Nature's Metropolis

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: WW Norton, 1991)

Here, Cronon looks at Chicago as both a product of and a shaper of the "first-nature" environment surrounding its metropolitan areas. This is the best possible example of how environmental history could integrate the urban and the rural and downplay the concept of "wilderness," a goal that everyone is always talking about. Cronon shows how Chicago used its position on Lake Michigan to attract railroads, which in turn attracted trade from the "great West"'s hinterlands, which in turn located Chicago as a gateway city: raw goods would enter the city and exit as value-added commodities, with Chicago performing the work of abstracting the commodity from its original context. Chicago was dependent on the strength and financial capital of New York and Philadelphia, which financed the railroads and established Chi-town as the broker of Midwestern ecological capital.

Commodities that Cronon looks at include wheat, lumber, and meat. In each case, Cronon argues, manufacturers in Chicago figured out how to use economies of scale to aggregate these goods into mass quantities and to abstract their value from their physical presence. This last happening worked especially well with wheat, which created the modern concept of the "exchange," at which people traded wheat without ever even seeing the wheat in question. (Here is where I figured out what a "futures market" is - it's more fascinating than one could ever imagine.)

Cronon writes that Chicago's effect upon the rural sites which came within its orbit was both positive for people's lives (easier selling of their goods; better access to cheaper things) and negative (they were at the mercy of distant forces for their livelihood; if they were merchants, they were undercut by cheaper Chicago prices). Cronon shows how certain small-potatoes merchants and farmers resisted the pressure of the giant Chicago firms through associations (sometimes more effective, other times less).

I've been waiting to read this one for a long time, and it was definitely un-disappointing. Cronon's ability to be both a good storyteller and a "man of infinite research" (as TR said about Henry Adams) is a thing to envy. His inclusion of financial records, technological analysis, and cultural productions (novels, esp. in the World's Fair chapter) makes this book a model of enviable American Studies practice.

Middle Ground

"The map...is the first attempt at delineating the country of the Great Lakes. Based wholly on Indian reports, the map accompanied a work by Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages de la Nouvelle France, which was published in Paris in 1632." Caption from this site...

Title: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Author: Richard White, now holding an endowed professorship at Stanford. White is one of the major architects of the new environmental and Western histories (see also William Cronon, Patricia Limerick, Hal Rothman, Ramon Gutierrez). The Western approach embodied in his work re-visions the West as a land where various groups of people interacted, not simply the empty spot where Anglo-Americans exercised their growing dominance, as described in nineteenth-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis".

White is also author of The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (1983); "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West (1991), which I've never read but always wanted to, and which apparently never uses the word "frontier"; The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1996), which we read in a Landscape class and which is notably shorter than Middle Ground; and Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories (1998).

Tecumseh, portrait uncited anywhere I could find (but I included it because of the prominence of the medal on his chest and the epaulets of his uniform). White wrote in his intro that he initially intended to write a book about Tecumseh's story, but decided that the back-story of Indian interaction with Europeans in the area was all the more interesting.

My short review: White dives into the complex, sometimes deeply confusing territory of the relationships between various Indian groups and the French, English, and American colonizers of the upper Midwest during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and emerges with a coherent narrative of the ways that cultural contact resulted in what he calls "the middle ground."

The book is not really assignable to undergrads, but (or maybe because) its underlying message is that stuff back then was more complex than we think it was. This complexity accounts for the occasional Biblically byzantine prose, describing the successions of various chiefs and French commanding officers. (I was only willing to forgive White the 525-page length of the book because he, quite endearingly, called Middle Ground "the Tristam Shandy of Indian history" in the foreword.) But all of this depth is definitely necessary, and definitely serves his point well: in a land of fragmented Indian groups, contacted by equally fragmented French traders, Jesuits, and travelers, people created a culture based on individual, face-to-face interactions, and it was a much more flexible and mutable one than has been described.

