"Wisdom Sits in Places"

• Dudley Patterson: Apache lore keeper guiding Basso in mapping the Cibecue region.

• Place-Names: Descriptions of both places and wisdom, conveying moral teachings.

• Western Apache Practice: Using place-names to offer advice and heal spirits.

• Wisdom Acquisition: Developing a smooth, resilient, and steady mind.

• Cultural Significance: Deep connections between landscape, language, and wisdom.

“You can’t live long without water and you can’t live a long time without wisdom.  You need to drink both.” -Dudley Patterson, Apache (Basso 1996:134)

In anthropologist Keith H. Basso’s ethnography Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache we are introduced to 54-year old horseman Dudley Patterson, an enigmatic and particularly insightful lore keeper for the Apache people.   Patterson lives in the community of Cibecue, a portion of the Fort Apache reservation along the Salt River, northeast of Phoenix, Arizona.  In his work to map the Cibecue region, at the behest of then chairman of the White Mountain Apache Tribe Ronnie Lupe, Basso would enlist Patterson and other Apache consultants to record the locations and associated place-names, or toponyms, that define the landscape for the tribe.  “Not whitemen’s maps, we’ve got plenty of them, but Apache maps with Apache places and names,” Lupe directed (xv).  Over the next five years (1929-1984) Basso, along with Patterson and other tribal members, crisscrossed the Cibecue doing just that, mapping “places with names such as Widows Pause for Breath, She Carries Her Brother on Her Back, and Bitter Agave Plains – places made memorable, and infinitely imaginable, by events that happened long ago.” (8)

The task that unfolded before Basso ultimately, in addition to the maps, which remain unpublished at the request of the Apache, would lead him to discover that “American Indian place-names are intricate little creations and that studying their internal structure, together with the functions they serve in spoken conversation, can lead the ethnographer to any number of useful discoveries.” (44) Among these discoveries was the notion that “Western Apache historical tales” sometimes “tell of persons who have acted unthinkingly and impulsively in open disregard for ‘Apache custom’…who pay for their transgressions by being humiliated, ostracized, or killed.” (51) By connecting these morality tales with the places and features of the Cibecue they “may establish highly meaningful relationships between individuals and features of the natural landscape.” (57) In this way, places with names like White Rock Stands Up and Out are transformed, “landscapes and the places that fill them become tools for the imagination, expressive means for accomplishing verbal deeds, and…eminently portable possessions to which individuals can maintain deep and abiding attachments, regardless of where they travel.” (75) In this way Basso’s mapping project became an ethnography as well, as “geographical landscapes are never culturally vacant.” (ibid.)

Basso discerned a problem in modern anthropology and linguistics, noting that scholars have “a widespread view of language in which proper names are assumed to have meaning solely in their capacity to refer…” (76) But his journey through the Cibecue places with Apache lore keepers like Dudley Patterson produced for Basso a basic conceptual framework for Apache place-names as descriptions of both places and wisdom.  Basso noted, “The Western Apache practice of ‘speaking with names’…may be used to accomplish all of the following actions: 1.) produce a mental image… 2.) evoke prior texts… 3.) affirm the value and validity of traditional moral precepts… 4.) display tactful and courageous attention… 5.) convey sentiments of charitable concern… 6.) offer practical advice… 7.) transform distressing thoughts [into] optimism and hopefulness; and 8.) heal wounded spirits.” (100)

Dudley Patterson provided a narrative example to help Basso understand how place-names are used by the Apache, “had anyone from Cibecue told [you] what happened long ago at Trail Goes Down Between Two Hills? (a place marked by a large tree with one limb reaching toward the ground) …Well then, listen.

Long ago, right there at that place, there were two beautiful girls.  They were sisters.  They were talking together.

Then they saw Old Man Owl walking towards them.  They knew what he was like.  He thought all the time about doing things with women.  Then they said, “Let’s do something to him.”

Then one of those girls went to the top of one of the hills.  Her sister went to the top of the other one.  As Old Man Owl was walking between them, the first girl called out to him. ‘Old Man Owl, comer here!  I want you to rub me between my legs!’  He stopped.  He got excited!  So he started to climb the hill where the girl was sitting.

