35 pages • 1 hour read
Keith H. BassoWisdom Sits in Places
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Preface Summary
In the opening paragraphs of Wisdom Sits in Places, Basso presents us with the central question of the book: How do people form a sense of place? Basso explains that sense of place often goes unexamined until someone finds that sense challenged by moving to unfamiliar surroundings: “It is then that we come to see that attachments to places may be nothing less than profound, and that when these attachments are threatened we may feel threatened as well” (xiii-xiv).
Basso goes on to explain that places are also formed by the knowledge held by cultures; Nonetheless, he says, place as a concept has been little explored by cultural anthropologists. Basso himself didn’t begin examining place until he had spent two decades doing fieldwork with the Western Apache in the village of Cibecue, where he’d examined subjects ranging from Apache ceremonial symbolism and witchcraft beliefs to patterns of silence in social interactions. When Basso was searching for a new project, the chairman of the White Mountain Apache tribe, Ronnie Lupe, suggested he “find out something about how we know our country” by making Apache maps containing Apache place names (xv).
A year later, Basso began the five-year project, which consisted of traveling to named locations in the region of Cibecue, speaking with Apache consultants about those names, and listening to how those names were used by members of the community. The resulting book is structured as four independent essays exploring different perspectives on the importance of place in the Apache worldview.
At the close of the Preface, Basso notes that Native Americans, as the first people to settle North America and the first to be displaced from it, have lessons to offer many other people, as uprooted populations grow and more people are forced to contemplate what it means to have a sense of place.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Quoting the Ancestors”
At the beginning of Chapter 1, Basso uses a statement by the physicist Niels Bohr to investigate how places, normally perceived as features of the landscape, can come to reference something more profound. In 1924, Bohr wrote that by imagining Kronborg castle in Denmark as the home of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, one can make the castle into an entirely different place. This example demonstrates one of the ways in which culture shapes and is shaped by place; by investing sites with a certain meaning, we’re engaging in “place-making”—an act required both memory and imagination, and one that is at the heart of most societies, Basso says.
Basso opens his narrative on an early morning in May 1979, standing on the edge of a swale—a shallow channel with sloping sides—with an Apache man named Charles Henry and his cousin, Morley Cromwell. Henry’s role is to provide place names and comment on their significance, and Cromwell is to serve as a translator, as Basso does not speak fluent Apache. A conflict arises when Basso fails to properly pronounce the Apache name of the swale in front of them. In Apache, Henry says that Basso is quoting the ancestors by speaking the place name; by mispronouncing it, and not taking the time to get it right, Basso is being disrespectful. Finally, Basso succeeds, and Henry goes on to describe how his ancestors found this place, assessed it, and settled on a name, Water Lies With Mud In An Open Container, speaking in the present tense as if watching a scene take place in front of him.
Over the next week, this process repeats twice, as Henry describes ancestors discovering Bitter Agave Plain—where they find an abundance of edible seeds—and Scattered Rocks Standing Erect, where they wonder at the strange rock formations. Apache place names preserve how the ancestors registered the landscape and, in some cases, document how it has changed.
Basso then moves on to explore how place names fit into the creation of social ties, or clans, with a journey to a place called Juniper Tree Stands Alone, on the outskirts of Cibecue. Henry once again imagines ancestors arriving at the place and, finding it to their liking, planting fields of corn. When their harvest is bountiful, the clan names itself for the place—Juniper Tree Stands Alone People. Through this example, we learn that clans are named for their places, even long after they’ve moved somewhere else.
Basso moves on to a third category of place names: those that speak to historical events and serve as a cautionary tales of the consequences of breaching Apache social values. Over several weeks, Basso visits places with commemorative names and starts to see the landscape as full of “places which proclaim by their presence and their names both the imminence of chaos and the preventative wisdom of moral norms” (28).
Basso closes the chapter by exploring how the manner of interacting with the past displayed by people like Charles Henry differs from that of academic historians. Unlike Anglo-American history, with its focus on dates, Western Apache history is subjective and rooted in place. This is true of many Native American groups, Basso says, for whom the relationship of the past to features of the landscape imbues that landscape with significance.
Preface-Chapter 1 Analysis
In the opening sections of Wisdom Sits in Places, Basso identifies a gap in the conventional approach to cultural anthropology—one stemming from an under-appreciation of the role of place in constructing people’s worldview—and describes his first forays into understanding the importance of place-names among the Western Apache.
Before delving into his exploration of place, Basso explains how the book is structured in four essays, focusing around four influential Western Apache individuals from the village of Cibecue. This structure not only mirrors how he conducted his ethnographic research—by learning from each of these people—but it also reflects an important theme of the book: that Western Apache place-names, and therefore Western Apache culture, are deeply rooted in storytelling, often by wise individuals who have invested much of their lives in learning and reflecting on place-names.
Basso tells us that due to the lack of research on place in his own field, he looked to voices from other disciplines to guide his thinking in the writing of the book, including philosophers, novelists, historians, and Indigenous writers. In setting out his choice of sources, Basso is not only explaining his rationale for drawing on these thinkers; he’s also highlighting the degree to which place has been little considered in anthropology and the social sciences, despite its importance—a theme that will shape much of the book.
Basso uses one of these sources of inspiration—the physicist Niels Bohr—to introduce the practice of “place-making” at the start of Chapter 1. While this act is common, it is not simple. Basso describes how place-making requires both memory and imagination, as what people remember about a given place shapes what they can subsequently imagine about what happened there. In this way, place-making creates history, allowing people to not only relive but also reshape the past. This process allows for the transmission of historical knowledge, even in societies in which common ways of preserving the past, such as writing, are not present. In fact, this way of recording knowledge about the past predates the establishment of history as an academic discipline and continues to the present day as a cultural activity.
This discussion foreshadows a tension between Western Apache and Anglo-American history that Basso further explores through the character of Charles Henry. Basso notes that the way in which Henry remembers history (through place-names) and brings it to life (through the telling of stories connected to those place names) is a far more immediate and subjective act than reading academic history, as it involves action in the present tense, mediated through both the storyteller and the listener, without final historical truths: “it is history without authorities” (32). This contrast between Western Apache and Anglo-American ways of recording history serves to shed further light on the unique role of place-names that Basso will explore in further chapters—that is, that history as recorded in place-names serves as a source of social bonds, rather than simply as an academic exercise—and lends support to an argument that Basso will return to throughout the book: that in order to understand a culture, one must understand how they talk about the world.
In Chapter 1, Basso intersperses reflections on the nature of place and the structure of Western Apache phrases with anecdotes about his time spent with Charles Henry. The novelistic nature of these passages and their descriptive immediacy mirror the storytelling style of Basso’s Western Apache guides, creating a parallel structure that will repeat in future chapters and with different individuals from the community.
