10
Ishi, Don Juan, and the Anthropologists
A Tale of Two Best-Sellers

At the beginning of this century, when the Press was only a few years old and the academic science of man—man as anthropos —was nearly as young, there were still Indian villages in California where daily life was carried on in the traditional way, where men and women spoke the Indian languages and remembered the history and myths of their people. What better could the first California anthropologists do than seek to understand and record this civilization before it was lost, as soon it would be? In the year 1900 a young man named Alfred Louis Kroeber, soon to get his degree under Franz Boas at Columbia, arrived in San Francisco as curator at the California Academy of Sciences. A few weeks later, having put the collections in order and with $100 of expense money in his pocket, he set off by train and stage coach to the Klamath River in the redwood country of far northern California. There he began the study of one of his favorite Indian peoples, the Yurok.

Although much of Kroeber's early work with this and other tribes was in recording languages, he also collected myths. For a time he intended, once those of the Yurok had been published, to write a history of that people. But he never did, and years later told his wife Theodora that perhaps he could never write of them in this way, saying: "I feel myself too much a Yurok." This she tells us in the foreword to Yurok Myths , published by the Press in 1976, sixteen years

Alfred Kroeber, 1911.

after Kroeber's death. His remark may foreshadow later controversies about inside and outside observers.

In the years after that first northern visit Kroeber published many books and hundreds of papers and articles. But his greatest publication, perhaps, was one not entirely his own, one shared with other university scholars—the famous monograph series, American Archaeology and Ethnology. Known everywhere in the world of anthropology as AAE, this series began in 1903 and added up to fifty volumes and about 300 papers before it was superseded in 1964 by a new series, called simply Publications in Anthropology, with no geographical limitation. And alongside AAE after 1937 was another series, Anthropological Records, designed for less expensive publication of field notes and raw data. Of all the numbers in AAE the best known was number 38, Kroeber's Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (1939), a large cloth-bound book.

I am not sure whether the Press ever had what might be called a list in anthropology; certainly we never thought of it as such; but over the years we must have published more pages on the California Indians than did all other publishers put together, and also much on Mexican native peoples, which led in the sixties and seventies to two of the most widely read books that we ever turned out. The first of these was distilled in large part from several AAE monographs.

But first a glance backward. The very first book of the Press, an accidental one in the old monograph days and one that had no successors for many years, was The Book of the Life of the Ancient Mexicans, Containing an Account of Their Rites and Superstitions . . . by Zelia Nuttall. In 1890 Nuttall, an amateur scholar and resident of Mexico with Harvard and California connections, came across in the national library in Florence a sixteenth-century Mexican manuscript that came to be known as the Codex Magliabechiano. With permission of the Italian authorities she had two hundred facsimile copies printed by what was then termed chromolithography. Intending to have the Codex published by the Peabody Museum at Harvard, where she was an honorary assistant in American archaeology, she set to work on an

introduction and translation. But she worked slowly, or perhaps she dawdled, and in 1903 was told by another scholar that if she did not publish at once, he would bring out his own edition. Putting aside her partially done commentary, Nuttall hastily wrote a preface and introduction, which she had set up and printed in Cambridge. But the Peabody was not ready to cooperate, and she turned to her friends in California, where she was a member of the advisory committee for the new department of anthropology. With money from a donated research fund, the Florence and Cambridge parts were put together, bound in flexible leather, and issued in 1903, with the imprint "University of California."

It is a handsome volume, with colored reproductions of drawings by an unknown Indian artist and of handwritten text by a Spanish friar. It was called Part 1 and the high price of $25 entitled purchasers to a second part to come, translation and commentary. But Nuttall, although she lived another thirty years, never completed the work. In 1927 Kroeber told an inquiring Press editor that Nuttall would never, in his opinion, finish this book or any other.

