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.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
Anthropologists’ Lack of Attention to Place-making
To look at much of the conventional understanding of place in anthropology, one might assume that place-names are mere reference points on the landscape, with no role in shaping, or being shaped by, cultural practices. At the time of writing Wisdom Sits in Places, Basso noted that little work on American Indian place-names had been conducted since the mid-20th century, and anthropology as such is generally silent on the question of place as a cultural creation.
In some ways, this is unsurprising, for as Basso notes, sense of place is experienced most often as an automatic form of experience, a simple way in which all people order the world around them. Insofar as this acknowledges that sensing place is a quotidian activity, this understanding is, at least on some level, correct. However, treating place as a simple phenomenon is a significant oversight, Basso states, not only because sensing places involves a complex interplay of memory and imagination—ignoring this, anthropology is missing an understanding of how people from different cultures comprehend the world around them—but also because this oversight hinders understanding of the cultural practices and narratives of Native American groups in particular, for whom stories are inseparably linked to the land.
This is not to say that anthropologists have ignored the relationship between American Indians and their environment—anthropologists have long been interested in the relationship between people and the material features of the landscape they inhabit—nor has anthropology neglected the formal properties and etymology of place-names. However, what these conventional lines of inquiry are missing, Basso says, is an interest in the symbolic function of place-names and their connection to a host of cultural associations.
In contrast to this convention, Basso argues that sensing place is a fundamental aspect of human social experience. Sensing place prompts one to consider a web of cultural meanings and symbols, as Basso observes in his own experience, after, having observed an exchange between Cibecue community members about a place called Trail Goes Down Between Two Hills, he literally looks at the place differently. Sensing place also prompts acts of self-reflection, an example of which Basso describes after seeing a young woman indirectly rebuked over disrespecting cultural traditions at a puberty ceremony. In her case, the place associated with her rebuke became part of her sense of what had been, what was, and what could be in the future.
Though people, rather than cultures, sense places, Basso notes that place-sensing is a social act, often carried out when people are together, and drawing upon socially constructed thought patterns. In this way, sense of place gives individuals a moment of insight into themselves and their self-identity, while also highlighting their connection to the collective.
The Role of Ethnography in Making Cultural Practices Legible
Throughout the book, Basso repeatedly positions himself as a bewildered observer to interactions among the Western Apache. In these exchanges, he understands what is said on a grammatical level but not how statements coherently fit together. Understanding these utterances, therefore, cannot be accomplished by linguistics alone: It also requires ethnographic research into the cultural narratives and associations that give utterances meaning. This is particularly true with place-making, since place-making, as a cultural activity, is grasped only by virtue of understanding the cultural practices that go into it: “the nature of the activity can be understood only by means of sustained ethnography” (7). Yet little ethnography on place-making has been done, underscoring the need for Basso’s own investigation.
At various points, Basso shows how, through ethnographic fieldwork, he’s able to make sense of statements about place that were previously unintelligible—for example, a series of statements by Western Apache about how the land “looks after people” and how stories “go to work on you like arrows” (38). The fact that they initially appear incoherent reflects not an intrinsic lack of clarity in these statements, but rather unfamiliarity with the cultural context that informs them. The only way to grasp these cultural constructs, Basso says, is by listening to how individuals talk, an imperative he instantiates in the book by focusing each essay on an individual from the community who guides Basso through the use of place-names he witnesses in ordinary speech.
As much as Basso’s approach in the book attempts to demonstrate the value of an ethnographic approach, as a redress to an existing gap in the use of ethnography in the exploration of place, it’s also a defense against skepticism of the value of fieldwork as such. In examining a small set of statements and practices, Basso says, ethnographers can find in the particular—characters and events from Apache traditional stories, or, to use another example, Central Park and rush-hour subways—something of larger significance: a sense of place.
This is not to say that ethnography is a source of certainty in decoding cultural practices, for as Basso notes, there is little certainty in ethnographic fieldwork; trying to grasp how people talk amongst and about themselves “can be a perplexing and time-consuming business” (37). Done properly, however, Basso says the ethnographer can cautiously begin to decode not only local conceptions of the landscape, but also the social acts that take place on that landscape.
The Importance of Individually Situated Perspectives in Place-making
In structuring Wisdom Sits in Places as essays based around individuals from the community, each of whom brings a different layer of insight to the exploration of sense of place, Basso is underscoring the importance of the subjective perspective in place-making, and he further highlights this perspective by including himself in the book as a protagonist whose appreciation of Western Apache place-names changes the more he understands the cultural significance of those places.
The role of subjective perspective in place-making is developed in Basso’s exploration of the differences between Western Apache and Anglo-American history. At the time of writing, Basso notes, one could argue that the Western Apache have yet to produce a tribal historian. However, this would only be true if one were to understand the function of the historian through an Anglo-American lens. Apache historians, like Charles Henry, do exist, but they carry out their practice in a way that’s markedly different from their Anglo-American counterparts. Instead, their role is to help imagine the past into being, delivering stories in spoken Apache that focus on where events occurred. There is no authoritative voice, or final truth, but rather a vivid, immediate depiction of ancestral events, mediated through the subjectivity of the speaker, or place-maker—it is “extremely personal” (32). This relationship to past events also grants the past—and the places in which those events happened—additional power; mediated through individual storytellers, the past speaks, and places develop a deeper cultural and moral significance.
The situated perspective of the storyteller isn’t the only relevant subjectivity to place-sensing; the subjectivity of the individual to whom the story is directed is also important. In some kinds of Western Apache narratives—namely, historical tales—the story is intended as a corrective to antisocial behavior. The actions in the narrative—in which someone has disregarded Apache custom and suffered misfortune as a result—correspond to an analogous failing on the part of the listener: “every historical tale is also ‘about’ the person at whom it is directed” (55). If the message is received, the individual then develops an enduring link with the place named in the tale: That place becomes part of who they were, are, and will be.
As Basso notes, this relationship flows both ways: As much as individuals shape places according to their own context and experience, those places also delineate the contours of that context and experience; for instance, a place is given meaning by being associated with a particular story, and that place-name can then be brought to bear on personal experience (for instance, via the act of speaking with names). Therefore, for the Western Apache, individual subjectivities are as much shaped by the landscape as they are involved in shaping it.