Particularly interesting examples of French and Indian contact/conflict come under the cultural situations of gift-giving, order-giving, murder, and sex. Gifts were used by Indian groups as ways to establish alliance; the French initially resented this, but eventually saw their efficacy; the British never wholeheartedly capitulated to what they saw as "begging Indians" and their empire suffered as a result. The maintenance of authority was understood differently by the Europeans and the Indians - Euros thought that because somebody was a chief, that meant that they could control all of their people, while Indian authority was much more conditional. French people in the country (the pays d'en haut) eventually learned this and worked around it, but their imperial commanders never seemed to understand; and the British saw the Indian lack of hierarchy as an emblem of their less-developed society. Murder was a situation which the Indians dealt with by "raising" or "covering" the dead (ie, giving the bereaved family a slave to replace the lost person, or goods to make up for his/her loss), while the Europeans believed in an eye for an eye. White describes how various instances of murder forced the French and Indians to create solutions which satisfied both sides of the equation, and how the British and American interactions were far less flexible. Finally, sex in the backcountry was an example of the literal "middle ground" - the birth of various metis (half-French, half-Indian) children served to help trade and establish ties between communities of the different nations.

All of this cultural exchange was possible and necessary because the French "needed" the Indians - or at least, they needed the Indians not to kill them, and to trap beaver for them, and not to betray them to the English during imperial wars. Once the British came into power, and once the Americans started colonizing the back-country, this "need" went away and "Indian-hating" became more common. Against this backdrop, the story told by Jill Lepore of the interactions between Indians and English in Massachusetts takes on added poignancy. (Or does it? The story White tells makes it pretty clear that the French weren't inherently more tender-hearted or kind, but simply in dire-r straits, which forced them to interact on a more human level with the Indians...if they had lived in tight quarters with Indians and needed land for domesticated animals and seen no need to patronize Indians to maintain trading relationships, as was the case in MA, they might not have been so open to relating in the way they did.)

"The Black Robe", 1991 movie about a Jesuit priest in the pays d'en haut - haven't seen it yet, but intend to. Check out the praise: "Packs twice the punch of Dances with Wolves."

Reviews of Others: Well, this book won the Francis Parkman Prize and was a Pulitzer nominee, so there's that. In the Journal of American History, Robert Berkhofer Jr (author of The White Man's Indian), wrote that the book was praiseworthy for its synthesis, but worried that White had tried too hard to maintain his narrative scenario by omitting mention of what happened after the end of the War of 1812 (how can this be a "middle ground" if it's constantly shifting westward because of the actions of faraway imperial nations?) Rebecca Kugel, in the American Indian Quarterly, said much more about the patriarchal family relationship between French and Algonquins than I did in the above review (and it's helpful for me to remember that the French saw this relationship as one of authority, while the Algonquins thought a "father" should provide for and mediate between his "children" - and trouble came about when the French violated this compact, which they might not have completely understood). Kugel thought that White might have shortchanged the British and American eras in comparison to the French (what did she want, the Gravity's Rainbow of Indian history?)

Words: "phratry" ("any of various analogous clans or kinship divisions found in other societies; [esp. in Anthropol.] a descent group or kinship group in some tribal societies); "moiety" ("a half, one of two equal parts"); "stroud" ("a blanket manufactured for barter or sale in trading with the North American Indians" - White writes that the British, for a time, had a trade advantage over the French because of their superior supply of scarlet strouds).

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas, 1774-1880 (1980).

Spectacular Nature

Title: Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

Author: Susan G. Davis, professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her PhD is in "folklore and folklife," from UPenn. Her first book was Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (1986). She lists her interests as "politics of contemporary public and commercial space; nature and its relation to mass commercial culture; history and memory on the landscape; the contemporary history of tourism, southern California and San Diego history and culture." She doesn't seem to have written another book since this one.

