1

In referring to the studies in this book as ethnocriticism , I take up again a concept I tentatively offered more than a decade ago in my first awkward attempt to say something about Native Americans as subjects and producers of varieties of American discourse. Ethnocriticism is the name I give to a particular perspective as this is manifested on the level of critical writing. On the pedagogical or curricular level, the ethnocritical perspective manifests itself in the form of multiculturalism , a term I take to refer to that particular organization of cultural studies which engages otherness and difference in such a way as to provoke an interrogation of and a challenge to what we ordinarily take as familiar and our own. On the level of what I will call cognitive ethics, the ethnocritical perspective is consistent with a recognition and legitimation of heterogeneity (rather than homogeneity) as the social and cultural norm. My term for this recognition and legitimation—and I take my particular sense of it from Paul Rabinow—is cosmopolitanism . Ulti-

mately, ethnocriticism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism are all oriented toward materializing their values on the sociopolitical level, contributing to the possibility of institutionalizing what I have elsewhere called the polyvocal polity .^[1] I will return to multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and the politics of polyvocality in my conclusion. Here, by way of introduction, I want to define, explain, and, so, inevitably, defend ethnocriticism .

Ten years ago I found terms for the sort of critical perspective I had in mind most particularly in the historical subdiscipline of ethnohistory . "Although ethnohistory is a scholarly strategy with a long pedigree," as James Axtell has written, "it was given academic prominence in 1946 when Congress created the Indian Claims Commission" (Krupat 1979 142), which called upon anthropologists to examine historical sources in order to determine whether specific tribes had occupied specific lands, and whether they had received fair value for those lands at the time of cession. The American Indian Ethnohistoric Conference was formed, and the journal Ethnohistory first published in 1954 to fill scholarly needs in studying Indian-White relations in the history of this country. Twenty-five years later, in 1979, it seemed to me that an "ethnohistorical literary criticism," as I referred to it then (1979 142), an interdisciplinary mix of anthropology, history, and critical theory, was equally needed for the study of Indian-White relations in the literature and culture of this country.

Central to ethnohistorical work is the concept of the frontier . The frontier for the modern ethnohistorian is not defined in the progressivist-evolutionist manner of Fred-

erick Jackson Turner^[2] as the farthest point to which civilization has advanced, a series of those points apparently marking a clearly discernible line between "us" and "them." Rather, in a more relativist manner, the frontier is understood as simply that shifting space in which two cultures encounter one another. In James Clifton's recent formulation, "a frontier is a social setting," not a fixed or mappable, but, rather, "a culturally defined place where peoples with different culturally expressed identities meet and deal with each other" (24).

Of course, the two cultures which met and dealt with each other at the various frontiers noted by Western history were almost never two cultures of equivalent material power, so that an ethnocriticism founded upon ethnohistorical descriptions of the frontier must involve a recognition that the topics it takes up from an anthropological, historical, or literary perspective all must be set against the backdrop of a pervasive Western imperialism. For the study of Native American materials, this means attention to the domestic imperialism, which, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, operated on this continent against indigenous peoples everywhere, and which, regardless of intentionalities, continues to operate to this day.

But inasmuch as the conceptual categories necessary to ethnocriticism—culture, history, imperialism, anthropology, literature, interdisciplinarity, even the frontier—are Western categories, the objection may be raised that ethnocriticism is itself no more than yet another form of imperialism, this time of a discursive and epistemological kind, and one which, by its very foundation in these cate-

gories cannot help but falsify the lived experience and worldview of any nonwestern people, translating , in Eric Cheyfitz's broad understanding of the term,^[3] "their" incoherent jabber into an eloquence of use only to ourselves. It seems to me that at the ultimate horizon, this objection is true, or at least unanswerable. Just as anthropology, in an absolute sense, cannot engage innocently with any culture—because anthropology, that is to say, turns people into cultural subjects (of inquiry, at the least), objects of its knowledge—so, too, can there, in this absolute sense, be no nonviolent criticism of the discourse of Others, not even an ethnocriticism. The question is whether, short of this absolute horizon, it is worth pursuing certain projects of inquiry in the interest of a rather less violent knowledge.

Objections to the imperialism of criticism, as it were, have been raised not only by Native American critics such as Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor, but as well by non-Native critics such as Calvin Martin and Robin Ridington, who have urged a turn to "Indian" modes of thinking about culture, history, and literature^[4] —a call which, as I have had occasion to say before, parallels a most decidedly Western turn to "postmodernist" approaches to literature, history, and ethnography. Best known among these latter are Stephen Tyler's call for anthropologists to abandon their production of "documents of the occult" and turn their efforts instead to the production of "occult documents"; Jean Baudrillard's denunciation of "Marxist Anthropology" for its inevitable "Domination of Nature"; Jean-François Lyotard's

rejection of the grands récits , the overarching explanatory narratives of historicism, philosophy, and science as no more than discourses of legitimation; Richard Rorty's neopragmatic demotion of philosophy to the position of just another speaker in an ongoing conversation with no claim (philosophy's historical self-justification) to be anything more than interesting ; and Gerald Vizenor's explicit linkage of what he calls the "trickster" mode to variants of these latter postmodernist positions.^[5] Although I am critical of much of traditional Western disciplinary theory and practice as these have operated in relation to Native American subjects in all the senses of that word, I continue to be in substantial disagreement with "evocative" (in Tyler's term) or "biological" (in Calvin Martin's term), or, quite simply, postmodernist orientations for criticism. The relativism of ethnocriticism is not, as these positions are, a radically epistemological relativism. For all that, ethnocriticism's self-positioning at a great many frontiers, as I hope will become clear, consciously and intentionally courts the questioning of any premises from which it initially proceeds.

For any who believe, however, that it is indeed possible to say an unequivocal "no" to the Western episteme and still do work of a specifically critical and pedagogical type, much of what follows will seem disappointing at best, fraudulent

at worst. Nor is it likely to placate the absolutist in these matters to point to the fact that ethnocriticism, like any analytic discourse , cannot help but be implicated in what Gayatri Spivak, in a brilliant recent discussion of "post-coloniality," has (re)defined as "the deconstructive philosophical position," one "in which one offers an impossible 'no' to a structure which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately" (794). It may be that ethnocriticism is engaged in a type of catachrestical project (a rather different one, however, from that of Boas, as I discuss it in chapter 2), in Spivak's terms, one which offers "concept metaphor[s] without an adequate referent" (794); if so, I would claim, as Spivak does for what she calls "the study of a globality not confused with ethnicity" (795), that ethnocriticism may—paradoxically, to be sure—turn out to be a project particularly worth pursuing.