All her papers appear to have been lost. Eighty years passed, and in 1983, the Press brought out a reproduction of the book, a facsimile of the facsimile, together with a second volume containing a translation and commentary by Elizabeth Hill Boone of Dumbarton Oaks. To the best of my knowledge none of the original purchasers showed up to demand their copies of Part 2.^[1]

Early one morning in the summer of 1911 an exhausted and starving man wandered down out of the mountains to a slaughterhouse near Oroville in the northern Sacramento Valley. Cornered by dogs, he was rescued by the sheriff and, for protection from by-standers, locked in the local jail. No one, white or Indian, could understand him, and the newspapers reported that a "wild man" had been found.

[1] This wonderfully tangled tale is told in detail by Muto in chapter 4 of University of California Press .

Reading these accounts in San Francisco, Kroeber and his colleague, T. T. Waterman, guessed that the man might be a Yana Indian of a tribe virtually extinct. With a written vocabulary in his pocket, Waterman took the train to Oroville and established partial communication with the man, who turned out to be a Yana of the Yahi subtribe. He was put into white man's clothes and taken into a world he had never known, transported by train and ferry to the University museum in San Francisco. There he lived for five years, the rest of his life. He was known as Ishi, the Yana word for man. It was Yana custom to keep the personal name private.

In the decades after the great gold rush white settlers had rapidly filled the Sacramento Valley, pushing the native peoples out of the way. There was trouble, and in the 1860s, about the time Ishi was born, settler bands massacred Indians in the farm country and pursued them into the hills, seeking to exterminate them. The campaign against the Yahi, the southernmost group of Yana, succeeded almost completely; only a small group, remnant of a remnant, escaped into the canyon country of Deer Creek and Mill Creek, where they hid themselves and managed to survive for more than forty years, subsisting in the old ways, hunting by bow and arrow. Eventually there were only four people left, and then there was only one, Ishi, then about fifty years old. Alone, depressed, and delirious, he wandered down to the valley, the last wild Indian in North America.

What does it tell us that a middle-aged man, transported directly from his stone-age culture into the complex world of the twentieth century, could make a quick adjustment and live with some comfort in the new environment? For one thing: that our technology has changed far more than we have. Ishi, befriended and given quarters in the museum, adopted the white man's ways, taught the anthropologists the crafts, language, and religion of his people, demonstrated fire making and other crafts to the public, and moved easily about the city. In the spring of 1914 he journeyed with Kroeber and others to the area in the foothills of Mount Lassen where he had

Ishi in two worlds.

spent his early life. There he led them to all the old spots where he and his vanished companions had managed to eke out a living. He was indeed a man who had lived in two worlds, as Theodora Kroeber put it in the title of her book.

I first heard of Ishi sometime in the 1950s, when Bob Heizer, professor of anthropology, told me that the department was looking for someone to write this story for the general public. There had long ago been monographs in the AAE series, among them Waterman's Yana Indians and Saxton Pope's Yahi Archery, both papers containing much learned from Ishi himself.^[2] For the wanted general book an author was at last found in Kroeber's own household, his wife Theodora, who had demonstrated her capacity in The Inland Whale , a retelling of nine stories from California Indian legends—the title

[2] American Archaeology and Ethnology 13:2–3. This volume of nine papers, published 1917–23, is almost entirely concerned with the Yana.

story from Kroeber's favorite Yurok tribe of the far northern region.^[3] The retold stories were called by Oliver La Farge "literature, in the best sense of the word." When she came to the larger task, the story of Ishi, she had as source material Kroeber's personal recollections as told to her, along with fifty pounds of old documents made available by Heizer. From these she distilled the book Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America, published in 1961, the year after Kroeber's death. At once it became a classic and a best-seller.

I had known Kroeber in connection with his publishing activities, books and monograph series, but had only the slightest acquaintance with Theodora until we came to publish Ishi after his death. There followed other books and other occasions until I knew her well as friend and neighbor, knew also the fine old house on Arch

[3] Indiana University Press, 1959. Paperback edition issued by California in 1963.

Street, built by Berkeley's most famous architect, Bernard Maybeck. So my knowledge of Theodora had virtually nothing to do with Kroeber himself, except as she wrote of him. It says something for the vividness of that writing and also of her talk that I came to feel the illusion of having known her and her daily life from long before we first met.

