Wisdom Sits in Places

“People, not cultures, sense places, and I have tried to suggest that in Cibecue, as elsewhere, they do so in varying ways.” 

Here, Basso is explaining his choice to structure the book around four individuals from Cibecue, to explain the phenomenon of naming places from different perspectives. This quote also highlights a theme that Basso will develop later in the book: that Western Apache history, and therefore culture, is developed in ways that are subjective and perspectival, in contrast to Anglo-American history, which aspires to a disembodied, authoritative voice.

“Essentially then, instances of place-making consist in an adventitious fleshing out of historical material that culminates in a posited state of affairs, a particular universe of objects and events—in short, a place-world—wherein portions of the past are brought into being.” 

Throughout the book, Basso notes that place-making requires both memory and imagination, whereby people not only reference past events but also filter them through their own subjectivity and interpret their significance based on the current context. In this quote, Basso is also highlighting how this discursive process allows people to preserve the past without needing recourse to the tools of academic historians. Though it involves a complex interplay of faculties, this is an everyday function, Basso says—a basic way in which people make sense of themselves and the world around them.  

“That Charles has taken me for someone in a hurry comes as a surprise. Neither had I foreseen that my failure to pronounce the stubborn Apache place-name would be interpreted by him as displaying a lack of respect. And never had I suspected that using Apache place-names might be heard by those who use them as repeating verbatim—actually quoting—the speech of their early ancestors. This is a fair amount to take in at once, and as the quiet of the morning asserts itself again, I fear that my actions, which were wholly unwitting but patently offensive, may have placed in jeopardy the future of our project.” 

In this quote, Basso has just offended his Western Apache guide, Charles Henry, by repeatedly mispronouncing the name of a place and suggesting they move on. The quote highlights the relationship between ancestors and place-names—that place-making brings the actions of the ancestors into the present and encourages people to view the ancestors with empathy and respect. It also demonstrates Basso’s status as an outsider—despite his best efforts, he’s breached Apache custom—which serves to justify the caution and care he demonstrates in the ethnographic study of Apache culture that follows. 

“Each story is concerned with disruptive social acts, with everyday life gone out of control, and each concludes with a stark reminder that trouble would not have occurred if people had behaved in ways they knew they should.” 

This quote describes one of the functions of place-names Basso discovers on his travels with the Western Apache guide Charles Henry. Under Henry’s instruction, Basso learns that places were first named in ways that were simply descriptive; then they became the names of clans; finally, they were commemorative and instructive, as is the case with the type of place-name described here. This quote also highlights how, through Western Apache place-naming practices, the landscape around Cibecue has become dense with moral significance. 

“To this engrossing end, as Charles Henry showed repeatedly, the place-maker often speaks as a witness on the scene, describing ancestral events ‘as they are occurring’ and creating in the process a vivid sense that what happened long ago—right here, on this very spot—could be happening now.” 

In Chapter 1, Basso describes how Western Apache historians like Charles Henry, unlike their Anglo-American counterparts, describe history from an eyewitness perspective, as though it is happening directly in front of them, rather than in some distant past. In this quote, we see a reflection of this immediacy, which allows history to be filtered through the subjectivity of both storyteller and listener, while creating empathy and understanding for the subjects of the stories. In contrast, Basso says, many Western Apache find Anglo-American accounts of their history flat and unfamiliar. 

“For Indian men and women, the past lies embedded in features of the earth—in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields—which together endow their lands with multiple forms of significance that reach into their lives and shape the ways they think.” 

With this quote, Basso is highlighting that for many Indigenous peoples—not just the Western Apache—place occupies a central position in conceptions of history. As the quote suggests, this focus on place has an impact on present and future self-identity, as well as shaping the understanding of past events. This characterization of the role of place echoes discussions of place that will occur later in the book, when Basso discusses how, by investing places with meaning, Western Apache individuals are also working those places into their sense of self. 

“We used to survive only off the land. Now it’s no longer that way. Now we live only with money, so we need jobs. But the land still looks after us. We know the names of the places where everything happened. So we stay away from badness.” 

This quote is one of the statements Basso sets out to investigate at the outset of Chapter 2. While initially inscrutable to outsiders, such statements, Basso says, can become legible through sustained ethnographic inquiry. In this case, this statement highlights how Cibecue is changing, with young people turning increasingly towards Western education—a source of anxiety for older community members. However, this quote suggests that historical tales, embedded in the landscape as place-names, continue to exert moral force. 

“In an even more fundamental sense, then, historical tales are ‘about’ what it means to be a Western Apache, or, to make the point less dramatically, what it is that being an Apache should normally and properly entail.” 

In Chapter 2, Basso identifies three categories of narratives in Western Apache tradition; of these, historical tales are most important to his examination of place-names, as this kind of narrative is closely linked to the site at which the events of the tale took place. Historical tales are also about the consequences of disregarding Apache custom, and as this quote suggests, they’re meant to be instructive to the listener. In imparting a moral lesson, historical tales link the listener to the place at which the events in the story took place—in that sense, they’re also “about” that place. 

