Hallowell
anticipates what Dennis Tedlock and Karl Mannheim (1995) call dialogical
anthropology, a view that seeks to understand cultural reality as it emerges in
engaged and embattled conversation. In center-staging such a conversation
between humans and cosmic beings, Hallowell rejects a spiritual view of
religion. He favors, instead, locating religious life in the world as a matter
of responsibility between human and other kinds of being. Hallowell also
prefigures current concerns for understanding human reality in terms of its
sensual character, particularly in relationship to the body, and the
externalization of self which occurs in acts of breath, song, dance, and
gesture (see Classen 1993a and b). In demonstrating that religious life
transpires in the ethical acts of powerful persons (Lee 1959), Hallowell points
to the provocative insight that Native American religious life is negotiated
between humans and other kinds of personal beings (Fienup-Riordan 1983).
Hallowell
lays out interpretive principles which are still poorly understood. He examines
what he called ‘a relatively unexplored territory – ethno-metaphysics’ (1975,
143)… In demonstrating that humans, plants, animals, and cosmic beings share
the same nature and socio-religious motives towards each other, Hallowell moves
beyond an anthrocentric view of Ojibwa reality. Hallowell insists, moreover,
that social-scientific methodologies in their own right, and in their
complicity with non-Indian metaphysical and theological categories, seriously
distort the actualityof the Ojibwa’s world (1975, 143-4).
Hallowell
realizes that non-Indians assume ethnocentrically that their cosmological
system is universal. He also understands that western ontology holds that a
hierarchical dissimilarity exists between categories of being – divinity,
humanity, and nature – which simply does not fit the Ojibwa’s cosmology (cf.
Miller 1955). Hallowell writes:
‘In this paper I have assembled evidence … which supports the inference that in
the metaphysics of being found among these Indians, the actions of persons
provides the major key to their world view’ (1975, 144).
Before
Hallowell, such ‘person objects’ (1975, 144) – an unhappy phrase because, given
the thrust of Hallowell’s argument, the Ojibwa perceive such entities as
intentional beings whose character and purposes can be understood in their
actual behavior – were usually called spirits because they seem to exist on a
plane, in a dimension, or a realm separate from, and greater and more powerful
than, everyday existence. In religious terms, scholars often think of these
beings as the focus of visionary mysticism and magic, belief or faith
(Hollenback 1996). In scientific terms, claims about the reality of these
beings’ existence were ascribed to superstition, imagination and psychological
projection. Without empirical evidence, these beings’ existence could not be
verified, and Native American views about them could not be proven (Trigger
1991). It follows that both religious and scientific perspectives hold that
Native American reality systems are supernaturalistic (Hultkrantz 1983).
Hallowell
learned empirically, and to the contrary, that humans and those entities he
came to call ‘other-than-human persons’ share with human beings powerful
abilities, including intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, the ability to discern
right from wrong, and also the ability to speak, and therefore to influence
other persons. In Ojibwa thought, persons are not defined by human physical
shape, and so the Ojibwa do not project anthropomorphic attributes onto the
world (1975, 154-7). Hallowell insists, rather, that the Ojibwa world is a
behavioral system; a social system, in which powerful persons are remembered,
and they themselves emerge, in myth and lore. Moreover, other-than-human
persons address and empower human beings in dreams and visions, present
themselves as kinfolk and engage humans in daily life, and empower humans to
embody them in ritual performances.
Hallowell
shows that, because the Ojibwa do not recognize the cosmic dimension that nonIndians
define as nature, their Cosmology does not proceed in terms of the nonempirical
domain called the supernatural
(1975, 151). Ojibwa people recognize-that animals, plants, the Sun, Moon, and
stars, and even ‘objects` are persons because they themselves behave as such.
