general and ethnology: apologies to the iroquois. edmund wilson

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1116 A merican A nlhropologist [64, 19621 flect unreliable or uncheckable sources. Wallace’s account is quite free of errors and false assumptions and represents good work in a most treacherous field. The major interest of Wallace’s book is, however philosophical. He is, I believe, the most significant apologist for Indian culture and Indian values among contemporary historians. This takes a certain courage, for the fashion among pedants from William Makepeace Thackeray to Elsie Murray has been a broad sneer for any suggestion of the “noble savage.” Wallace thankfully has the courage to stand with Montaigne, Voltaire, Mark Twain; as with them, his noble savage is a man, not a sentimental ideal or a child of pity. This book is a notable addition to Wallace’s little group of publications on Indian values. Apologies lo the Iroquois. EDMUND WILSON. With a study of The Mohawks in High Steel by JOSEPH MITCHELL. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960. vi, 310 pp., 15 illustrations. $4.95. Reviewed by WILLIAM C. STURTEVANT, Bureau of Americait Ethnology, Smithsoniala Institution Edmund Wilson apologizes for his previous ignorance of the Iroquois with a set of essays based on his investigations among them during 1957, 1958, and 1959. These are revisions of four articles which ran in the New Yorker (vol. 35, nos. 35-38) during October and November, 1959. Joseph Mitchell’s chapter first appeared in the same magazine in 1949 (vol. 25, no. 30, Sept. 17). Wilson is particularly concerned with “a whole set of white encroachments, inci- dental to various engineering projects, which have seemed to converge o n . . . [the Iroquois] all at once, hitting one reservation after the other, . . . [and which have been] characterized by total ignorance of Iroquois civilization and a contemptuous disregard of those rights of the Six Nations Confederacy which were assumed to be guaranteed them by treaty,” causing the Indians to suspect a systematic persecution intended to drive them out of their lands and to disperse them as a troublesome minority that would better be out of the way” (pp. 8!%-90), and thus setting off an “Iroquois nationalist movement,’, He investigated five specific recent struggles in New York and Canada; all have been lost by the Iroquois, either before or after the publication of this book. Wilson discusses the history of the conflicts, briefly sketches the personalities of some of the Iroquois political leaders involved, indicates the political (and some of the other) relations between the various Iroquois communities, and includes some material on the activities among eastern Indians of the intertribal group of nationalists sometimes known in the west as the “Indian Minute Men.” This is an original contribution; the information is new, and the topic has been little investigated by ethnologists. Contrasting with these political matters are descriptions of three non-Christian Seneca ceremonies which Wilson attended with William N. Fenton. Here materials derived from Fenton and other ethnologists are interwoven with Wilson’s own observa- tions. While more systematic descriptions of some of these rituals are available, there is nothing published which gives such a direct sense of the mood and meaning of Iroquois “doings.” The chapter on the Little Water Medicine renewal rite is a par- ticularly beautiful piece of descriptive and interpretive writing. This is not ethnology, and it would be unfair to judge it as such. It lacks the rigor, the systematic analysis, and the aim for inclusiveness of good ethnography. But Mr. Wilson is a superb reporter who is able to establish rapport easily with both Indians

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Page 1: GENERAL AND ETHNOLOGY: Apologies to the Iroquois. Edmund Wilson

1116 A merican A nlhropologist [64, 19621

flect unreliable or uncheckable sources. Wallace’s account is quite free of errors and false assumptions and represents good work in a most treacherous field.

The major interest of Wallace’s book is, however philosophical. He is, I believe, the most significant apologist for Indian culture and Indian values among contemporary historians. This takes a certain courage, for the fashion among pedants from William Makepeace Thackeray to Elsie Murray has been a broad sneer for any suggestion of the “noble savage.” Wallace thankfully has the courage to stand with Montaigne, Voltaire, Mark Twain; as with them, his noble savage is a man, not a sentimental ideal or a child of pity. This book is a notable addition to Wallace’s little group of publications on Indian values.

Apologies lo the Iroquois. EDMUND WILSON. With a study of The Mohawks in High Steel by JOSEPH MITCHELL. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960. vi, 310 pp., 15 illustrations. $4.95.

Reviewed by WILLIAM C. STURTEVANT, Bureau of Americait Ethnology, Smithsoniala Institution

Edmund Wilson apologizes for his previous ignorance of the Iroquois with a set of essays based on his investigations among them during 1957, 1958, and 1959. These are revisions of four articles which ran in the New Yorker (vol. 35, nos. 35-38) during October and November, 1959. Joseph Mitchell’s chapter first appeared in the same magazine in 1949 (vol. 25, no. 30, Sept. 17).