Many of us live more than one life, I suppose, even if not so drastically as did Ishi. The several lives of Theodora Kroeber were more distinct than most: girlhood in a Colorado mining camp and first widowhood; then the long central period as wife and partner of a man much older than she; and after his death, a final twenty years as author and noted public figure, with a third marriage to a younger man. She came to writing late. When her youngest child was fifteen, the older ones away, husband recovering from a heart attack, she made, she tells us in her book about Kroeber, the "first tentative beginning toward writing." She was always tentative, I think, even later when she had won some fame and must have been well aware of her talent. Her first book, The Inland Whale, was published when she was past sixty.

When the manuscript of Ishi first came to the Press, half of it was written in her own words while the other half was a set of strung-together quotations from the sources, including the monographs of Pope and Waterman. I suggested that she take the manuscript home and redo the quoted parts in her own language. As first submitted the book fell apart into two sections, unlike in style and in effect on the reader. As redone, source material rewritten, the book was triumphantly one thing, perhaps the finest account that we have of American Indian life.

Ten years later, when she brought in her biography of Kroeber,^[4] there was a minor repetition of the incident. In one section she tried once more to string quotations on a thin line of commentary, something she could not do effectively, that no one should do. Why she

[4] Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration (Berkeley, 1970).

tried is a mystery, related perhaps to the tentativeness mentioned above. When she rewrote in her own style, without leaning on borrowed syntax, the improvement was beyond compare. She told me then, I remember, that I was wasting myself as an administrator and should spend my time editing.

Theodora was no scholar, nor ever pretended to be one. She listened and absorbed. Her strengths as a writer were understanding, intuition, simple words well placed, strong feeling understated, an unexplained ability to project herself and her reader back into another time and place. This is the ability of the historical novelist, one of them at least, and it helps us to see how she could breathe life into the unliving transcripts of Indian tales, unliving because set down literally in an alien idiom. It is this gift of re-imagining that distills reality out of old papers and re-creates Ishi as an individual person, not fully comprehended of course but quite as alive and eccentric as my grandfather. It is a very great gift, that of making us part of a life we never took part in, of allowing our presence where we never were, of raising up a gone world. In another kind of life, no husband's career to assist, no family to raise, she might have made herself into a considerable novelist. But we are fortunate to have what she wrote in the latter part of her life.^[5]

The great success of Ishi —half a million copies in print, said our ads in 1976—was bound to attract other publishers. Of course we would never sell the paperback rights, as we did later those to another anthropological best-seller, deemed less suitable to our list. But one day Luice Dobbie came to my office and said that a local publisher, specializing in juvenile books, wanted Mrs. Kroeber to write a children's book about Ishi, and did I have any objection? A children's book would not affect our market, I thought in one of my naïve moments, knowing too little about that business and perhaps about that publisher. Permission was given for a children's book.

[5] A few of these paragraphs, somewhat changed, are taken from the introduction that I wrote to her oral history for the Bancroft Library.

A year or two later we woke up to advertisements for a general book, implied to be the book about Ishi for all readers. The new version was being pushed in the adult market, our market.^[6] Although it was said to be written for young adults—a book trade term for twelve-to-fifteen-year-olds—there was no indication of age group on book or jacket or in the ads; on the jacket our book was passed off briefly as an "anthropological story" of Ishi and not a biography, as it was. One might have excused some of this but not the marketing.

The book itself, though perhaps allowing the kind of sales treatment that confused book buyers, was entirely different from the original book. A fictional account with imagined incidents, conversations, and some invented characters, it tells Ishi's story from his own viewpoint, concentrating on the years of concealment in the hills and the deaths or disappearances of family and friends. The story is one of almost unrelenting decline and sadness until the years in San Francisco. It seems to me, and I no judge of "children's" books, that the parts set in Ishi's mind, his thoughts and memories, are not entirely successful, perhaps because too explicit. In calling up a past world and making it live, the author is more successful, I think, when she sticks closer to real events, when the writing is more objective and restrained. Here perhaps I contradict my earlier words, and perhaps am prejudiced by knowledge of what really happened, but that is how a re-reading strikes me. And I find it disconcerting that she leaves Kroeber entirely out of the latter part of the story. But some parts, such as that on the first train journey to San Francisco, are fascinating.

