New York Field Trip

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org

Main Conference Page | 2005 NY Field Trip | Schedule of Events | About the Participants

Panel: “Thinking Culturally: An Insider’s Perspective”

The following is a transcript of a panel presentation from the New York Folklore Society’s Field Trip, “Writing Folklore,” held in collaboration with the Hudson Valley Writer’s Center and City Lore, Inc., on September 24, 2005. The session was held at the Warner Library in Tarrytown. Support for this conference was provided by Poets and Writers, through support from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

PANELISTS:

Moderator: Tom van Buren, Westchester Arts Council
Tom van Buren, Ph.D., is the staff folklorist for the Westchester County Arts Council, as well as a staff member at the Center for Traditional Music and Dance.

Joanne Mulcahy, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon
Joanne Mulcahy, Ph.D., teaches and directs the Writing Culture Summer Institute at the Northwest Writing Institute of Lewis and Clark College. Her publications include Birth and Rebirth on an Alaskan Island: The Life of an Alutiiq Healer and several essays.

Kevin White, State University of New York at Oswego
Kevin White is a Ph.D. candidate at SUNY-Buffalo’s Center for the Americas. A member of the Haudenosaunee Mohawk tribe, his dissertation is a study of Native American narrative and issues in its presentation to a non-Native American audience. He is currently employed at SUNY-Oswego.

Kirin Narayan, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Kirin Narayan, Ph.D., is a professor of anthropology and languages and cultures of Asia at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her books include Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching and the novel Love, Stars, and All That.

Tom Van Buren: We start off today with personal perspectives of major participants in the conference. The theme is “Thinking Culturally: An Insider’s Perspective.”

Last night Kirin Narayan gave a wonderful reading from her latest work reflecting on her own biographical experience: her biography of her own personal experience of growing up in India and of being bicultural. One thing that struck me was talking about one’s experience in one’s own family and upbringing and processing the cultural information and experience that comes down through one’s ancestors and environment. I was also the youngest of four in a family that brought together a lot of different perspectives, from the Middle East to the Hudson Valley. And I’ve been working most of my professional life in folklore and applied ethnomusicology, in presenting others and being the outsider, but at the same time working a lot with immigrant artists who themselves are outsiders here. So there’s a whole interesting dialogue back and forth about who’s the outsider, who’s the insider, and ultimately when a presentation happens, you hope and strive to have the artists or the tradition bearers be as much relating from their inside experience. I’ve been an insider here, yet traveling between so many worlds, I’m never quite sure who’s inside and who’s outside. I look forward very much to hearing what the panelists have to say on this subject, and I hope that you will participate with questions and comments of your own.

Joanne Mulcahy: Thinking culturally. As Tom mentioned, I did fieldwork in Alaska and also with a Mexican curandera in Oregon that I’m working on a book about. But I have written extensively as an “insider” about my own Irish-American family, mainly in creative nonfiction. But what I really want to do is to lay out some thoughts that were important to me in thinking culturally in a general way.

Joanne leads the group in a reading of Naomi Shahib Nye’s poem, “The Man Who Makes Brooms.”

So you come with these maps in your head
and I come with voices chiding me to
“speak for my people”
and we march around like guardians of memory
till we find the man on the short stool
who makes brooms.

I am starting with the idea of “the maps in our heads” as kind of a cultural framework, and the notion of who has to “speak for their people” and act as “guardians of memory” and all the parts of the poem that are so provocative for me in thinking about culture. This poem really provokes me to think about the things that have been most meaningful in my understanding of culture: the idea of the individual and the collective, the idea of cultural encounters, and how we know who we are through encounters with others, and the kind of emergent and spontaneous quality of that. Also, to think culturally is to have to hold very contradictory views at the same time in your mind and to realize that they have to coexist and sometimes can’t be reconciled.