Wilson is particularly concerned with “a whole set of white encroachments, inci- dental to various engineering projects, which have seemed to converge o n . . . [the Iroquois] all a t once, hitting one reservation after the other, . . . [and which have been] characterized by total ignorance of Iroquois civilization and a contemptuous disregard of those rights of the Six Nations Confederacy which were assumed to be guaranteed them by treaty,” causing the Indians to suspect a systematic persecution intended to drive them out of their lands and to disperse them as a troublesome minority that would better be out of the way” (pp. 8!%-90), and thus setting off an “Iroquois nationalist movement,’, He investigated five specific recent struggles in New York and Canada; all have been lost by the Iroquois, either before or after the publication of this book. Wilson discusses the history of the conflicts, briefly sketches the personalities of some of the Iroquois political leaders involved, indicates the political (and some of the other) relations between the various Iroquois communities, and includes some material on the activities among eastern Indians of the intertribal group of nationalists sometimes known in the west as the “Indian Minute Men.” This is an original contribution; the information is new, and the topic has been little investigated by ethnologists.

Contrasting with these political matters are descriptions of three non-Christian Seneca ceremonies which Wilson attended with William N. Fenton. Here materials derived from Fenton and other ethnologists are interwoven with Wilson’s own observa- tions. While more systematic descriptions of some of these rituals are available, there is nothing published which gives such a direct sense of the mood and meaning of Iroquois “doings.” The chapter on the Little Water Medicine renewal rite is a par- ticularly beautiful piece of descriptive and interpretive writing.

This is not ethnology, and it would be unfair to judge it as such. It lacks the rigor, the systematic analysis, and the aim for inclusiveness of good ethnography. But Mr. Wilson is a superb reporter who is able to establish rapport easily with both Indians

Page 2: GENERAL AND ETHNOLOGY: Apologies to the Iroquois. Edmund Wilson

Book Reviews 1117

and ethnologists, and he knows how to find his way around in the literature of ethnology and history. He is highly selective in what he reports, but the selection is determined by such sensitive judgments and presented with such literary skill that the descriptions convey a remarkably accurate and immediate impression of the conditions of modern Iroquois life and thought.

I t is good to have again available Joseph Mitchell’s well-known account of the Mohawk high-steel construction workers of Brooklyn, which first called to attention this occupational specialization of the Caughnawaga Mohawks (shared to a lesser extent by some other Iroquois). It is a description of the steel workers and their com- munity, with some attention to the history of Mohawks in the occupation and to their home reserve, written by a first-rate reporter. An occasional inaccuracy is due to Mitchell’s failure to talk to ethnologists or investigate their publications; some of these are silently corrected in Wilson’s part of the book.

The great attraction of the Iroquois for ethnologists from Morgan’s day to this has been difficult to explain to those who have not attended a Longhouse ceremony nor talked to a passionate Iroquois nationalist; now much of the excitement can be appreciated from this book. There is no better published introduction to the lively and tragic world of modern Iroquoia.

LINGUISTICS

Trends iis European and American Linguistics 1930-1960. CHRISTINE MOHRMANN, ALP SOMMERFELT and JOSHUA WHATMOUGH (Eds.). (Edited on the occasion of The Ninth International Congress of Linguists, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 27 August- 1 September 1962, for the Permanent International Committee of Linguists.) (Pub- lished under the auspices of the International Council for Philosophy and Human- istic Studies with a grant from the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cul- tural Organization (UNESCO).) Utrecht & Antwerp: Spectrum Publishers, 1961. 299 pp., bibliographies, notes. $4.50.

Reviewed by JOHN LYONS, University of Cambridge The present volume is an attempt “to record, briefly, the recent achievements of

European and American linguists” on the occasion of the 9th International Congress of Linguists which was held a t Harvard in the summer of 1962. Judged in the light of this, the editors’ own statement of their intentions, the book must be declared to be ex- tremely unbalanced. Not only is no space a t all given to certain important “schools” of linguistics in Europe (the editors recognize this and promise to make up for it in a second volume: “[we] regret that there are important lacunae, as far as Europe is concerned, such as, for example, the so called Prague School and British research centred round Daniel Jones, J. R. Firth and others. We intend, however, to complete our task in a second volume for which we hope to get the necessary subvention”), but there are con- spicuous differences in the way the several contributors have interpreted their assign- ments. The book is far from being a coherent and comprehensive guide to the present state of the subject: it is doubtful whether it can even be said to fulfill the implied promise of its title, vague as this is. It is not clear whether the division of the field of linguistics into “European” and “American” is a matter merely of editorial conven- ience, or whether it is meant to suggest (perhaps I should say, to perpetuate the belief) that there are two fundamentally different modes of linguistic investigation, the one characteristic of American, the other of European, linguists, If there is any implied sug- gestion that linguists really divide methodologically or doctrinally in this way, it must