Zuni and the American imagination

"The ancient settlement of Zuni Pueblo has seen many visitors over the centuries, from Spanish conquistadors to tourists from around the world. For more than a century, it has also drawn great attention from anthropologists, three of whom - Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Frank Hamilton Cushing, and Stewart Culin - brought remarkably different views of the Zuni people to the professional literature." "In this study, historian Eliza McFeely considers the work of Stevenson, Cushing, and Culin at Zuni, which, though influential, often misrepresented the realities of life there. Although of mixed value for anthropologists today, their work, McFeely suggests, reveals much about what contemporary Anglo Americans wished Native Americans to be; their "scientific creation stories" point to the shortcomings and contributions of the anthropological enterprise. A woman committed to science and accustomed to having to struggle in a culture dominated by men, Stevenson, for example, gave undue import to the role of women in Zuni society and revealed secretly observed rituals while dismissing matters of spirituality as superstitious. Cushing, a writer of then-popular books, tended to turn all Zuni expressions into fables. "When artifacts and informants could not answer his questions," McFeely writes, "he 're-created' the circumstances and allowed his own intuition to supply the missing links." And Culin was so entranced by Zuni material culture, by baskets and jewelry he acquired mostly from white traders, that he scarcely seems to have noticed the living people of the pueblo."--BOOK JACKET.