So I wanted to just tell a few stories not so much from my fieldwork experience, but stories that embody for me some of those ideas. One of them is from when I was a graduate student in anthropology before I began to study folklore. I was getting my master’s and had just come from living and working on Kodiak Island, where I started out as a waitress and worked in the community. Deciding to study culture was a natural outgrowth of living in this community, where I had become very attached to a group of women. When I got to graduate school there was a person on the faculty who suggested to me, “Wasn’t it really just a bit bleak, these Eskimos eking out a living? And wouldn’t I want to consider another culture that was more exotic and symbolic?” I was stunned by the implication (and this will sound very odd to folklorists) that there were certain cultures that matter more than others, that they’re more worth studying or more important in some way.

This spiraled into a depression and triggered the sense that I was in the wrong place. I got a job working for a place called the Center for Independent Living, which helped elderly people in their homes. Through that job I was sent to a trailer park on the outskirts of Madison, Wisconsin, to work with a family in a very low-income area. The woman worked in a grocery store and her husband was a recovering alcoholic who wasn’t working. They had three children, and they had taken in their great-grandmother who was dying. She was literally a shriveled woman dressed in black, laid out on what looked like a cot in the center of the room. And this family had the most extraordinary rituals, stories, and ways of caring for this woman.

This became a high point of my year in graduate school, going to this trailer once a week. When the woman died, the young woman had been saving these dried rose petals—and I have to say this was through one of the bleakest winters I’ve ever spent in Wisconsin. It was so cold that it made Kodiak Island, Alaska, look like the banana belt. It was just in every way an utterly bleak time for me. This young woman had saved these dried rose petals in a jar so that when the great-grandmother died, she created this trail to heaven for her children to follow to say good-bye to their great-grandmother.

It was so powerful, and it made everything that I was learning in graduate school about ritual and story and performance completely alive for me in a way that nothing before really had. It opened me up to really thinking about my own family in new ways, to thinking about the cultures I was working with in Alaska, and subsequently I’ve hearkened back to it as a moment of real illumination.

I’m sure we all have experiences of that kind of cultural encounter, where we saw something in a new way. So I think that’s really the only story I’ll probably tell right now. Thank you.

Kevin White: Thank you. When I start to think about culture, or thinking culturally, and what it means to me, an insider’s perspective, this is actually what most of my academic work has been geared towards: analyzing all the stories that have gone, have been gathered, before me. And what’s fascinating about it to me is looking at it as a member of this group that’s studying somebody else, as an insider of this group that may have been trained by somebody else that was an outsider of the group. It’s a really weird place to be, because most of these writings are dated from the 1890s through the early 1900s. And as I started to struggle with this I began to realize that one of the interesting points of question for me was how my life has impacted my interpretation of this material.

These stories were gathered in the 1890s into a big time of change in the historical relationship between the U.S. and the American Indian. The Indian was the vanishing race in that these stories were being gathered to preserve that race in text. And there’s always that tension between orality and textuality, but we don’t talk about how those gatherers’ lives shaped them and their collection and their gathering of the information. I think that’s one thing we confuse … oral historians and folklorists and even mythologists. We don’t look at how our own lives shape how we are looking at other cultures.

My Ph.D. teacher has come up with a great line that he and I have debated quite often, and it’s about our imprint on the story itself. And that was something that becomes interesting between the 1890s, through the 1930s, 1950s. There’s this big shift to find the one right, accurate version of this story. In my case I’m working with the creation story, the cosmology of the Iroquois. There are forty written versions of it, and there’s this quest in the field of anthropology and within mythology and even folklore about who’s got the right version, and if there’s any variations in the versions it becomes a storyteller’s self-promotion.

I don’t think that’s right.

The storyteller had a very difficult job in my perspective to narrate this ancient story in a contextualization that would make sense and be meaningful to his audience, including this gatherer, and we don’t look at that enough. And when we begin to struggle with that, it becomes this fascinating tug and pull on it.

I look at how my stories are shaped within my own life. I’m an urban Indian. I wasn’t raised on the reservation. I cannot tell you why the Lakota believes the way they do, why a Hopi believes the way they do. That’s not my culture group. But I can tell you what my imprint on the versions of the creation story that I have read are as a modern-day Indian. And that’s one thing that was fascinating: this tension between those that had gathered the stories and their quest for the one right story or one correct version, and the pragmatic world view of the Haudenosaunee. We understood everybody came to that story, from young to old—in one place, in one point in time, at that one instance—and understood the story in the way they were going to. That’s another thing we don’t debate enough about, is that this type of storytelling for us was meant to excite a dialogue. It was meant to engage in a discussion.

