3

To return specifically to the level of critical discourse—and it will have been obvious already that it is not possible to do more than foreground one level rather than another—the problem of the postmodernist position is not just that, as many have noted, it has been far easier to call for a non-Western, "Indian," "biological," or postmodern ethnography and historiography than actually to produce them. Nor is it even that when these have appeared, as, for example,

in Gerald Vizenor's "trickster criticism," apart from surface differences of style, tone, and organization (to be sure, these are not negligible), they have not offered interpretations very different from those of more traditional Western criticism.^[9] Rather, it is that postmodern positions, regardless of what they call themselves (e.g., trickster, "Indian," biological, evocative, or whatever), are all based upon models both of Western "scientific," "social-scientific," "rational," "historical" modes of thought, and of non-Western "religious," biogenetic, "mythic," or vaguely specified "Indian" modes, that are grossly overgeneralized—overgeneralized, so that they may be reified as categories presumptively in (binary) opposition to each other. This insistence upon what Frantz Fanon years ago called a "manichean allegory,"^[10] as I shall argue in a moment, is as largely useless as a framework for understanding specific ethnographic, historical, and literary instances as it is, to my mind, politically dangerous.

For Native American materials, as Thomas Biolsi has written in a fine review of Calvin Martin's recent work proposing monolithic dichotomies between "Indian" "biological" worldviews and Western "anthropological" worldviews, "the obvious distortion is the liquidation of the astounding intertribal diversity present at any one time in North America, as well as historical change within tribes, both before and after contact" (262). A persistent attachment to the notion that Indians are inherently "natural" or "biological" people, always and everywhere in perfect harmony with their environment, or to the notion that Western "scien-

tific" and "anthropological" desire must inevitably foul whatever it touches leads to nothing more than "sermoniz[ing] about 'the Indian mind'" (Biolsi 262), or the evils of "Western civilization."

An ethnocritical frontier orientation, however, soon shows that one of the things that occurs on the borders is that oppositional sets like West/Rest, Us/Them, anthropological/biological, historical/mythical, and so on, often tend to break down. On the one hand, cultural contact can indeed produce mutual rejections, the reification of differences, and defensive retreats into celebrations of what each group regards as distinctively its own—William Bennett and Allan Bloom are available as current illustrations of this option on the Western side of the frontier—for, as Fredrik Barth, in a classic study showed, the maintenance of "ethnic distinctions do[es] not depend on an absence of social interaction and acceptance" (10, my emphasis), and that "cultural differences can persist despite inter-ethnic contact and interdependence" (10). On the other hand, it may also frequently be the case that interaction leads to interchange, what A. I. Hallowell, in a term borrowed from Fernando Ortiz and intended to emphasize the dual directionality of cultural contact, has called "transculturalization" (in Clifton 289).

Further, whatever "cultures" or "peoples" do or don't do, particular persons—as the studies in Clifton's book, as well as work by Sherry Ortner, Peter Whiteley, and other anthropologists have shown^[11] —react to the new and other with all the range of human response possible. This is not at all to reinstantiate the discredited category of the "free," "au-

tonomous," "individual"; it is to remark that there may be a greater rather than a lesser number of variations within whatever discursive and epistemic limits one may note as prevailing. As just one example of which I am aware, let me cite the case of the Brulé Sioux historian, Clyde D. Dollar. In a paper called "Through the Looking-Glass: History and the Modern Brulé Sioux" (1972), Dollar anticipated some of the recent objections of Martin and others to traditional Western historiography as applied to Native American materials. According to Dollar,

the idea of an historical fact . . . from the Indian side of the looking-glass, is something one has been told by his elders and therefore is not to be questioned. Indeed, among the High Plains people, there is little interest in the subject matter of history per se beyond the repeating of its stories, and a deeply searching pursuit of data and facts on which to build veracity in history is frequently considered rather pointless, perhaps ludicrous, decidedly nosy, and an occupation closely associated with eccentric white men. (In D. Tyler 1)

Then a historian at the University of South Dakota, Dollar became a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arkansas, where, I assume, in full consciousness of how "pointless," "ludicrous," "nosy," and "closely associated with eccentric white men" his studies might seem to Brulé people, he must nonetheless have engaged in something like "a deeply searching pursuit of data and facts on which to build veracity in history." Cognizant and respectful of the ways in which traditional High Plains Indian people conceptualize history, Dollar nonetheless chose to pursue researches into Western historiography. So far as this is true, Dollar would have been engaged in an exemplary ethnocritical project, attempting

to see whether he could accommodate elements of Brulé historical theory to that of the West, and/or to accommodate elements of Western theory to that of the Brulé. Dollar's efforts to move back and forth across border lines, as I imagine them, seem far richer in their potential for criticism, pedagogy, and politics than any turn to an exclusively defined, monolithically "Indian" or "Western" way. These remarks, I hope it will be understood, do not in the least presume that the mere attempt to mediate such things as the Plains view of history and the view of history of the American graduate school must, as a function of the intensity of its desire, achieve success. Not at all. Indeed, as I shall note in detail later (chapter 5), the difficulties of mediating the view of literature held by traditional people and the view held by the modern West is something particularly vexing, to the point, it may well be, of incapacitating the full practice of the ethnocriticism I nonetheless propose.