“In order to reach the young women’s camp, we had to pass within a few hundred yards of Men Stand Above Here and There, the place where the man had lived who was arrested for rustling in the story. I pointed it out to my companion. She said nothing for several moments. Then she smiled and spoke softly in her own language: ‘I know that place. It stalks me every day.’” 

This quote reflects an incident Basso observed in which a young woman who behaved disrespectfully, by adopting “whitemen” ways, changed her behavior after hearing her grandmother tell a historical tale about the consequences of siding with outsiders over her own community. Years later, the young woman remembers the lesson every time she sees the place named in the story—it “stalks” her. This quote is also an illustration of how Basso uses stories from his ethnographic research to illustrate his more abstract points about place-names. 

“What has been ignored, in other words, are the cultural instruments with which American Indians fashion understandings of their environments, the ideational resources with which they constitute their surroundings and invest them with value and significance.” 

In this quote, Basso is highlighting a different dimension of a recurring theme throughout the book: that of the neglected nature of sense of place as an object of study. In this case, Basso notes that the ways in which anthropologists have focused on the material dimensions of the relationship between Native American groups and their surroundings—how it shaped questions of biological survival—while neglecting the role of processes whereby people vest the landscape with meaning. This meaning, Basso argues, shape people’s sense of themselves and sphere of possibilities for social action. 

“Ordinary talk, the ethnographer sees, provides a readily available window onto the structure and significance of other people’s worlds, and so (slowly at first, by fits and starts, and never without protracted bouts of guessing) he or she begins to learn to listen. And also to freshly see. For as native concepts and beliefs find external purchase on specific features of the local topography, the entire landscape acquires a crisp new dimension that seems to move it more surely into view” 

Here, Basso is arguing for the importance of sustained ethnographic research as a tool for understanding how people talk about the landscape, and therefore, how they talk about themselves. Such utterances, he says, don’t just communicate ideas about features of the material world—they also form the basis of social interactions and of culture. However, understanding the significance of this talk as an outsider, as Basso says repeatedly throughout the book, is only possible when one understands the cultural reference points. 

“Most notably, as T.S. Eliot (1932) and Seamus Heaney (1980) have remarked, place-names provide materials for resonating ellipses, for speaking and writing in potent shorthand, for communicating much while saying very little.” 

This quote highlights a theme that Basso returns to at various points throughout the book: that places-names are more than tools to reference features of the landscape, but instead call forth a range of associations. It also illustrates another dimension of the lack of research on place in anthropological circles: Due to the paucity of resources in anthropology, Basso has grounded much of his non-ethnographic research in writers from other fields—in this case, the poets T.S. Eliot and Seamus Heaney. 

“In addition, place-names implicitly identify positions for viewing these locations: optimal vantage points, so to speak, from which the sites can be observed, clearly and unmistakably, just as their names depict them. To picture a site from its name, then, requires that one imagine it as if standing or sitting at a particular spot, and it is to these privileged positions, Apaches say, that the images evoked by place-names cause them to travel in their minds.” 

This quote illustrates the remarkable evocative potential of place-names, which can anchor people concretely in a historical tale—not only inviting them to bear witness to the events of that tale, but also, as this quote demonstrates, telling them where precisely they’re standing as they do so. Specifically, the vantage point is believed to be in front of the site, where Western Apache ancestors would have stood while naming it. In this way, the quote also illustrates how speaking with places—the practice referenced in this quote—forges a direct and immediate bond with ancestral voices and events. 

“By virtue of their role as spatial anchors in traditional Apache narratives, place-names can be made to represent the narratives themselves, summarizing them, as it were, and condensing into compact form their essential moral truths. As a result, narratives and truths alike can be swiftly ‘activated’ and brought into focused awareness through the use of place-names alone. And so it happens, on these occasions when Apache people see fit to speak with place-names, that a vital part of their tribal heritage seems to speak to them as well.” 

In this quote, Basso is offering insight into the immediacy with which Western Apache individuals can relate to their ancestors, thanks to place-names; in a manner similar to that highlighted in Chapter 1, when Charles Henry states that speaking place-names is quoting the voices of the ancestors, this quote shows that the practice of “speaking with names” allows individuals to call directly on ancestral authority in times of distress. This quote also highlights the reciprocal nature of place-making: People invest the landscape with meaning while simultaneously incorporating that meaning into their own experience.

“This reciprocal relationship—a relationship in which individuals invest themselves in the landscape while incorporating its meanings into their own most fundamental experience—is the ultimate source of rich sententious potential and functional versatility of Western Apache place names. For when place-names are used in the manner exemplified by Lola Machuse and her friends, the landscape is appropriated in pointedly social terms and the authoritative word of Apache tribal tradition is brought squarely to bear on matters of social concern.” 

In Chapter 3, Basso describes how place-names can be used to condemn bad behavior, dispense advice, and offer comfort, due to their association with a complex web of cultural associations. This practice—referenced in this quote—is called “speaking with names,” inviting people to think of those locations and learn from what happened there. Though the practice occurs infrequently, Basso notes that it is a highly effective tool for dealing with social situations that would otherwise be challenging to address. 

