The Need for an Audience: A Response to Dennis Tedlock

Abstract

If responses need or deserve a title, then the title for this one would be, the need for an audience. It seems particularly appropriate at 9 o'clock this morning. Tedlock is an anthropologist, though an unusual one. Any man who can persuade a private university in these financially tight times to publish a journal like Alcheringa, which is guaranteed to make typesetters whimper in their sleep, and even to slip recording discs in the back of it, must be considered unusual. But I am a less unusual anthropologist. It would, therefore, have been possible to give an anthropological response to this paper. And such anthropological responses come in many varieties. The first variety says: well it's interesting that Quich6 Maya tell that sort of story in that sort of way. Indeed, it is not at all surprising when you consider the kind of houses that they live in or the way they calculate their kinship or the political system they have to stumble along with, or the religious beliefs they manipulate. In fact, the whole thing is so Quiche Maya, it's quite astonishing. And then there is the second variety of anthropological response. This says: well, Quich6 Maya may tell stories