean. Does it mean that the scholar or analyst must himself/herselfbe indigenous? An Indian by some definition? If Churchill has indigenous genes in mind, what racial standards are scholars to meet, and who is to pass judgment on their racial bona fides? And if she has indigenous culture in mind, are we to believe that Cherokee religious and philosophical traditions are untranslat- able, so culture-bound that a non-indigenous person cannot grasp them? If so, then I do not see how the dialogue she recommends can possibly occur.

I confess to being puzzled by what Churchill means by a model of complementarity rather than opposition. Does she mean that in the Cherokee world- view every being and spiritual entity gets along with every other in a cozy peaceable kingdom? If so, how does she reconcile this with the role of blood revenge in Southeastern Indian social and political affairs? 22 How does she reconcile this warm and fuzzy complementarity with the principle of vengeance that is so apparent in Cherokee mythology? 23

Finally, as a social anthropologist I quite appreciate the importance of knowledge possessed by Native "elders and religious practitioners," though I would like to know more about what she has in mind. Since my concern in The South- eastern Indians was principally the beliefs and behaviors of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indians, I would like to know how the relevant elders and Native practitioners could be resurrected from the dead. Or does Churchill require that my work be vetted by contemporary Indian "elders" and "Native practitioners"? If so, any self-respecting scholar would find such a requirement repugnant. One would want to know, for example, how such contemporary elders attain their office. Is it that to be an elder a person must (1) pass a racial and/or cultural test and (2) reach a certain age? Is that all? Are no scholarly cre- dentials required? May a contemporary religious practitioner also be a believ- ing Christian, as most contemporary Native Americans are?

The Southeastern Indians suffers from having been written in a time when anthropologists employed the "ethnographic present" to speak of cultural pat-

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terns and institutions as if they still existed out of time in the present. Thus, in the late twentieth century one could write: "In Cherokee culture a boy has love-hate feelings toward his mother's brother because in a matrilineal kinship system this particular uncle is the family disciplinarian." In fact, matrilineality is only a memory for late twentieth-century Southeastern Indians, if it is re- membered at all.

Painted in the soft brush strokes of the ethnographic present, the Native

people of the Southeast were prevented from being depicted as actors in world

history, as they most assuredly have been since the sixteenth century. In the

early 1970s I had grown uncomfortable with the "ethnographic present," but

intellectually I was unable to break out of its grip. In my book I wanted to de-

pict the ways of Native Southeastern peoples while at the same time placing them in the context of history. This explains the rather clumsy structure of The Southeastern Indians, which I have described as a kind of Dagwood sandwich: (1) A piece of archaeological rye bread, (2) holding up a thick serving of various cultural and social meats and cheeses, and (3) the whole thing topped off with a piece of historical white bread.

Social history cannot be written in any such mechanical fashion. The prob- lem of writing the social history of the Native peoples of the Southeast is for- midable. One has to simultaneously represent both synchronic social and cultural systems and the diachronic change that transforms them. One has to both represent the exotic world of the Southeastern chiefdoms and the Euro-

pean world-system that impinged upon them as "storms brewed in other men's lands" and in time destroyed, dissolved, or enveloped by them. And we must do it with the merest fragments of archaeological and oral evidence. As cultural and social beings, the Native peoples of the Southeast have been funda- mentally transformed by history several times over, as have we all. If the Na- tive peoples of the Americas are ever to be more than moral fodder for various ideologies-whether left, right, or postmodern-they must find their proper place in the social history of the modern world. Since 1976 some progress has been made on this front by archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and historians, but much more remains to be done.24

All of this seems to have passed by Mary Churchill. Indeed, if I understand her, she seems to argue in favor of the ethnographic present in a particularly radical way. She asserts: "I prefer to use the present tense in speaking about Na- tive Americans." There is no as if in her ethnographic present.25

As a postscript to anyone not already committed to the postmodernist agenda, I would like to recommend Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History (New York: The Free Press, 1996). Readers may judge for themselves whether Windschuttle succeeds in tossing a few salutary bags of cement into the mire of postmodernist quicksand.

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NOTES

For criticism and suggestions I am grateful to Cameron Adams, Robbie Ethridge, Russell Kirkland, and Stephen Kowalewski. However, I alone am responsible for what is said here.

1. Mary C. Churchill, "The Oppositional Paradigm of Purity versus Pollution in Charles Hudson's The Southeastern Indians," American Indian Quarterly 20 (fall 1996): 563-93; Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee

Press, 1976). 2. James Mooney, "Myths of the Cherokee," Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau

of American Ethnology (Washington Dc: Government Printing Office, 19o00).

3. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

4. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 139-69. 5. Robert Hertz, "The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Po-

larity," in Death and the Right Hand, trans. Robert Hertz, Rodney Needham, and Clau- dia Needham (London: Cohen & West, 1960), 89-160; Rodney Needham, introduc- tion to Primitive Classification, by Pmile Durkheim and Marcell Mauss, trans. Rodney Needham (London: Cohen & West, 1963), vii-xlviii; G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Anal-

ogy: Two Types ofArgumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1966). 6. Robin Horton, "African Transitional Thought and Western Science," Africa 37

(January, April 1967), 50-71, 155-87.

7. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 120.

8. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Essays in Social Anthropology (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 22-23.

9. Churchill, "Oppositional Paradigm," 581. 10. John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (1709; reprint ed. Hugh Talmage Lefler,

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 229, 197, 241. 11. James Adair, History of the American Indians (London: Edward and Charles

Dilley, 1775). 12. Charles Hudson, "James Adair as Anthropologist," Ethnohistory 24 (1977):

311-28.

13. William Bartram, Travels of William Bartram, ed. Mark Van Doren (1791; reprint, New York: Dover, 1955), 399.

14. The John Howard Payne Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago. Payne visited the Cherokees several times in the 1830s, compiling fourteen notebooks from documents, interviews, and correspondence with missionaries.

15. Mooney, "Myths of the Cherokee," 322; John R. Swanton, "Indians of the South- eastern United States," Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 137 (1946): 768-69.

16. Churchill, "Oppositional Paradigm," 577.

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17. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 317. 18. Churchill, "Oppositional Paradigm," 580.

19. Charles Hudson, "Uktena: A Cherokee Anomalous Monster," Journal of Chero- kee Studies 3 (1978): 62-75.

20. Churchill, "Oppositional Paradigm," 584. 21. Ibid. 22. John Phillip Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation

(New York: New York University Press, 1970). 23. Mooney, "Myths of the Cherokee," 250-52. 24. See, for example, David G. Anderson, The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political

Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994); Charles Hudson, The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee (Washington Dc: Smithsonian Institution Press, 199o); Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American

South, 1521-1704 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). 25. Churchill, "Oppositional Paradigm," 590, n. to.

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