Criticizing the European and Euramerican's "culturally patterned system of assigning individual and group identity by race" or "blood" (Clifton 12), James Clifton points out that

Originally, no native North American society subscribed to the idea of biological determination of identity or behavior. Indeed, the most common identity question asked of strangers was not, "What nation do you belong to?" or "Of what race are you?" Instead, when confronting unknown people, they typically asked, "What language do you speak?" (11)

Not only may language serve as a major determinant of identity as Native American people would "originally" seem to have thought, but, as I want to suggest, in a very partic-

ular sense, language may serve as a model for culture as well.

I mean to indicate here a similarity although not an identity between the way Mikhail Bakhtin describes language^[12] and the way—one way, at least—I would want to describe culture. This particular analogy was remarked some years ago by James Clifford (but only in a footnote!), and although Clifford has, I believe, worked out some of its implications in practice, he has not, to my knowledge, taken up the matter in an explicit theoretical fashion. So I believe something remains to be said on this matter.

What I want to instantiate, here, is Bakhtin's claim that language in society is always and inevitably a plural construct. As is well known, for Bakhtin, the language of any single speaker, one's "own" speech, can never be absolutely and exclusively his or her own, never some sort of inalienable private property. Rather, real speech—speech, I assume, as it occurs in the marketplace, in the corridors and the classrooms of the academy—is always shot through with the speech of others. In the same way, it may be useful to see culture in history—culture after the Fall, outside the gates of Eden, and so on—as never absolute and exclusive unto itself. Epistemologically, for example, it would appear that no culture could very accurately be described as entirely mythical or historical; biological or anthropological; from the point of view of social organization, there is no known culture that is or ever has been entirely patriarchal or matriarchal; and so on. "Language," Bakhtin writes,

lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's . . . the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!) but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one's own. (In Gates 1985 1)

And the same sort of thing is probably true of culture and cultural difference, which, like racial or gender difference, is better conceptualized in dialogical rather than oppositional terms—Fanon's "manichean allegory" of white/black, men/women, us/them, and so on.

It should immediately be added that the dialogical or differential view of culture I am proposing in no way assumes an egalitarianism in regard to its various constitutive elements. For all that the words we speak or the cultural practices we engage in do manifest themselves or "exist . . . in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions" as well as our own, not everyone's words, contexts, and intentions weigh equally. The question is not so much, to borrow a formulation from Gayatri Spivak, whether the subaltern can speak but whether and to what effect she can be heard. Nonetheless, for all the care with which it must be employed in practice, the dialogical view of culture seems to me to have advantages over the oppositional view.

Not the least of these, as Dominick LaCapra has noted, is that the "undoing of binary oppositions" can provide a "critique" of what he calls "the scapegoat mechanism—a mechanism that generates purity for an in-group by projecting all corruption or pollution onto an out-group" (6).

This important "undoing" was earlier proposed in Nancy Jay's deconstruction of dichotomized thinking, in which, extrapolating from Emile Durkheim's presentation of the absolute difference between the sacred and the profane, and, more distantly (but with more general effect), from Aristotle's principle of the excluded middle ("anything, and everything must be either A or Not-A" [Jay 42]), Jay showed that dichotomized reasoning is

necessarily distorting [in its tendency to take all difference as a matter of presence/absence, existence/non-existence] when . . . applied directly to the empirical world, for there are no negatives there. Everything that exists . . . exists positively. (48)

Just as dichotomized, binary, oppositional, or manichean reasoning once served as a justification for imperial domination, so, too, is it too often retained today to justify that form of postcolonial revisionism that produces what Donald Bahr has called "Victimist . . . history," a very specific form of narrative which "tells how one people was damaged by another" (1989 316). In victimist history, it is, of course, not the first, but the second term of each dichotomous set that is valorized, so that, as Tzvetan Todorov has noted, we still get "manichean writing . . . [but] with good and evil simply having switched places. On your right, the disgusting white colonialists; on your left, the innocent black victims" (1986 178)—or the relentlessly genocidal Euramericans, the innocent and hapless Native Americans.

At the risk of elaborating the obvious, I want to state clearly that my own critique of dichotomous logic as inadequate to the actual complexities of cultural encounter in history is not at all intended to endorse Todorov's or anyone

else's notion that it is possible somehow to proceed "neutrally," avoiding not merely the reductionist practices of "scapegoating" and "victimizing," but as well the moral and political implications of any situated discourse. One may grant that not all Euramericans were rapacious, genocidal monsters, and that not all Indians were, in the purest and most absolute sense, their hapless, innocent victims: nonetheless, it seems to me beyond question that—all things considered—the indigenous peoples of this continent, along with African Americans, women, and many other groups, have overwhelmingly been more sinned against than sinning. If this is so, to construct one's discourse on such a premise is not necessarily to engage in the revisionist allegory of victimism. Some people have been hurt by others and if that is not the only and the most interesting thing to say, it most certainly remains something that still, today, can probably not be said too often.