Argument: Davis takes a holistic look at the production of the Sea World experience, seeking to outline the park's positioning as public and as educational space. To this end, she describes the park's interaction with the community; analyzes the corporation's advertising and packaging, both in print media and within the exhibits and the park itself; conducts ethnographic research within the population of those who work at the park and within the population of visitors; and parses the physical space of the park. Through all of this work, Davis hopes to understand how Sea World, and other examples of what she calls "spectacular nature", are "corporate culture's philanthropic answer to a world of environmental emergencies," through which "the possibility of alternatives" (to environmental destruction, especially species extirpation) "collapses into the consumption of images" (237-8). Theoretically, she draws from Raymond Williams' concept of nature's ability to obscure hidden social relationships of power, as well as Donna Haraway's work on museum exhibits.

This picture was attached to a blog post about an article about applying Sea World's animal-training techniques to husbands. Human husbands, that is.

Chapter-by-Chapter:

One: Another World: Theme Parks and Nature: Davis sets up the framework for understanding theme-park nature as a product, and the theme park industry as the producer. This chapter is a cultural history of theme parks, concentrating on the ways in which theme parks produce multiple streams of income for corporations (through licensing, tie-ins, concessions). Davis sees Sea World, owned by Anheuser-Busch, as a powerful way for a company to associate itself with neutral and pristine white-washed ideals of nature.

Two: The Park and the City: Here, Davis does a site-specific historical analysis of Sea World's location in San Diego, concentrating on the ways in which the park must appeal "both to an audience of locals and tourists," situating itself in San Diego but responding to a national corporation and trying to attract national and international tourists as part of SD's tourism juggernaut (41). In early permutations, Sea World had a more cheesy, sideshow visual language - dolphins wore bikinis, etc - but later on it sought to reposition itself as an Educational Institution.

Sea World mascot.

Three: Producing the Sea World Experience: Landscape and Labor: Sea World's landscape, Davis points out, is a space constructed out of "human work, time, space, dirt, plants, and animals" (77). Here, using interviews with managers, she tells us about the way in which the corporation uses numbers to drive the park's physical workings, constantly recalibrating based on statistics derived from market research in order to achieve a "good length of stay" which will provide the maximum visitor utilization of concessions and other money-making components (extra shows, rides, etc) (87). She also unpacks the visual rhetoric of the exhibits, examining interactivity, levels of educational specificity, showcasing of certain animals, etc.

Four: Entertainment Lite: The Theme Park Classroom: Davis examines Sea World's actual functioning as an educational institution, questioning Sea World's claim to "make enlightenment available in a variety of ways" (117). Davis' stance is that "the theme park education that works its way into the life of the school and the family is so carefully crafted to meet Sea World's marketing and publicity needs that the union between spectacle and education is a lopsided one" (118). In heartbreaking ethnographic sequences, Davis writes about the experiences of disadvantaged schoolchildren with and at the park, pointing out that although Sea World claims to serve "San Diego's schoolchildren", the ones who actually come on a regular basis are the ones whose families own annual passes, and who come in casual fashion with their parents, while poorer schools may barely afford one official trip a year. On these trips, Davis writes, the children seem to learn very little on an unscripted, truly engaged basis.

Still from a Sea World X-Box game. Spiked purple floating globe unheard of in nature.

Five: Routine Surprises: Producing Entertainment: Here Davis strips Sea World's animal shows (which, she points out, take a lot of time to structure and revise) down to their elements, trying to understand what they say about SW's mass culture of nature. Davis interviews trainers, producers, and others involved in the making of these shows, finding that the behavioral possibilities of the animals, the desires of the corporation, and audience feedback all come together in the objectives of the show. In the end, Davis argues, the show's elements are carefully scripted, leaving the animal performer to provide all of the novelty and possibility of surprise within the performative space.

