Shared Experience and Magical Death: Chipewyan Explanations of a Prophet's Decline

Abstract

Subsequent to Ridington's (1968) benchmark identification ofthe medicine fight as political instrument among the Beaver Indians there has been substantive increase in understanding the symbolic ordering supernatural causality among the related Chipewyan. Smith (1973, 1982, 1985) has examined the role inkoze as sorcery in its relation to subsistence activities and traditional leadership at Fort Resolution in the Northwest Territories. This paper extends the analysis inkoze to & prophet figure, active in the northern parts several Canadian Provinces at the end ofthe 1960s, and Chipewyan explanations his decline in the early 1970s. Needham's (1979:64-77) emphasis upon the distinction between monothetic and polythetic classification has necessary corollary, that polythetic category has no fixed boundaries. Categories can be seen as coalescences meaning within field rather than as discrete entities. The pervasive role polythetic categories and polythetic category in Chipewyan culture mandates fluid metaphor structure. The Chipewyan match perfectly Turner's (Turner [i957:xxii] citing Gluckman [1954:21]) use Gluckman to describe, a social system as 'field tension, full ambivalence, cooperation and contrasting struggle'. Inkoze can be profitably viewed as field amenable to the application Turner's (1957, 1974) concept social drama. Turner (i957:xvii) developed the concept as means, of description and analysis in the study social process. his dramaturgical metaphor is also applicable to social dramas Chipewyan create from purely verbal accounts events occurring elsewhere in time and space. I shall treat inkoze as paradigm. Turner (1974:17) defines paradigm as, sets 'rules' from which many kinds sequences social action may be generated but which further specify what sequences must be excluded. He (1974:67) further states, But where processes are unconditioned, undetermined, or unchanneled by explicit customs and rules, my hypothesis would be that the main actors are nevertheless guided by paradigms?which may derive from beyond the mainstream socio-cultural process with its ensocializing devices such as education and limitation action models in stereotypical situations. Symbols, like paradigms, work through both verbal and non-verbal mechanisms. Because the crucial role played by affect in this material I shall focus upon the symbolic field and shared arena rather than on the nature and form the representations themselves, using the term script to encompass the affectual aspect subjective paradigms. I shall presume that the shared experience social life generates meaning/emotion solely as function being shared.