In this behavioral distinction, Hallowell contends that real-world, daily life
transpires in the interactions of persons, human and otherwise. Ojibwa people
experience themselves as being at the center of world order, not as pre-eminent
beings, but certainly as essential to vital cosmic relations which make persons
interdependent. Hallowell reveals a world in which both the Ojibwa and other-than-human
persons express mutual responsibility, and
thus give structure, pattern, and coherence to the multiple centers and related
boundaries of cosmic life. At the same time, the Ojibwa understand that
antagonistic relations among persons create disorder, including hunger, illness and social estrangement…
In Hallowell’s view, the Ojibwa do not recognize a cosmic hierarchy running
from the least to the most perfect being. The Ojibwa emphasize the ontological
similarity, rather than the dissimilarity, of all beings…
Every
day (one should also say every night), human beings and animals communicate in
dreams, a state of consciousness which bridges cosmological dimensions,
including objective time and space (1975, 164-8). In such dream states, human
beings are not only addressed by entities who live in other space-time
dimensions; they also respond in kind, acknowledge mutual responsibility, and
so motivate everyday behavior… Hallowell concludes that Ojibwa reality consists
of interpersonal encounters with other-than-human persons, and not in the
objective or supernatural character of a world upon which non-Indians insist
for reasons of both science and faith…
Sam D.
Gill has shown, for example, that Native Americans think of ‘religion’ in
performative terms, as transformative speech acts in which communication shapes
all ethical purpose (1982, 11; 1987b). In these terms, ritual modalities like
song, dance, smoking, and drumming imply acknowledgment and mutuality. Ritual
processes draw human and other-than-human persons into active communities,
particularly in rites in which names, masks, costumes, bundles, sand paintings
and pipes embody cosmic persons in forms with whom humans can interact, feast,
and celebrate solidarity… Such ritual systems are poorly interpreted in the
credal, dogmatic, textualized and institutionalized forms of religion that
characterize church-based religions.
In
fact, as has been demonstrated amply for the Navajo (Gill 1977), Yaqui (Yoeme)
(Evers and Molina 1987), and Lakota (Bunge 1984; Powers 1986), Native American
languages encode the insight that speech is a power all persons share. As Gary
Witherspoon (1977) has shown, the Navajo think of language as generative rather
than, as in European convention, representative. Navajo speech does not encode
realities which might exist independently, objectively apart from itself. In
Witherspoon’s interpretation, Navajo words do not mirror reality. Words do not
stand for or, as is often said, symbolize any reality apart from themselves. On
the contrary, Navajo speech embodies the speaker’s intentionality, and extends
the self beyond the body, to shape a reality coming into being in the field of
interpersonal dialogue. Speech influences and motivates a cosmos of
relationships and social processes (Witherspoon 1977).
Such a
view of language has revolutionary importance for the study of Native American
religions in terms of the personal entities who constitute them (Morrison
1992a, b). A generative view of Native American languages requires scholars to
recognize that non-Indian languages assume that words have a representative
character in relation to an external reality which is objective. One major
consequence has been the pervasive misunderstanding of Native American
symbolism as encoding and representing a reality that is otherwise unseen,
non-empirical, and ‘spiritual’ in character (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Sam Gill
partially addresses this misrepresentation in arguing that Native American
symbols have a performative significance which their use evokes (Gill 1982,
59-82). But Gill does not go quite far enough.
Native
American ‘symbols’ are generative because they themselves are persons.
So-called ‘sacred,’ ‘symbolic’ objects are intentional beings. Walens, for
example, documents the complex ways in which Kwakiutl feast dishes have
distinctive lives of their own, and link ‘the household of the chief who owns
them and that of the spirit who gave them’ (1981, 57). In the Southwest, for
another example, Kachina masks are embodiments, in which a human person gives
physical form to cosmic persons encountered in dreams. Embodied as well in dance,
what appears as a ‘spiritual’ difference between human beings and the kachina
merges as an essential truth of cosmological correspondence (Gill 1982, 71-2).
Similarly, at both Zuni and Hopi, prayer-sticks extend the life-bearing breath
of human beings, and thus extend human intentionality towards non-human others.
The being of the prayer-stick is inhaled by cosmic kachina persons who, thus
nourished, extend themselves in rain. Rain in turn nourishes corn, who in turn
feeds human beings. In these ways, Kachina masks, rain, corn and prayer-sticks
are not ‘sacred’ in the sense of referring to, or revealing, another
pre-eminent order of reality. On the contrary, they are each intentional
beings, whose needs are bound up with the desires and needs of all persons
(Fulbright 1992).
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