My version and interpretation is not going to be the same as yours, nor should it be. But that’s how we dialogue, that’s how we discuss, because what else is there to be doing during the winter months? Especially in places like Oswego. We get snow, and it’s deep and it’s cold, and you hang out and you hunker down and you tell stories, and that’s how the fish grows from this big to this big, so that’s when we begin to look at these kinds of things. It’s each generation’s imprint on that story that makes it unique for that generation, and that’s where I think it becomes fun to look at for me.

I’ve gone through coursework being kind of fractured in a lot of ways, because I think as an American. Sometimes I think as a Haudenosaunee person, which is different—when you really get into the nitty-gritty of it—than what somebody would call an Iroquois person. But I also think as an Iroquois person. I’m a veteran of the military, so there’s that kind of thinking that goes in there. All these facets have shaped how I have an outlook on life. And so I’m very conscious of the role, because usually if I’m going to get somebody’s story, there’s a reason behind that, there’s something in that, that is fascinating, that I want to hear, that I want to stew about, and I want to ponder.

It’s fun trying, because even when I teach the students I teach every semester, they always want me to interpret what it means for some other kind of tribal culture. I can’t do it. It’s just not in my perspective to do that, because it’s a different culture. There’s a different set of beliefs. There’s a different set of belief structures. How we believe things and why we believe things, and that’s where the interesting points in philosophical outlook in the world we live in lie.

The man I work most with in my dissertation is Hewitt, and he was a Tuscarora man that ended up being prolific. He produced ten thousand pages of documentation and only published a handful of pages, or a few hundred pages, I should say. He was one of the few people who went out and learned all six languages and gathered at least four versions of the creation story in the original language, but then he imprinted by trying to validate it through Western culture. He used biblical language, which is fascinating . . . you know, because we didn’t speak that way. “Thou should go do this.” But that’s the way he did it. There was a method to his madness. He was trying legitimize the Indian in an era when the Indian was illegitimate, not accepted. And he was trying to show the similarities and the grasps that are there for the cultures to embrace in the conversation, and yet for the most part these books remain now on bookshelves that hardly anybody studies. It’s interesting, because now it’s my turn to ponder these great stories and try to figure out what I think they’re saying and where I think they’re going to go in the future. So I think that’ll be where I conclude for right now.

Kirin Narayan: As you mentioned, not having the answers yet, I was thinking the whole issue of ethics is really a space where there never seem to be fixed answers because each situation kind of makes you rethink it all afresh. What is your human responsibility? What is your scholarly responsibility? And I always think of Rilke’s exhortation in Letters to a Young Poet. “Live the questions. Sometimes if you live them long enough, you might live your way into an answer.” But the basic thing is living the questions, and I think one can never feel the smugness of arrival in this space.

I just had a bit of a jolt of anxiety earlier when Ellen asked if this might be taped. I was going to tell a story that’s based on this book, so it will say: “Oh, am I going to get it right in the way that it was told in this book?” So I am taking you back to my first formal fieldwork, which was when I was a graduate student in Berkeley, and I had not intended to do this as my dissertation. It was something I wanted to do with the old holy man Asadhu, one of the people who Rahool, my brother (who I mentioned to you yesterday), went to live with. He went to live in Swamiji’s ashram, which was on a mountain top near Nasik, and who very much believed in working with children. He said, “With adults it’s often too late, but if you start with children, you can really change the world. If you want to change the world, start with children.”

So I had been very intrigued with Swamiji’s use of storytelling as a form of religious instruction. When I was a little kid, he seemed like a Scherherezade among sadhus. And being a graduate student, I felt that I had some of the analytic tools to record some of this, and also he was old and in not terribly good health, so it was just first intended as a summer project. And people told me you know, “This is too close, somebody you’ve known since your childhood. You don’t really want to be a scholar here.” But then there was such wonderful material at the end of one summer that I had spent in Nasik with a tape recorder at my knee, and Swamiji was meeting people in his dasram, or audience, public audience hours, that I went back a following year and spent some more months.