When the other publisher—Parnassus Press of Berkeley—would not see the matter as we saw it, we had recourse to the University attorney. After some wrangling, during which we had to explain to Bob Heizer that we were not attacking Theodora, the publisher agreed to stop advertising to the adult market. He then made an attempt to sell movie rights; Harlan Kessel, our marketing manager, had to call him off. Harlan himself was dickering with a studio; a

[6] Ishi: Last of His Tribe (Berkeley, 1964).

script was written, I think, but no picture was produced at that time. It could be argued, I suppose, that the story itself is in the public domain, but nothing truly good could be done without Theodora's interpretation. As this is written I am told by Dan Dixon, rights manager of the Press, that there are now to be two films. A documentary, done on an NEH grant, was first shown in October 1992 at the Marin Film Festival. A feature film is being done commercially.

Approaching retirement, the Press in good shape, financially and intellectually, I found time to think about books we had published, including Ishi, and it occurred to me that perhaps there should be a fully illustrated edition, somewhat like the handsome volumes produced in color and black-and-white by George Rainbird Ltd. for a number of London publishers. So we got Dave Comstock, formerly of our production department, to design and produce one, first going through all the Ishi documents and photographic files in the Lowie Museum (once the University museum, where Ishi lived, but now in Berkeley) as well as through many contemporary publications. Living in Grass Valley, Dave was pleased to visit the Ishi country, not far away, and photograph the terrain. In rather larger format than the original edition, the book came out in 1976.

The next step followed from that one. With readers wanting more information about Ishi, I thought we ought to publish a volume of the documents themselves. This appeared in 1979. Edited by Bob Heizer and Theodora Kroeber, the thirty-seven documents, including early newspaper clippings, personal accounts of Indian fighters, and detailed studies by the museum staff, are divided into four sections: Before Ishi, Ishi Enters Civilization, Ishi Among the Anthropologists, and Death of Ishi. It is called Ishi, the Last Yahi: A Documentary History . With this, I thought, perhaps we had done full justice to the story of Ishi, a great story in several ways: scientific, historical, and merely human. Ishi, born to a fleeing remnant of a persecuted people, having spent more than forty years in hiding, became a celebrity twice: once after 1911 as a stone-age man come to the city, living with the anthropologists, and then again fifty

Theodora.

Ishi.

years later in the writings of Theodora Kroeber, widow of his early benefactor.

Quite different is the story of don Juan, a Yaqui Indian famous in the 1970s and who may or may not have existed. In 1967 there came to the Press office in Los Angeles a manuscript by a graduate student in the anthropology department there. Based on a term paper or intended as a thesis—I am not sure which—it recounted the experiences of the student, Carlos Castaneda, as apprentice to an Indian shaman in northern Mexico. "In a series of remarkable dialogues," says our advertising copy, "Castaneda sets forth his partial initiation into don Juan's perception and mastery of 'non-ordinary reality.' He describes how peyote and other plants sacred to the Mexican Indians were used as gateways to the mysteries of 'dread,' 'clarity,' and 'power.'"

A university press, faced with such a "non-ordinary" manuscript, will be interested but skeptical. Such was the reaction of Robert Y. Zachary, head of the southern editorial office, and he decided that the critical readings should be more extensive than usual—four of them instead of two. To begin with there was a statement from Clement Meighan, an archaeologist at UCLA and leader of at least one field

trip in which Castaneda took part. Another was obtained from Edmund Carpenter, former collaborator of Marshall McLuhan in Toronto, a man expected to be sympathetic. I reveal these names because their participation was public; some of Carpenter's remarks were later quoted on the book jacket. Two other readers were promised anonymity, the standard practice. The crucial reading, says Zachary, was from a noted ethno-botanist, a level-headed person familiar with the medicinal plants mentioned. Rather to the editor's surprise, it was quite favorable, as were all the others.