Six: Dreaming of Whales: The Shamu Show: Continuing with her analysis of the performances themselves, Davis writes of the Shamu-based show that it carries "an enormous weight", one which is "devilishly complex to analyze" (197). "Triangulating" between "performance, institutional context, and a larger cultural context", Davis finds that the Shamu show is a "kind of routinized magic", one which plays with expectations about nature and culture (198-9). The show contains and normalizes Shamu's dangerous nature as a "killer" whale. It reminds the audience of the ecological fragility of Shamu's habitat, then reconstitutes the corporation and related actors as those who are in Shamu's corner, trying to preserve his nature.

Shamu Southwest Airlines jet.

Reviews: In AQ, Brian Black wrote that Davis' analysis, situated as it was within corporate culture of the contemporary world, rather than in historical context, missed an opportunity to take what he sees as American Studies' "next step" into an understanding of "the role and nature and the environment in American life." However, in general Black found Davis' project compelling and superbly executed, pointing to her folkloric training as an definite advantage in this project. The Pacific Historical Review ran a piece by John Findlay which took issue with the book's attempt to link the politics of Sea World's space with what Findlay saw as a "free-floating academic malaise" about the state of modernity and specifically the conservative brand of capitalism flourishing in Southern California. (Findlay thought this part of the book was shallowly executed, comparing it to Sea World itself with its empty gestures toward greater meaning. What's with these reviews of books about edutainment that compare the books themselves to edutainment? Weird.)


Books to follow up on: Secondary: Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870 (1980); Warren J. Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry, 1966-1988 (1989); John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?" in About Looking (1980); Henry Giroux, Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture (1994); Henry Giroux, et al, ed, Popular Culture, Schooling, and Everyday Life (1989); Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (1990); Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (1992).

Reading National Geographic

Title: Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Authors: Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins. Lutz, an anthropologist, is now at Brown and writes that her interests include "cultural understandings of the emotions, popular photography and ideas of race and gender in the U.S., changes in local democracy with economic restructuring in the last part of the twentieth century, and militarization and its shaping of social life beyond the battlefield," but that for the last ten years she's been working on projects dealing with society and the military (she also works for the American Friends Service Committee!) Her most recent book is about Fayetteville, NC: Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Boston : Beacon Press, 2001). Collins, who is now in a sociology and women's studies department at Wisconsin, lists her interests as "Qualitative Sociology, Rural Sociology, Sociology of Culture, Sociology of Economic Change and Development, Sociology of Gender." Her most recent book is Threads: Gender, Labor and Power in the Global Apparel Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Argument: The Geographic, a middlebrow cultural production par excellence, has been normalized as an "educational" and "positive" publication, one which Americans and other Westerners look to for an enjoyable and "objective" window on non-Western cultures. Lutz and Collins hold that the production of the photographs in the magazine is regulated by a system of understood rules and norms held by the publishers and editors, imparted to the photographers, and expected by the public. These rules and norms (especially during the period they propose to examine, 1950-1986) demand(ed) a portrait of the non-Western world that is free of strife, violence, hunger, and trouble; colorful; sensual; inviting; and positive. Overall, these qualities are meant to add up to what L & C call a "conservative humanism" - a view of the world that normalizes the "other" by proposing that "we're really all alike under the skin."

L & C hold that, in the end, although this point of view is nominally positive and affirming, it means that the photographs have "rarely cried out for change, raised painful, unresolvable questions, embarrassed, or caused discomfort...in general, they have existed as a beautiful, somewhat compelling body of evidence that the third world is a safe place, that it is made up of people basically like us, that the people who are hungry and oppressed have meaningful lives, and that the conflicts and flare-ups we hear of in the news occur in a broader context of enduring values and everyday activities. These images obscure the American relationships with the third world that have structured life there in profound ways; they deny real social connections even as they evoke empathy" (280).
In their survey of readers' attitudes towards Geographic photographs, L & C found that pictures showing children (particularly, happy children) were consistently ranked as the "most enjoyable." "The magazine's focus on children alone or in other groups of children is consonant with the sociological reality in which children are not integrated into the adult world of work or leisure and with the cultural belief that the child is a special kind of person rather than a miniature or even protoadult" (107). This photograph of a Garifuna child, by Susie Joy Rust, is titled "Joy in Motion," and its caption reflects this bias toward romanticization of childhood: "Beaming with pleasure after doing flips with his friends, Antheon Petillo of Dangriga romps along a well-worn path that connects his schoolhouse to a palm-lined Caribbean shore. Antheon and his classmates at Sacred Heart Elementary School are being taught Garífuna history and language, part of an effort in Belize to keep this culture alive."