And at one point in the course of the second year—I was sitting there very serenely—he came up with this parable. He said, “Mataji, think about this, mother.” (I was like a mother, like all women were.) He at this point was in his sixties, often talking through a mouth full of tobacco, and so it makes transcription sometimes a little hard, and lying in an aluminum deck chair with a big tub of bananas under it, you know? And people would come and go, and he said:

“So think about this, Mataji:

Suppose you and I are walking on a road together.
A little child has shit in the road.
We both step in it.
I just wipe my foot, and I move on.
But you…you’re a scholar, so you have to look around…
‘So what was that? Kirin pretends to look down at her foot.
Ooooooh, something brown. She wipes something off her foot
Something sticky…. Kirin pretends to smell an invisible substance on her hand.
“Oh Shit!”
You lie awake at night thinking, What is it?
What was the cause of it?
What is the meaning of it?’
You don’t get a good night’s sleep.

This really caused me to stop short and see the parody of how everybody has taken for granted. Everyday reality had to me become this object of very earnest scrutiny.

And another occasion, Swamiji was giving kind of a disposition very informally about how so much was becoming a business. He said even religious teachings are becoming a business. I’m sitting there, listening, (there’s not really a folk narrative going, so I’m not paying that much huge attention), and all of a sudden, I’m being drawn into this. He says:

And this mataji here,
this woman here,
you’re taking all these stories on tapes, and you’re going to go to America, and people are going to ask you:
“What is bhagavan? What is God? What is bhagavan?”
And you know you’re going to tell them things, and you’re taking all of this material to do a business with it.

And I kind of really weakly protested, “No, Swamiji, I’m not going to do a business.” But I realized even as I said that that, yes, this was becoming my academic currency. This was something that would allow me to write me dissertation, get a job, and of course have the credentials to sit here at this table at this moment.

And he said, “Don’t just take these stories, understand them.”

And I think, again, this brings up the whole issue of the insider versus stepping aside to see what you can take out of it in terms of thinking about culture, which is often the stance that we take as scholars, as to thinking with culture—where it’s becoming part of you. And as a religious teacher, Swamiji was most interested in my own growth as a human being, not necessarily in the grand things I might say in scholarship.

In fact, when I took my dissertation back to him, and was quite pleased with myself—the big, bound, red auspicious dissertation—and give it to him, he sort of flipped through it upside down, and he said, “Oh yeah, we’ll put it on the altar . . . now let me teach you how to make poha, which is a nice snack.”

So, it was just something I had done. I said, “Do you want me to tell you what’s in this?” He said, “No, I can see from the shine on your face you did a nice job, so let’s get on with the next thing of cooking.” So, also a reminder that this can be such a weighty and self-important mission that . . . it’s just a passing moment in the lives of the people who we work with.

Now I’m using these illustrations in a situation where people had told me I was too close to remind us all of how it’s really hard to say what is an “authentic insider,” because there are so many planes that allow us to identify with and simultaneously set us apart in any situation that we’re working with people. On one hand, yes, I had grown up partly in Nasik where Swamiji was and had known him for many years. But I wasn’t a sadhu, a holy man. I wasn’t of his age or his gender or his spiritual preoccupations.

And this is something that I’ve thought about in many of the other contexts in which I’ve done fieldwork, the moments when you are really drawn close and feel the warmth of fellow feeling, and then the moments at which you are really revealed to be someone with quite a different agenda among which is just the scholarly one, different preoccupations. And one of the awkwardnesses I’m sure you all feel is when you might feel that in traversing those boundaries, back and forth, between being such a close insider that your presence isn’t even noticed, to being the one who’s stepping apart and commenting on it and asking the meaning and the cause of it and thinking about representing it, is what are you also betraying in some sense? Especially in my work with Kangra women in the Northwest Himalayas, I’ve really had to go back sometimes and think, “No, that was told to me as a friend. It wasn’t told to me as an anthropologist.” Luckily with things like phones now I can, if I’m writing something, call people and say, “Would you mind if this went in?”

So the ongoing ethical issues aren’t just in the moment of fieldwork collection, but in every step of representation afterwards, too. Thanks