Culture in crisis : a study of the Hopi Indians

270 Pages·1950·57.518 MB·English

by  Laura Thompson

CULTURE IN CRISIS
A STUDY OF THE HOPI INDIANS BY
LAURA THOMPSON, WITH A FORE-
WORD BY JOHN COLLIER « A CHAPTER
FROM THE WRITINGS OF BENJAMIN LEE WHORF
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK

Under the Editorship of Gardner Murphy
CULTURE IN CRISIS: A STUDY OF THE HOPI INDIANS
Copyright, 1950, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
All rights in this book are reserved. No part of the book may be
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles
and reviews. For information address Harper & Brothers
I-Z
CONTENTS
Foreword by John Collier ix
Preface XV
Acknowledgments Xxi
The Problem

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The Earth Mother and Her Children 21
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Ancient Americans 47

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“We All Help One Another” 63
F
Intensity Within Tranquility 90
The Path that Leads to the Sun 121

D
N Strange Ways of the White Brother 136
Time, Space and Language
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by Benjamin Lee Whorf 152
Culture in Crisis 173
10. A Two-Ply Lariat 185
Bibliography 203
Index 215

PLATES
Following page 214
Corn Rock
Shipaulovi pueblo
Houses in Mishongnovi
South plaza, Shungopovi pueblo
View of Old Oraibi
Peach orchard, New Oraibi
Spring-irrigated terraced garden
Ranch house
Farmer with digging stick
Herding sheep on the Hopi range
Indian Service range manager instructing Hopi in sheep care
Sheep owner culling his flock
Range management plot
Storeroom in a Hopi home
Cooking at the open hearth
Evening meal during the last war
Women grinding corn
House scene
Coiling a basket
Girls’ puberty ceremonial costume
Married woman’s ceremonial costume
Up the mesa trail
A mechanic at work
At the village store
Tribal Court
Judge of the Tribal Court
Hospital-delivered infant with Hopi nurse-aide
Boys’ washroom in a Hopi day school
Shungopovi day school
Day-school playground
Day-school classrooms
Children going home from school
In the home economics class
Recess at the Oraibi high school
Beginners’ classroom
Mothers with infants on cradleboards
Mother and child
Boy preparing to spin top
Hopi school girl
Taking care of baby brother
Girl at work
Youth on horseback
Hopi man
Hopi man
A Hopi ceremony
FOREWORD
I suspect no book yet produced is like this book. I also believe that its
importance will not be quickly apprehended, because the book draws
into relationship with one another many matters that usually are not
thought of as belonging together. It deals with relationships not con-
ventionally apprehended as yet. Through deep attention to these unat-
tended-to relationships, it makes discoveries—fundamental discoveries,
of theoretical and practical moment at the same time, and of local mo-
ment, and perhaps world moment. But if the reader is to make these
discoveries on his own part, he too must bring deep attention to bear;
and in these hurrying years, with their myriad demands upon quick
attention, little of reading is done with deep attention.
The individual, as all know, yields his meanings only to profound
study. Profound study of even the lowliest individual, in even the re-
motest part of the world, yields understanding of life as a whole and of
man’s whole world. And the understanding of the individual has been
an unwearying pursuit of the European mind ever since the Greek years;
toward such pursuit, every enlightened mind pays respect, and most
enlightened minds share in it.
But as yet, the pursuit of the understanding of human societies
attracts little. of that deep, sustained attention which the individual
demands and receives. The two centuries behind us were not very sure
that society had any effective existence at all. Contemporary social
study is broken down into many specializations, whose hypotheses are
narrow and not very exciting or demanding upon profound attention.
And here I come to one of the elements of importance in this book.
I
The many specialized disciplines of social science break down the
questioning of society into many hypotheses, each one useful but each
ix
X Foreword
one limited and limiting. As long time rolls on, synthesis may dawn
from the vast volume of data gathered under the many and incomplete
hypotheses; or synthesis may not dawn, even after long years. Not in
this manner do other sciences and arts reach their useful goals—indus-
trial engineering, for example, and medicine. Numerous are the spe-
cialties of medicine, but they do not await on some far future intellectual
event for their synthesis. Instead, they move here and now, incessantly,
into coéperative, clinical application.
This book results from the codperative and integrative use of the
many specialities of social science, including psychological science and
ecology, by specialists who collaborated in the search for the whole-
ness of a complex social fact or event. The specialities functioned as
they function in the medical clinic. There emerged discoveries not con-
tained within or predictable from any of the specialized hypotheses or
all of them together. The discoveries threw a flood of genuinely new
light upon an entire human society—its past, its present, and its pos-
sible future. Immediate practical understandings’ were attained, and
some very moving, universal significances appeared. Synthesis and
pragmatic yield did not have to wait on the intellectual construction
of some indefinite future year; they emerged at once, right out of the
human and social data as examined through the method of converging
specialized disciplines within a codperative research.
One of the desperate needs of the clouded world situation now is
the speeding-up of social discovery, the quick achievement of generaliza-
tions which can be used by statesmen. When the specialities of social
science move into codperative, integrative research, a corner in the his-
tory of social science is turned, and a critical acceleration takes place.
The corner is turned, the critical acceleration is demonstrated, in this
book.
11
The pueblos of the Southwestern United States are the most repre-
sentative survivors of pre-Columbian Indian civilization. They are
such through the complexity of their life, its many-sidedness and its
extraordinary balance, its religious profundity, its man-nature world
Foreword xi
view, and its weight and radiance of symbolism. None other of the
complex Indian civilizations was allowed to hold its own through the
centuries after white conquest. The pueblos held their own.
But now, their deepest crisis is upon them. None can say that it is
their final crisis; but it could be the crisis leading to social death, while
if, through great inner resourcefulness and with very wise aid, they
surmount the crisis, the achievement will have world-wide interest
and might be productive of world-wide values.
Among the pueblos, none except possibly Taos is in the grip of
crisis so manifest and so profound as are the Hopi pueblos. And among
the pueblos, it is the Hopi who preserve the most unmixed of the pre-
Columbian cultures and life-systems.
This book searches to its roots and to its core the Hopi society as
the conserver of an immense past and as the builder of souls; and it
searches to its roots the nature of the crisis which has come upon this
society and upon its personalities. In this search, the book deals, in
terms valid for all the continents, with one of the major conditions of
humanity today. The hundreds of millions of nonliterate or nonindus-
trial peoples within their societies usually ancient, have moved or are
moving into crisis. The crisis is far, far deeper, more central, than the
merely political view or the merely economic view apprehends, though
it is, too, a political and economic crisis. This book is a case study in
the crisis of one people among the many hundreds of peoples who are
in crisis. It is exhaustive in terms of this one people, but it is a study
carried out in the search for an understanding of the crisis of all non-
industrial and nonliterate people, and also the crisis of our world in its
entirety. For our world is in crisis as stern and as obscure as that of
the Hopi Indian tribe, and an aspect of that crisis is the dissolution of
the human bonds and the sinking of faiths and values which are from
of old.
Wy .
The world profoundly needs to have its sense of society deepened;
to become aware of the universal potency of societies as the determiners
and creators of life; even to acquire a reverence for these intangible
yet so definite entities which from out of obscurity are the dominators