Chapter by Chapter:
One: Comfortable Strangers: The Making of National Identity in Popular Photography: An introduction which situates the Geographic in the realm of "mass culture" (using the Frankfurt School's formulation) and points out that among "edutainment" products, very few have the "cultural legitimacy of the Geographic" - a legitimacy that stems, in part, from its associations with "the state, national identity, and science" (7).

Two: Becoming America's Lens on the World: National Geographic in the Twentieth Century: A history of the formation of the Geographic's cultural authority (as laid out in the previous chapter). Includes information about early Geographic editorial guidelines for content in the magazine (27), the story of the magazine's adoption of color photography (32); the magazine's association with the government (34). Overall, describes the development of the Geographic's idea of American national identity: "rational, generous, and benevolent" (46).

Three: Inside the Great Machinery of Desire: Perhaps the most interesting chapter, methodologically, in which L & C gain access to the internal workings of the magazine, attending editorial meetings, hovering over layout artists while they work, and interviewing photographers and editors about how they "frame" a story during its development. Also presents interesting information on how the marketing and advertising departments contribute to choices of subject matter and frame: "Africa is an unpopular subject, as are social problems...articles on small, endearing animals, or endangered species" are popular (83). The process of creating the magazine, the authors write, is a "highly negotiated" one, in which the editors seek to receive a "constant supply of what they consider very good pictures - photographs that operate within traditional realist frameworks, yet contain elements of surprise and interest", while still allowing photographers a degree of autonomy (85).

Caption written by Geographic website: "A Woman of Faith, Photograph by David Alan Harvey. With nine decades of living etched on her face, Mãe Filinha exudes the quiet authority of her position as leader of the Sisterhood of the Good Death. This religious group practices Candomblé, a belief system based on African traditions and influenced by Catholicism and South American Indian rituals. The sisterhood is known for processions marked by singing and praying as members move through the streets of Cachoeira. During Candomblé ceremonies adherents enter trances and commune with their gods. The chanting and beating of drums can last well into the night." Interestingly, the site also includes information about the technical details of the photographic equipment used, intimating that the reader could (should?) participate in the production of similar pictures.

Four: A World Brightly Different: Photographic Conventions, 1950-1986: An analysis of the "surface content" of the photographs, done by coding a random sample. In this chapter, the authors introduce the wide range of themes they will problematize in future chapters. The view the authors see emerging through this sample is one of a non-Western world "of happy, classless people outside of history but evolving into it, edged with exoticism and sexuality, but knowable to some degree as individuals" (116). They hold that the evaluation of this view should be based "not on the intentions of the magazine's makers but on the consequences of its photographic rhetoric" (117).

Five: Fashions in the Ethnic Other: Here, L & C describe shifting interests in "other" cultures throughout the postwar time period, pointing out differences in regional coverage (the Pacific Islands receive far more attention, proportionally, than other regions, for example), and changes in coverage during times of US political involvement in the country in question (see: formerly positive, then negative portraits of Ferdinand Marcos).

Six: The Color of Sex: Postwar Photographic Histories of Race and Gender: Interpretations of photographs of non-white females, with emphasis on how they were used as exemplars of "unspoiled" sensuality and womanhood (and maternality), in contrast to a Western womanhood perceived "ruined" by education and careerism. Here, too, an analysis of the bare-breasted issue - the darker the woman, L & C found, the more likely she was to be bare-breasted in the magazine (this is still true).

