All, I've recently pulled off my shelf a copy of Dennis and Barbara Tedlock's "Teachings from the American Earth, Indian Religion and Philosophy", published in 1975.
In the Introduction, which I will include in a series of posts to follow, I think you will see a lot of similarity between Pirsig's exposition on Indians in LILA, as well as some groundwork for considering the non-S/O culture (painted broadly) which draws Pirsig to use the Indians as exemplars. I am about halfway through the book, and I do recommend it (your public library should be able to get you a copy). I've made a few notes within the text, to point out specific points of commonality or interest. (No, I did not type all this in, I used a scanner, and its been known to produce a typo or two, I've tried to catch all I could, but you know how that goes.) ======================== "The American Indian has already taught us a great deal, whether we remember it or not. In the far north of this continent, life is still dependent in part on the technology of the Eskimo and Indian, who gave us among other things the parka, snowshoe, toboggan, and kayak. Maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc, which today make up more than half the world's tonnage of staple foods, were first domesticated in the New World. Most modem cotton, including that grown in the Old World, is the long-staple cotton of the American Indian. Some 220 American Indian drugs have been or still are official in the Pharmacopeia of the United States of America or the National Formulary. Even in these practical areas, we have sometimes been slow to learn. As recently as thirty years ago, Indian oral contraceptives were dismissed as mere magic; later, when these same botanical drugs were found to suppress ovulation, they set medical researchers on the road to "the pill." Although we have accepted a great deal of technology from the American Indian, we have not yet learned his more difficult lessons, lessons about the mind and spirit. Some of these lessons concern the very things we have borrowed, as in the case of that most famous of Indian stimulants, tobacco. For the Indian, tobacco always had a sacramental meaning: the smoke was exhaled east and west, north and south, above and below, and then the smoker blew smoke on himself. In this way he joined the self with the cosmos. When we adopted tobacco we turned it into a personal habit, and we have overused it to the point where it has killed many of us. The final irony is that there should be a righteous public campaign against this sacred gift of America, as if there were something inherently wrong with smoking. Beeman Logan, a Seneca medicine man, suggests that the trouble is with ourselves: tobacco kills us, he says, because we do not respect it. An easy way of reading Logan's message is to say that the Indian has a different relationship to the natural world than we do. If he can "respect" a plant, he must be "closer" to nature than we are, and we imagine ourselves more like him in our own distant past, before we started to dominate nature. Those of us who are believers in material progress see our task as elevating the Indian to our level by teaching him how to make nature better serve material ends. If, on the other hand, we are suspicious of material progress, we envy the Indian and wish that we could somehow "return to nature," suspecting all the while that there is really no way to recover our own innocence. The trouble with both of these views is that they allow us to picture the living Indian as a fossil from which to learn about the past. If there are any lessons to be had about the present, we think they are ours to teach him, whether we wish to initiate him into the present or to warn him away from it "for his own good." There is quite another way to approach Logan's message, and that is to defer the question of its meaning and call attention instead to a supposed error in the thought process which produced it. "From the point of view of Lucien Levy-Bruhl, it would be argued that the Indian's characteristic participation mystique, his feeling of oneness with the world, has here blinded him to the difference between himself and the tobacco plant. If he only had a "logical" mind, he could see that a plant is an inanimate object and is neither owed respect nor able to punish [scare quotes on logic point towards S/Oism- Arlo]. From the more recent point of view of Claude Levi-Strauss, the supposed error is not in a lack of logic but in an overzealous and premature application of it, which in this case seeks" to link facts from the disparate realms of psychology (the attitude of "respect") and biology (tobacco and death) in a single system of cause and effect. ["... to be part of the world, and not an enemy of it", ZMM - Arlo] All of the approaches presented so far permit us to sidestep the possibility of learning directly from the Indian. It is true that anthropologists sometimes describe themselves as students of the Indian; they may indeed appear to be his students while they are in the field, but by the time they publish their "results," it is usually clear that the Indian is primarily an object of study [sound familiar? -Arlo]. If anthropologists would seriously put themselves in the position of being the Indian's students, they would have to take more seriously what he considers to be important. But instead of learning to experience respect for tobacco, for example, they simply wish to find an explanation for why someone like Beeman Logan might respect it, thereby keeping him and his lesson at arm's length. They may listen to him, but they do not hear him. In order to become the Indian's students, we have to recognize that some of what he has to teach transcends cultural or historical boundaries. Paul Radin took precisely this position with respect to American Indian religion, saying that we would never make any progress in our understanding "until scholars rid themselves, once and for all, of the curious notion that everything possesses an evolutionary history; until they realize that certain ideas and certain concepts are . . . ultimate for man. " Mircea Eliade, in his classic study of shamanism, puts the matter this way: "The various types of civilization are, of course, organically connected with certain religious forms; but this in no sense excludes the spontaneity and, in the last analysis, the ahistoricity of religious life." And the Sioux holy man Lame Deer, fully aware of the diversity of external religious forms among American Indians, says, "I think when it comes right down to it, all the Indian religions are somehow part of the same belief, the same mystery." [recognition of metaphoricity? -Arlo] 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/