The manuscript was also read by a fifth authority, Walter Goldschmidt, then a member of our Editorial Committee and chairman of the department of anthropology at UCLA, although not at that time acquainted with Castaneda. He recommended approval to the Committee and also offered to write a foreword, placing the author as a graduate student in anthropology. In later years he must have regretted doing this—not for what he wrote, which was cautious enough, but for putting himself in the line of fire. His most persistent critic jumped and jumped again on Goldschmidt's very first sentence, calling the book "both ethnography and allegory." Logically impossible, said the critic, as it surely was to his type of mind. In his acknowledgments the author mentioned help from six other members of the anthropology department. One senior member, as we shall see, was adamantly opposed.

So in the spring of 1968 we published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge . On the jacket Edmund Carpenter wrote, "I cannot adequately convey the excitement I experienced on reading this account. I kept putting down the manuscript and walking around. . . . Suddenly so much of what had hitherto been ambiguous made sense. . . . The Teachings of Don Juan reports a human reality, not an equivalent of that reality."

In the summer of 1960, wrote Castaneda, when he was on a field trip to collect information about medicinal plants used by the Indians, he met in a Greyhound bus station near the Arizona-Mexican border an old Indian named Juan Matus, said to be a sorcerer. Later he sought out Juan and visited him many times. A year after the first

meeting Castaneda abandoned his objective role and began serving as apprentice to don Juan—thus going from outsider to insider, from observer to participant. In the book he recounts a number of extraordinary experiences, not fully understood by him and not full explained. All this is set forth in simple and unemotional language that contrasts with the things told and enhances a believable story. (After ten years of apprenticeship, we learn in a later book, Castaneda becomes a "member" of the sorcery and is able to "stop the world," and to perceive another reality without the aid of psychotropic plants.)

It was clear from the beginning that interest in The Teachings of Don Juan was not limited to the usual academic market. Harlan Kessel advertised in the alternative press as well as in the standard media, and he arranged an extensive speaking tour for Castaneda in university communities. Success was quick. The book became famous. Castaneda and don Juan became cult figures to the young, not just in the counter-culture but to many others who were feeling the general dissatisfaction of the times. If there is such a thing as a zeitgeist, it was there to greet Castaneda and don Juan.

And so we sold a million copies. Or did we? Friends, impressed by the successful publicity, called Kessel to ask how many copies so far, and he put them off, not wishing to reveal the true figures. In the first several months we went through a couple of substantial printings, a good result but not sensational, nothing like the early sale of Ishi . What Kessel had suspected was now clear: the true market was not in cloth; the natural readers were not buyers of hard-bound books but of paperbacks; the great potential sale could be reached only in paper. We knew how to sell a paperback, of course, but had no time to cope with the off-beat inquiries, the special events, the countless telephone calls, the general commotion; we had a hundred other books to sell in the scholarly market. So Kessel licensed paperback rights to Ballantine Books for a substantial advance on royalties, shared with the author of course. At the end of the first licensing period, after some disagreement about accounting records, he transferred the license to Simon and Schuster. Meanwhile our Los Angeles

office had found Castaneda an agent, Ned Brown, who sold his future writings to the same publisher. From then on we watched with interest, collecting royalties on the volume we had published. Castaneda wrote more books and became wealthy.

In March 1973, shortly after publication of the third book, Journey to Ixtlán , the magazine Time printed a long cover story entitled "Carlos Castaneda: Magic and Reality." Because Castaneda would not allow a straight photograph, the cover picture was a shadowy montage of his head in outline, and inside it a thin Mexican in a sombrero. Below were flowering plants and a single cactus. In a gossipy, semiliterate way, the article must have been intended as a demystification of Castaneda. The magazine tracked him back to childhood in Cajamarca in Peru, interviewed his sister in Lima, and uncovered small facts about his life in this country. He was quoted on the difficulty of judging one culture in terms of another, and on how a Navajo anthropologist might ask about white European culture.