Availability and sensuality of non-Western women is a mainstay of the Nat Geo appeal. "Introduction" and caption written by the Geographic: "Salvador, Brazil, 2002. Photograph by David Alan Harvey, Magnum. Introduction: 'I call Brazil the "land of the 10,000 senses" because of the lushness and diversity of it all. Just the Amazon rain forest alone fills the sense with its sounds, smells, colors, even its silences.' -National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis. Caption: In Bahia, Africa cultural traditions are strong and set the rhythm at Carnival. That most sensual of festivals hold sway every February from Recife to Rio."

Seven: The Photograph as Intersection of Gazes: An intimate analysis of the"gazes" to be found in Geographic photos, including the direct gaze at the camera (which was more likely to be seen in photographs of the powerless - darker, younger, poorer, more female - subjects); the gaze within the photographic rectangle; and the gaze of the subject upon his/her own reflection in a mirror, a Polaroid, or a camera's viewfinder.

Eight: The Readers' Imagined Geographic: An Evolutionary Tale: Introduction of the sample of white Americans used for the ethnographic portion of this book. The most interesting part of this chapter is the assessment of the evolutionary views of the readers - an assessment which finds that "the categories of primitive or traditional, civilized or modern, were assumed by virtually everyone we talked to in the interviews" (236) and that "modernization is sometimes viewed as analogous to transmitting disease - as a kind of physical, determinate process outside human intentionality" (240). L & C found strong currents of Rosaldo's "imperialist nostalgia" (246) within readers' reactions to photographs of modernizing peoples, but also point out that the overriding contradiction and confusion of readers' responses mitigate against any pinpointing of operative ideologies - readers were more likely to use and combine several different ideologies while describing a picture's content.

Nine: The Pleasures and Possibilities of Reading: A final chapter that seeks to examine the real-life implications of the reader responses that the Geographic solicits. Here is where L & C arrive at the conclusion that the humanism provoked and enforced by these pictures is essentially conservative, and that human differences "that could tell us something important about history...or be turned critically on our own society...become construed as superficial, even if attractive, flourishes that can be pulled back to reveal a confirmation of important Western values" (277). This humanism, they claim, following Barthes, "cannot accommodate differences of interest or account for incidents of injustice" (282).

Here, a Western scientist working in Guyana to study catfish employs "local residents" to help him gather the fish. The scene, which depicts non-Westerners stooped over and supervised by a white Westerner, evokes questions about colonial relationships, especially ones shaped around "science"; questions not examined by the Geographic-written caption ("'Hard Science,' Photograph by Randy Olson. 'It’s very difficult to catch fish in streams with large rocks and fast water,' says Larry Page. So he hired help. Raising a ruckus, local residents drive fish into the scientists’ nets. In calmer waters researchers go 'hoggin’'—wading into the shallows, then sticking a hand into a log or other dark, wet place. 'You pull out whatever is in there,' says Page, 'and hopefully all your fingers as well.'"

Reviews: In a long review in AQ, Kathryn VanSpanckeren wrote that the book is "comprehensive," "generous-spirited", "readable", but adds, "This straightforward book does not offer striking new theoretical formulations...instead, it bristles with specific information and offers concise reviews of theoretical positions only if they are helpful in understanding the magazine." Her main criticism lies in the omission of text in the analysis, and says that techniques of literary theory and the greats of postcolonial theory could have been employed to advantage. She also holds that L & C should have done a better job at situating the magazine within magazine history. Most of all, she criticizes the book for re-inscribing the central fallacy of the magazine itself: not allowing the non-Western peoples a voice. In Science, Heidi Larson (of Unicef) wrote that she wished the captions themselves had been given more attention, especially in the chapter in which the authors interviewed white Americans using uncaptioned pictures as prompts. Reviewing the book for the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Joseph Wood liked the way the book "turned the tables" on National Geographic, examining it the same way it examines others, and writes that the book "illustrates quite effectively how our view of the world is socially constructed."


