Intercultural Relations in the Greater Southwest

Abstract

KIRCHHOFF'S paper, which initiates this symposium, has divided the Greater Southwest into a number of small cultural provinces. I shall propose some larger groupings of these, on the basis of intercultural relations. Suggestions, in this brief presentation, apply only to Oasis America. References to Arid America will be confined to the Great Basin, where the culture of that large and vaguely bounded area appears in its best known form. Beals (1943b), Kroeber (1925) and Lowie (1923) have suggested that a Basin-like culture was once common throughout the whole of the Greater Southwest. Lowie (1923) called it a primeval ultramontane layer. Where weather and soil conditions permitted, this layer was overlaid by patterns from the south, coming either direct from Mexico or sometimes, as we now surmise, by a roundabout route through the Plains. Among the agriculturists of Oasis America the substratum shows through, now at one point, now another (Map I). Beals (1932:155-219) and Kroeber (1925:583) have listed some of the substratum traits, mostly in material culture. To these Zingg adds captive eagles and perhaps the kickstick race suggested by two feather-stuffed balls found in Lovelock Cave (1939:14). In the nonmaterial realm, Kroeber lists puberty rituals, the unsought vision and magic rather than true shamanism (1943:195). I would add to this some other devices for negating the dangerous power of the supernatural: the semicouvade or restrictions on the father after a birth as well as on the mother, and some form of purification for the mourners after a death. These procedures, seen in their simplest form in the Basin, are intensified and elaborated in California and on the Northwest Coast, so that we have a public ceremony for girls at puberty and a mourning anniversary for the dead. In other parts of America they appear, now simple and now elaborate, from the Eastern Algonkians to the Northwest Coast. Driver has suggested that the girl's puberty observances, in simple form, were brought over by the first immigrants (1941:62). I would go further and surmise that rites for all three events in the life cycle-birth, girl's puberty and death-were brought over very early in simple form and survive among the hunting and gathering peoples. I do not include boy's puberty here. That is a more complicated ceremonial with organizational and theological implications. It often arises after the more magical ceremonial for the girls has been abandoned. The sucking shaman, another Basin trait, seems to me equally ancient. Clements (1932:241) suggests that he was one of the earliest healers in the Old World as well as the new. In the Basin, there are also Snake and Bear shamans and some who retrieve lost souls, an echo of the Northwest. The individual vision may be another early trait. It too is widespread among hunting and gathering peoples who function as individuals and need such power more than