Carlos, a friendly and intelligent fellow, continued to come into the Press office to ask about royalties and for conversation. I talked with him a number of times in Los Angeles but never knew him so well as did others. He considered Zachary a snob, says the latter, and with him conversed about philosophy, while with some junior editors he discussed girls. To Jim Kubeck, managing editor, he told long stories of childhood in Brazil, abandonment by a father who ran off to Paris, schooling in Argentina, near death from a bayonet wound in Korea, and work as a border spy in Texas. He must have known that the sober and rational Kubeck, onetime student of anthropology, would not believe so many things, at least not after the first episodes, but perhaps that was no matter. In the Peruvian Andes the teller of tall tales, says Kubeck, is expected to mix fact and fantasy and is admired for the richness of his invention. But some skills, I think, can be learned only by those with a natural gift.

The young people who came to hear Carlos at Cody's Bookstore in Berkeley and in other places were always shocked, says Harlan Kessel, when their cult hero appeared in a three-piece suit and neck-

tie. That is how he always dressed, looking oddly out of place on the UCLA campus where no one but an economist, says Walter Goldschmidt, ever wears a suit. Goldschmidt says also that Carlos looked like your gardener on his way to church. A popular magazine wrote that he resembled a Cuban waiter. But snide remarks give a wrong impression. Shrewd and intelligent, Carlos surely knew exactly what he was doing. The Brooks Brothers suit, he once told Zachary, perhaps in jest, was a kind of armor, covering the confusion within. More likely, it seems to me, he knew that to meet an audience in sandals and open shirt would be to bring himself down to the level of his hearers and eventually to lose respect, as some well known gurus did.

It was surely part of Carlos' persona, built up over his entire lifetime, perhaps, that he should always be something of a mystery—as also was don Juan. Not too much should ever be certain. A factual biography would have diminished him. One wonders to what extent this pattern was thought out, calculated, or whether it had all become so natural, so much a part of him, instinctive rather than learned, that the quotidian man was no longer there, the persona more real than the person.^[7]

The true con man, I think, is born, not made, although he may sharpen his skills over time. One thinks of another successful con man—so called by himself—of about the same time, Werner Erhard of EST. Werner was not always entirely convincing but never quite unconvincing, and could perform remarkable mental feats. His mind was quick and supple; one could never pin him down or even catch up with him, and to dispute him was to risk humiliation. As with Carlos, some hearers became true believers; some, the practical minds, pronounced him a fraud; others admired without fully understanding.

In any event, and in more banal terms, Carlos created in himself a character more complex than his don Juan, if indeed don Juan was

[7] In the second chapter of Journey to Ixtlán (1972) don Juan tells Carlos that he must "erase" his personal history, wrap a fog of uncertainty around himself.

Carlos' creation. We don't know that he was or that he was not, and given the nature of the story—or the thesis—we cannot know. But there were those who thought they did know, one way or the other. At UCLA, where Castaneda submitted the manuscript of Journey to Ixtlán as his doctoral dissertation, there were a few detractors but more supporters. One senior professor, Ralph Beals, considered the work a fraud and would not have granted the degree, but he retired, and a committee of several others examined the manuscript and approved the doctorate in 1973. In its dissertation form the work was entitled "Sorcery: A Description of the World."

A couple of years later there came along a man named Richard de Mille, with a degree in psychology, who embarked on a five-year endeavor to prove that the Castaneda books were not just a mixture of fact and fiction but amounted to a great hoax, like Piltdown man. In one of his lighter moments de Mille invented the term Uclanthropus piltdunides Castanedae . And he quoted the bon mot of a friend: that Castaneda's one successful piece of sorcery was in turning the University of California into an ass. But surely no one with a genuine sense of humor—sense of the ridiculous—would devote five years of his life to such a quixotic project, and write two books about it.^[8]

De Mille hectored the UCLA faculty, especially Goldschmidt, demanding that the department admit error and rescind the degree. It is hard to know how serious he was when he wrote in the second book that he could not have finished writing it if the department had made public confession of its sins. In 1978 de Mille, Goldschmidt, Beals, and others took part in a raucous session at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Castaneda declined to appear.