Then, after Old Man Owl got halfway to the top, the second girl called out to him.  ‘Old Man Owl, I want you to rub me gently between my legs!’  He stopped!  He got even more excited!  So he turned around, walked down the hill, and began to climb the other one.

Then, after he got halfway to the top, the first girl called out to him again in the same way.  He stopped!  Now he was very excited!  So Old Man Owl did the same thing again.  He forgot about the second girl, walked down the hill, and began climbing the other one.

It happened that way four times.  Old Man Owl went back and forth, back and forth, climbing up and down those hills.

Then those beautiful girls just laughed at him.” (115-116)

Wielding this story to chastise a younger cowman, recently spurned by a girlfriend and acting wildly within the community, Patterson is able to council, and anchor his council in a heritage site in his ancestral lands, as well as lift up and revive the young man’s spirit, all at once.  Basso notes the young man, “had been firmly chastised and generously pardoned, all in the space of a minute in which no one uttered a harsh or demeaning word.” In this way, Patterson remarks, “wisdom sits in places.” (120-121)

To Basso it seems a cryptic manner, to converse in place-names, but after twelve years of friendship Patterson is ready to open up and explain the broader psychological and cultural significance of the Apache practice.  “You must make your mind smooth,” “you must make your mind resilient,” and “you must make your mind steady” are the central instructions for acquiring wisdom, according to Patterson.  By exercising these talents through the learning of, and the story-telling that surrounds, place-names Basso understands that the Apache people express in their wisdom “a heightened mental capacity that facilitates the avoidance of harmful events by detecting threatening circumstances when none are apparent.” (130) The smooth mind is “skeptical of outward appearances and…able to look through them and beyond them to detect obscured realities,” the resilient mind works to combat external distractions, and the steady mind internal ones.  “Resilient minds do not give in to panic or fall prey to spasms of anxiety or succumb to spells of crippling worry.” (132)

The process of acquiring wisdom among the Western Apache can take a lifetime, and not everyone completes the journey entirely.  “As people move forward on the trail of wisdom, their behavior begins to change…reflected in outer displays of poise and equanimity…[a] growing consistency among attitudes adopted…[and] they rarely show alarm.” (139) Wise Apache people, then, council and speak with other members of the community by prompting them to picture “in one’s mind the exact locations where the narrated events [unfold] and [imagine] oneself as actually taking part in them.” (140) If the words of wisdom and the person being advised ‘flow swiftly together’ it can help lead to a more successful outcome (ibid).  Basso goes on to explain how a sense of place, embodied in the wisdom and the features of the landscape, such as the large tree, “is a kind…[of] way of appropriating portions of the earth,” (143) interestingly pointing out that “sense of place may gather unto itself a potent religious force, especially if one considers the root of the world religare, which is ‘to bind or fasten fast.’” (145)

Dudley died in 1983, shortly after Basso finished his mapping project for the Apache people.  But his powerful and insightful narratives live on in Basso’s incredible ethnography, and in the ethnographic method that he inspired – to create a paradigm for evaluating places and language across space and time.  Reflecting on other ethnographies such as Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, there seems, sometimes, a broad emphasis on property ownership and subsistence that forms the paradigm around which these intimate experiences of the social scientist take shape.  Suddenly thrust into the experiences of others’ lives, anthropologists may feel “experience-distant” from their storytellers, according to Scheper-Hughes, who later notes that poor sugarcane workers, involved in her study and living in the town of Bom Jesus, a town lain out in the shape of a giant cross, reside at the ‘foot’ of the cross with the wealthy landowners occupying the area of town at the top (Scheper-Hughes 1998:432).  The idea of anthropologist engaged in “more human activities” (25) can produce stunning insights into the culture and heritage of people old and new, dramatically brought to life by Dudley, Basso, and others in this beautiful and arresting ethnography where we read, in fact, that wisdom does sit in places.

References

Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico, 1996. Print.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: U of California, 1992. Print.