Ron and Marsha, I am not sure why Ron's irritation should surprise Marsha. Or why it has never occurred to her that the brujo was not some shaman knight tilting at established religious hierarchy. Pirsig clearly got a great insight from Benedict's tale but that insight blinded him to the underlying story. If he had done his homework a little better he would have checked the reference Benedict cites. It is a bit of early ethnography by Ruth Bunzel. In it she tells the tale that Benedict used in "Patterns of Culture," which Pirsig uses without much editing.
Bunzel's work is long out of print and a couple of years ago I talked a friend of mine in Boston into getting it copied for me. One of the few places on the planet that has the original article is Harvard University. There has been a link to it posted on Case's website for a long time now. http://ispots.com/media/BunzelsZuniBrujo.pdf I don't think you can read Bunzel's tale and see in it a story of dynamic quality overcoming static quality. Even as Pirsig tells the tale, the true dynamic quality is the US military, hell bent on destroying native cultures from one end of the continent to the other. It would not have mattered one whit whether the quisling brujo advocated peace, war or sacrificing all of the Zuni first born. I have been to Zuni and it has not prospered under the white dominance appreciably more than any of the other native peoples. This MoQ Myth is just a product of Pirsig Valuing his personal revelation over simple fact checking. I too bristle every time the word "brujo" finds its way into a post here. Krimel Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