“Following its more accentuated moments, moments shaped by graciousness and the resonating echoes of a fully present past, the minimalist genius of Western Apache discourse leaves us silent in its wake—traveling in our mind, listening for the ancestors, and studying the landscape with a new and different eye. On the pictorial wings of place-names, imaginations soar.” 

This quote is an example of the expressive, lyrical language that Basso deploys throughout the book. It also highlights how, as Basso argues, the structure of Western Apache language makes it uniquely well-suited to accomplish complex communicative ends with a minimum of linguistic means. Place-names are an excellent example of this ability, as they call forth a host of meanings and associations in a limited number of words—as Basso notes, this conciseness is many ways the source of their power.  

“As places animate the ideas and feelings of persons who attend to them, these same ideas and feelings animate the places on which attention has been bestowed, and the movement of this process—inward towards facets of the self, outward toward aspects of the external world, alternately both together—cannot be known in advance.” 

Basso begins Chapter 4 with a new angle on the theme of the lack of attention paid to place: Anthropologists have overlooked the ways in which people dwell in a place, which is to say, the way in which they become aware of it. This quote illustrates how in dwelling, people become conscious not only of the external world, but of their own sense of identity and selfhood. In the case of the Western Apache, this process serves to develop wisdom. 

“Surrounded by places, and always in one place or another, men and women talk about them constantly, and it is from listening in on such exchanges and then trying to ascertain what has gotten said that interested outsiders can begin to appreciate what the encompassing landscape is really all about.” 

Although Basso notes it is people who sense places, rather than cultures, he also argues that those doing the sensing do so most frequently alongside other people. This quote illustrates the fundamentally social nature of place-making. It also highlights how, happily for Basso and other ethnographers, this social dimension of place-making can give outsiders a chance to unveil people’s perspectives on place—an insight granted not just by ordinary talk, but also by forms of artistic expression and political ritual. 

“In other words, naturally occurring depictions of place are treated as actualizations of the knowledge that informs them, as outward manifestations of underlying systems of thought, as native constructions wrought with native material that embody and display a native cast of mind.” 

In this quote, Basso is underscoring the importance of a close examination of local contexts and interactions, a theme he explores throughout the book in his meditations on the importance of ethnography and one he exemplifies in the structure of his essays, which hinge on an examination of a single exchange of place-names or series of statements about the land. This is the role of the ethnographer, he says: to make expressions of place comprehensible, and to explain what those expressions have to say about the broader context. 

“Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them. You must learn their names. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it and keep on thinking about it. Then your mind will become smoother and smoother. Then you will see danger before it happens. You will walk a long way and live a long time. You will be wise.” 

In this quote—part of a response given by Dudley Patterson to a question posed by Basso on the nature of wisdom—Patterson explains the relationship between place-names and wisdom in Western Apache culture. Western Apache are told to travel and learn about places, giving them a body of knowledge that they can draw on in times of trouble. As Patterson’s response initially confuses Basso, this quote also serves as an illustration of the value of Basso’s method: Through ethnographic research, he moves from bewilderment at this statement to insight on the meaning of wisdom. 

“As Apache men and women advance farther down the trail of wisdom, their composure continues to deepen. Increasingly quiet and self-possessed, they rarely show signs of fear and alarm. More and more magnanimous, they seldom get angry or upset. And more than ever they are watchful and observant. Their minds, resilient and steady at last, are very nearly smooth, and it shows in obvious ways.” 

This quote illustrates the qualities exhibited by the rare individuals, like Dudley Patterson, who’ve managed to become wise through the contemplation of place-centered narratives. Through contemplation of these narratives, individuals can find examples of wise behavior to emulate in their own lives, eventually developing the characteristics described in this quote. The fact that these qualities are difficult to attain underscores the suitability of Dudley Patterson as a guide in this section—as Basso hears from other community members after Patterson’s death, there’s nothing they can add beyond what Patterson taught him.

“Though commonly viewed in different terms—as instinctual need by human ethologists, as beneficial personality component by developmental psychologists, as mechanisms of social integration by theoretical sociologists—sense of place, as I have made it out, is neither biological imperative, aid to emotional stability, nor a means to group cohesiveness.” 

Basso contrasts the academic analysis of place put forth by researchers in other fields with the lived experience of place he observed among the Western Apache. While place-making is complex, Basso says, it’s also a commonplace activity carried out by individuals in their daily lives. By listing the understanding of place in several disciplines—with anthropology conspicuously absent among them—Basso is also making a case for how ethnographic research can add to an understanding of place in cultural anthropology, where such understanding is currently lacking.

“You can no more imagine an Apache sense of place without some notion of Old Man Owl, smooth minds, and what occurred at Grasshoppers Piled Up Across than you can fancy a native New Yorker’s sense of place without comparable ideas of Woody Allen, contending with subway rush hours, and Central Park on the first day of spring.” 

In this quote, Basso is highlighting how sense of place depends on the identity, and social context, of the one perceiving that place. For this reason, Basso says, he has chosen to focus on the elements that make up Western Apache sense of place—to evoke that sense, rather than simply trying to describe it. He also offers further justification for ethnography, as it uncovers the kinds of particulars, identified in this quote, which can then be used to evoke place.