This photo, called "Afghan Girl", by Steve McCurry, ran in a 1985 edition of the Geographic. In 2003 the magazine made an effort to find the subject, named Sharbat Gula. The way that the magazine wrote up this search is fascinating, in light of the conclusions Lutz and Collins draw: the search was framed as an exploration in and of itself, looking for the anonymous woman whose "direct gaze had intrigued the West for so long" (see L & C on the gaze of the photographed, chapter 7). By dramatizing the search in this way, the magazine appears to have glossed over the fact that the reason Gula remained anonymous was that the magazine had failed to identify her in her initial portrait (see L & C's conclusions on the anonymity of the non-Western subject), as well as to re-inflect the viewer's relationship with the subject with significant overtones of desire.

The follow-up picture, which has Gula, now a mother, holding the magazine, echoes previous Geographic pictorial compositions in which the subject is seen as engaging with his/her depiction in the magazine - a construction which L & C holds is fundamentally reflective of the idea that the Geographic, and by extension, the Western world, has brought self-awareness, history, and change to the rest of the world (208). The Geographic's reflections on the search for Gula also noted that she had not even seen the photograph until they "found" her - a fact which the Western reader could see as indicative of the tremendous difference and distance between Gula's life and their own, given the iconic nature of the photograph. The slightly icky connotations of this relationship - isn't it sort of weird that we've been enjoying her beauty for so many years, while she's been living in a refugee camp in Pakistan, an experience which has clearly aged her beyond her chronological age? - are not explored.

Follow up: "Brazil...is often portrayed in popular culture as a kind of sister state to the United States, complete with the same vast area, wealth of resources, frontier with Indians, and much immigration" (125).

New words: "hebete" ("dull, stupid, obtuse"); "ludic" ("of or pertaining to undirected and spontaneously playful behaviour").

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Christopher Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward Curtis (1982); Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (1985); Bernard MacGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (1989); Susan Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (1989); Roy Preiswerk and Dominique Perrot, Ethnocentrism and History: Africa, Asia, and Indian America in Western Textbooks (1978); Richard Ohmann, Politics of Letters (1987) (on the development of the magazine market); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth (1989); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988); Min-Ha T. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989); Eric Wolf, Empire and the People Without History (1982).

Poem: "In the Waiting Room", by Elizabeth Bishop

In Worcester, Massachusetts
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It was dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
"Long Pig," The caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked, women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover;
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came a "oh!" of pain
Aunt Consuelo's voice
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I we were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should I be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
I couldn't look any higher
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, of even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How I didn't know any
word for it how "unlikely…."
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

Visions of the Land

Title: Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology (Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2002)

John C. Fremont's map of what would soon be Oregon and California, 1848

Author: Michael A. Bryson, professor of humanities, Roosevelt University in Chicago. Educated as an undergrad in biological sciences; received PhD in English (SUNY/Stony Brook). His CV shows that his next book will be called Mapping the Urban Wilderness: an Ecological and Literary Topography of Chicago (go, urban ecologists! The Jungle alone should furnish quite a chapter...) He does some environmental reporting for a local newspaper. It also seems as though he's actually been to Antarctica and done scientific research.

Argument: Science and literature have intersected in significant ways in the writing of American environmentalists, scientists, and explorers. The texts which Bryson will examine,
which range from expedition reports to maps to fiction, are "united by thoughtful examination of science in nature" and "speak to two defining tensions within our views of nature and science" - namely, the conflict between use and conservation, and the concomitant conflict between science's exploitative powers and its generative possibilities (xi).

Richard Byrd's middle name was Evelyn.

The chronological span of the book's terrain, moving from the antebellum era to the 1960s, seeks to trace "the emergence of twentieth century ecology out of nineteenth century natural history" (shades of Sachs), as well as examine the transformation of scientific activity and the expansion of scientific "frontiers" (xii).

