Reflections on “Stalking with Stories,” from Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache by Keith A. Basso.
Keith A. Basso finds embedded in the the language of the Western Plains' Native Americans a memory code of place tied to stories. Human memory is often organized in associative patters. Different cultures have different depths of association based on their interactions with their environment and their means of producing food, shelter, and clothing. The Inuits, who live in the Arctic have many words for snow; modern technical fields have their own complex jargon; language morphs to reflect the underlying complexity of the daily interaction of the individual with his or her environment. Basso illustrates how the traditional hunter gatherers of North America formed a rich linguistic bond between their culture and the spaces they occupied.
What perhaps is most surprising in Basso's telling is the incredible detail and richness of the prescriptive association. His research into the the rich linguistic depths of the Western Apache reveals a form of thought that seems alien to the western mind. Perhaps more alien to the American Suburban mind than to the people of the cultural roots from which western civilization is derived. The modern American Suburban culture is a culture of placelessness, strip malls and McDonald's all looking the same across vast regions of the continent. In contrast to the sameness of sub-urbanity, the uniqueness of place, in many cultures, is illustrated by a rich tapestry of words and woven into precautionary tales that bind the present to the past.
For the Western Apache the oral history of the culture is tied to the richly descriptive place names. Places are associative references to precautionary tales. The stories reinforce the uniqueness of each place, and the uniqueness of each place acts as a mind map to stories. They are reinforcing bonds of association, a congestive linked list of oral history mapped into a spacial realm. Thus the travel down the trail becomes a walk into enculturation. The richness of the place names are but indexes to a vast library of morality tales. I cannot help but to see a parallel question in the founding literature of Western Civilization, whence do we hear the blind Homer recites from memory the stories of places and bind them into one man's Odyssey?
What perhaps is most surprising in Basso's telling is the incredible detail and richness of the prescriptive association. His research into the the rich linguistic depths of the Western Apache reveals a form of thought that seems alien to the western mind. Perhaps more alien to the American Suburban mind than to the people of the cultural roots from which western civilization is derived. The modern American Suburban culture is a culture of placelessness, strip malls and McDonald's all looking the same across vast regions of the continent. In contrast to the sameness of sub-urbanity, the uniqueness of place, in many cultures, is illustrated by a rich tapestry of words and woven into precautionary tales that bind the present to the past.
For the Western Apache the oral history of the culture is tied to the richly descriptive place names. Places are associative references to precautionary tales. The stories reinforce the uniqueness of each place, and the uniqueness of each place acts as a mind map to stories. They are reinforcing bonds of association, a congestive linked list of oral history mapped into a spacial realm. Thus the travel down the trail becomes a walk into enculturation. The richness of the place names are but indexes to a vast library of morality tales. I cannot help but to see a parallel question in the founding literature of Western Civilization, whence do we hear the blind Homer recites from memory the stories of places and bind them into one man's Odyssey?
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