Driving up highway 101 south of Orick, Calif., I kept an eye out
for a scenic rest area that, according to a memoir by his wife, Theodora,
had once been the site of a cabin owned by Alfred Kroeber.
It's through Kroeber that the Yurok people made their way in the
world of learning, their lives distilled into a monograph and footnote. In
1900, Kroeber, the father of academic anthropology in California, began a
series of encounters with the Yurok that lasted many years. Many of these Q
& A sessions were at this cabin, formerly located in the scenic rest area
where I was now peering under the hood of my wagon, trying to figure out why
my brakes had stopped working.
Here, at the place known as Sigornoy, Kroeber would interrogate
Indians, chiefly Robert Spott, a Yurok theocrat. Their conversations
eventually had academic consequence in such works as "Yurok Narratives" and
figured in Kroeber's dispassionate reflections on the supposed "character"
of the Yurok, scattered through various works. The Yurok were, he wrote on
one occasion, an "inwardly fearful people . the men often seemed to me
withdrawn." Kroeber mused that "for some reason, the culture had simply gone
hypochondriac." Kroeber never got around to mentioning that between 1848,
the start of the Gold Rush, and 1910, the Yurok population in the region was
reduced from about 2,500 individuals to about 610. Disease, starvation and
murder had wiped out about 75 percent of the group. It is as though an
anthropologist studying the inward fears of Polish Jews never mentioned
Auschwitz.
In his "Handbook of the Indians of California," published by the
Bureau of American Ethnology in 1925, Kroeber wrote that "there is one
Indian in California today for every eight that lived in the same area
before white man came." Then he mused that "the causes of this decline of
nearly 90 percent . are obscure."
Kroeber, eager to identify American anthropology in terms of
"millennial sweeps and grand contours," had little patience with that
shorter chronological span encompassing the extermination of most of the
California tribal groups he was presuming to study. As he put it, "the
billions of woes and gratifications of peaceful citizens or bloody deaths"
were of no concern. He visited the desperate Native Americans of California,
writing these tranquil ethnologies, sometimes after only a couple weeks with
the group, all but ignoring the end of history elapsing before his eyes.
This posture bothered some of Kroeber's professional associates.
The linguist Edward Sapir wrote him in 1938, "You find anchorage -- as most
people do, for that matter -- in an imaginative sundered system of cultural
and social values in the face of which the individual has almost to
apologize for presuming to exist at all. It seems to me that if people were
less amenable to cultural and social mythology, we'd have less Hitlerism in
the world."
In the back of my station wagon I had the special 1989
California issue of The American Indian Quarterly, in which Thomas Buckley
discussed Kroeber's attitude to the Yurok and his relationship with the
Yurok aristocrat, Spott. Buckley described how Kroeber was once asked why he
hadn't paid any attention to recent Yurok history and acculturation. Kroeber
answered that he "couldn't stand all the tears" that these topics elicited
from his Yurok informants.
Not that Kroeber was indifferent to pain. He'd been through a
fairly harrowing time in the century's second decade, suffering from
Meniere's Disease and psychic ailments, undergoing some lengthy sessions
with a Freudian psychoanalyst. He also corresponded with Freud himself.
Kroeber's remark about the tears reminding me of a sudden outburst from
Freud once, to one of his intimates, about the filthy and despicable lives
of people who ended up on his couch in Berggasse 19. There may be a secret
text here. A fellow who had it from a Yurok once told me Kroeber was a
closet gay and Spott was his lover.
Freud fortified Kroeber's addiction to the sweeping cultural
judgment. "Among other things," Kroeber wrote in his big work,
"Anthropology," "Freud set up oral and anal types of personality ... The
personality of anal character is orderly, economical and tenacious; or, in
its less pleasant aspects, pedantically precise, conscientious and
persistent; miserly; and obstinate to vindictiveness . Now, just as the
anal-type description fits certain individuals quite strikingly, it seems to
agree pretty well with the average or modal personality produced under
certain cultures. This holds for instance for the Yurok of native California
and their cotribes of the same culture. It holds also for certain
Melanesians . On the contrary, within Oceania, Polynesians, Indonesions and
Australians are wholly unanal in character, the Australians in fact standing
at a sort of opposite pole of living happily in disorder, in freedom from
possessions and in fluctuations of the moment. And the Siamese are certainly
oral if the type has any validity at all."
Kroeber was basing his perceptions of the Siamese on the work of
Ruth Benedict, who had never been to Siam but was keen on majestic
generalizations about native traits, having begun her career by contrasting
two American Indian cultures, that of the Plains bison hunters and that of
the Southwestern Zuni and other Pueblo farmers, as being respectively
Dionysiac and "Apollinian" (to use Kroeber's spelling). During the second
World War, the U.S. government commissioned Benedict to write a study of
Siam, and she responded speedily enough, stating in her book that much in
Siamese politics and society could be explained by early child nurture,
during which period infants were permitted to manipulate their genitals
freely.
Spott was once reproached by his nephew for spending so much
time with Kroeber, whose work didn't do the Yurok much good. "Ah, Harry,"
Spott answered, "white men hurt so much. We have to help him."
I think the Indian had a surer grip on the ethno-cultural
problems.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking
newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read
features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate
Web page at
www.creators.com.
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