De Mille's second book—I have not seen the first—contains 519 pages of gossip, innuendo, burlesque, and some genuine evidence, which I make no attempt to weigh. There are also a number of pieces

[8] Castaneda's Journey (Santa Barbara, 1976) and The Don Juan Papers (Santa Barbara, 1980).

by others, including an article favorable to Castaneda by the noted anthropologist Mary Douglas. Of special interest is an interview with Barbara Myerhof, fellow student of Castaneda and once a close friend. Goldschmidt considers this piece damning, but another reader might think it a partial validation. De Mille, on the attack, has Myerhof backed into a corner; as he presses her to declare the books a fraud, she keeps answering, "yes, but . . . yes, but." Yes, Castaneda seems to have adapted material from her work and from others, but there is more to him than that.

I find it striking that attitudes to Castaneda's work relate so closely to the type of mind of the critic. In over-simple terms: those of a mystical or quasi-mystical turn of mind tend to be sympathetic; the practical or engineering mind cites the lack of evidence and the obvious fact that Castaneda does not always tell the truth. At UCLA his supporters, with some exceptions, were of the first type. The distinguished and beleaguered Goldschmidt, who fully fits neither type, gave loyal support for a long time without accepting everything, but now seems close to judging that Castaneda mined "the literature of psychic phenomena, largely material from India, for his insights." And that "Don Juan is himself a literary creation."^[9]

In our own Los Angeles office I have already mentioned the contrast between two experienced senior editors, both now retired. The sensible Kubeck, detached, amused, remembers Carlos as charming friend and liar. The subtle Zachary, no mystic but with mind honed on philosophic studies, says that the demystifications of Time and others are not the whole story. And continues thus:

The importance of Castaneda's work does not rest upon the veracity of the don Juan story. Even if much of it is fictitious—and I doubt that it is entirely so—the point of the work for anthropology revolves about the so-called emic/etic (insider/outsider) distinction set forth in 1954 by the linguist Kenneth L. Pike.

Oversimply: the inhabitant of a culture speaks emically. A scientist observing and describing speaks etically. Emic speech conveys an inside

[9] Goldschmidt to Frugé, 1 April 1991.

truth, not available to the etic (outside) speaker. But the intellectual convention is that scientific truth is expressible only etically. A radical dilemma arises: if "inside" truth is the "real" truth, then the scientist-observer will always wander in outer darkness. But if the truth is real only when it is scientific, then the insider must be a prey to endless delusion . . . is in the purest sense one of Plato's cave-dwellers, seeing only shadows on the wall. Question: Can there be such a thing as a participatory observer, at once an outsider and an insider? Clearly there is danger: the scientist who wants to speak emically may simply "go native" and lose his scientific perspective. But if he is inflexibly etic, he sits above and outside the culture and winds up talking vacuous abstractions.^[10]

We may remember—from the early part of this chapter—that the great Alfred Kroeber once said he could not write a history of the Yurok tribe because he felt himself too much a Yurok.

Zachary says that Carlos, in many conversations, almost never discussed magic, drugs, and the like, but showed himself much concerned with the insider/outsider dilemma and interested in the writings of Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. And indeed we find the following in Castaneda's dissertation abstract:

This is an emic account of an apprenticeship of sorcery as it is practiced by the American Indians of modern Mexico. . . . The sorcerer's contention is that the world at large, and our physical surroundings . . . are the product of the perceivers' agreement on the nature of what they perceive. . . .

This basic premise of sorcery does not deny the objectivity of the world. For the sorcerer the world is not an illusion, quite the contrary, it is real, but its reality is not a fixed condition. In fact, it can be altered in part, or it can be changed altogether; thus the alleged magical properties of sorcery practice. This process of change is called "stopping the world" and can be explained as the volitional interruption of ordinary consensus. The "techniques of stopping the world" entail that at the same time the ordinary consensus is interrupted another one is ensued [sic] and in this way a new "description of the world" is brought into being.

[10] Zachary to Frugé, 21 February 1991.

And there I shall leave these matters—hanging in the air. Perhaps there is no plain answer to questions about the nature of Castaneda's writings—perhaps not even in his own head. Was it the Lady or the Tiger waiting behind the door in Frank R. Stockton's old story? Each reader, I seem to remember, was told to supply his own conclusion. Such uncertainty once troubled me. I am older now.