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50books_pocThis book isn't long, but it took me a long time to read and a long time to digest. It's an academic work, not a popular one. Literary theory isn't my field, and some of the sections were too dense for me to understand, making heavy use of concepts I was unfamiliar with. But I believe Sarris's core message got through to me, and it was a message that moved and excited me greatly: When you hear or read a text, you are conversing with that text. You and the author are conversing. Your experiences and your cultures are conversing. Your reading/hearing experience is itself a creative act.
He expresses and illustrates this central theme through his own experiences of cultural intersection, starting with the Pomo women who raised him (his father was Miwok and Pomo, and his mother was white, but he never knew them), and the attempts of white academia to study these women, his family -- their storytelling, particularly.
It is hardly surprising that the narratives they provided to white researchers (often for much-needed monetary compensation) were different from the stories they told when outsiders weren't present. But Sarris doesn't leave it at that, pointing out that there is not a hard line between "authentic" and "inauthentic" texts. Discarding these texts because they are not "purely Indian" ignores what is interesting about them -- the creation of a new text that is both Indian and White, that expresses truths about the relationship between the two.
This is worth examining, but it can be hard to get there, because there is a tendency for academia to pretend that the researcher is invisible, that his or her presence doesn't affect the texts that are elicited. An "observer" and a "subject". This is not only dehumanizing, it is demonstrably inaccurate, as Sarris discusses.
There is also an excellent section about reservation schools, and how even well-intentioned educators are still severely failing Indian kids. Often ideas are clumsily applied with no examination of the underlying assumptions. A white teacher offers her Indian class a traditional story from their own people to read, and is shocked -- shocked! -- that they respond with anger and resentment.
Sarris's dissection of this incident is fascinating. Students are taught to read texts as though they exist in a vacuum, taught not to bring their own life experiences to class, to keep it separate. Then they're given a text that the white teacher tells them is supposed to be "theirs", but it's presented in the same way, out of context, without any information about how this story was elicited. Who told it? Who did they tell it to? Who did they mean to hear it? (I was reminded very much of my discomfort with this book for basically the same reasons.)
I had one quibble with Sarris, about the issue of translating Pomo narratives into English. From the discussion, it seems that Kashaya Pomo is verb-initial and uses clause chaining. It's Sarris's position that translating Kashaya Pomo into verb-medial, non-clause-chaining English is inherently substandard, and that non-neutral English constructions should be used to approximate the syntax of the original.
The problem I have with this is that translating pragmatically neutral clauses into highly marked clauses makes it sound like the target language is "always marked", which, in addition to being misleading in itself, I think can actually come off as quite Othering, like gee don't those Indians talk funny. Of course it's always impossible to render both the syntax and the pragmatics of one language perfectly into another; translation always involves sacrificing one, and usually both to some extent. I just thought his take on it was a little one-sided, which surprised me because he seems to go out of his way to look at most things from as many angles as he can (even to the point of it feeling repetitive in places).
This aside, I felt that I got quite a bit out of the book, even if I didn't understand it all. I'm glad I sought it out and glad I got through it.
tags: a: Sarris Greg, Miwok, Pomo, genre: non-fiction, subject: American Indian literature, literary theory
He expresses and illustrates this central theme through his own experiences of cultural intersection, starting with the Pomo women who raised him (his father was Miwok and Pomo, and his mother was white, but he never knew them), and the attempts of white academia to study these women, his family -- their storytelling, particularly.
It is hardly surprising that the narratives they provided to white researchers (often for much-needed monetary compensation) were different from the stories they told when outsiders weren't present. But Sarris doesn't leave it at that, pointing out that there is not a hard line between "authentic" and "inauthentic" texts. Discarding these texts because they are not "purely Indian" ignores what is interesting about them -- the creation of a new text that is both Indian and White, that expresses truths about the relationship between the two.
This is worth examining, but it can be hard to get there, because there is a tendency for academia to pretend that the researcher is invisible, that his or her presence doesn't affect the texts that are elicited. An "observer" and a "subject". This is not only dehumanizing, it is demonstrably inaccurate, as Sarris discusses.
There is also an excellent section about reservation schools, and how even well-intentioned educators are still severely failing Indian kids. Often ideas are clumsily applied with no examination of the underlying assumptions. A white teacher offers her Indian class a traditional story from their own people to read, and is shocked -- shocked! -- that they respond with anger and resentment.
Sarris's dissection of this incident is fascinating. Students are taught to read texts as though they exist in a vacuum, taught not to bring their own life experiences to class, to keep it separate. Then they're given a text that the white teacher tells them is supposed to be "theirs", but it's presented in the same way, out of context, without any information about how this story was elicited. Who told it? Who did they tell it to? Who did they mean to hear it? (I was reminded very much of my discomfort with this book for basically the same reasons.)
I had one quibble with Sarris, about the issue of translating Pomo narratives into English. From the discussion, it seems that Kashaya Pomo is verb-initial and uses clause chaining. It's Sarris's position that translating Kashaya Pomo into verb-medial, non-clause-chaining English is inherently substandard, and that non-neutral English constructions should be used to approximate the syntax of the original.
The problem I have with this is that translating pragmatically neutral clauses into highly marked clauses makes it sound like the target language is "always marked", which, in addition to being misleading in itself, I think can actually come off as quite Othering, like gee don't those Indians talk funny. Of course it's always impossible to render both the syntax and the pragmatics of one language perfectly into another; translation always involves sacrificing one, and usually both to some extent. I just thought his take on it was a little one-sided, which surprised me because he seems to go out of his way to look at most things from as many angles as he can (even to the point of it feeling repetitive in places).
This aside, I felt that I got quite a bit out of the book, even if I didn't understand it all. I'm glad I sought it out and glad I got through it.
tags: a: Sarris Greg, Miwok, Pomo, genre: non-fiction, subject: American Indian literature, literary theory