Chapter-by-chapter:
Part 1: Narratives of Exploration and the Scientist-Hero

One: "I Saw Visions": John Charles Fremont and the Explorer-Scientist as Nineteenth-Century Hero: Here Bryson examines the explorer Fremont's maps as instruments of political power, and as indicators of how Fremont conceptualized nature - "as a static, spatial entity best known through a visual perspective" (16). Bryson then describes Fremont's self-portrayal as masculine, heroic figure, possessed of self-control and intellect, in opposition to James Fenimore Cooper's bumbling naturalist Obed Bat (of The Prairie, 1827). Bryson also brings in the spectre of poor half-romantic Clarence King to illustrate Fremont's comparative detachment from the subjects he studied.

Two: "The Evidence of My Ruin": Richard Byrd's Antarctic Sojourn: Byrd's attempt to create a Thoreauvian idyll on the ice in Antarctica, as cataloged in his 1939 book Alone, is thwarted by the adverse conditions of the landscape, leaving the admiral a slave to the technological innovations which keep him alive. To Bryson, this narrative represents a significant departure from Fremont's stoicism: Byrd is "a vulnerable human subject seeking self-knowledge, spiritual replenishment, and communion with the natural world" (53). (It seems to me that this is a theme developed with far more chronological unity in Sachs' book, but one could also argue that this information about Byrd represents an interesting addition to Sachs' schema.)

Part 2: Imagined Communities and the Scientific Management of Nature

Three: "A Strange and Terrible Woman Land": Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Scientific Utopia: This chapter is a close textual analysis of CPG's Herland (1915), a feminist utopia intended to defy expectations of female capability to handle engineering/technology, and redefine ideas of environmental management. Bryson acknowledges that Herland has often been seen as racist (because of the lack of non-whites in the utopia), but argues that the project is an inherently feminist and ecocentric one, advocating for a science that "enables the whole community - human, plant, animal, mineral - to function in a self-sustaining, harmonious, and efficient way" (71) and an anti-social Darwinist point of view which views the community as a unitary whole, instead of valuing each person on an individual basis.

Four: "A Unit of Country Well Defined in Nature": John Wesley Powell and the Scientific Management of the American West : Powell's vision of science is of "the ultimate problem solver," "the means by which humans can control not only their natural environment but also themselves" (84). Bryson points out that although Powell conducted surveys that enabled the exploitation of the West's resources, he also, especially in the piece which Bryson examines (Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah [1878]), advocated for wise management of American arid regions, saying that humans should adjust their ways to accomodate the carrying capacity of the land.

John Wesley Powell and a conspicuously/racistly unidentified friend.

Part 3: Nature's Identity and the Critique of Science

Five: "The Earth is the Common Home of All": Susan Fenimore Cooper's Investigations of a Settled Landscape: Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours (1850), while almost retrogressive in its separate-spheres gender politics, is also a "complex, multilayered narrative that integrates natural history, cultural analysis, and personal stories" (105). Bryson characterizes her work as "proto-ecological," writing that Cooper presents a "forward-thinking, if limited, conservation ethic in which wild areas as well as developed and cultivated lands are valued" (106).

Six: "The Relentless Drive of Life": Rachel Carson's and Loren Eiseley's Reformulation of Science and Nature: The last chapter examines Carson's and Eiseley's
popularizing of natural science and ecology, pointing to their works as examples of a humanistic philosophy of the environment, one which hearkens back to the nineteenth-century popular naturalists such as Susan Fenimore Cooper, while "developing innovative strategies of literary representation" capable of avoiding the pathetic fallacy while opening up arenas for public sympathy with the natural world.

The dapper Loren Eiseley.

Of Carson's work, Bryson focuses on The Sea Around Us (1951) while the Eiseley book The Immense Journey (1957) provides much of the material for the analysis of his writing.


Reviews: In Environmental History, Robert Burkholder wrote that Bryson's book is a "model of graceful interdisciplinarity expressed through thoughtful analyses in lucid prose." He added that Visions is notable for its ability to turn pairings of ostensibly similar works into illustrations of significant differences.

Rachel Carson: the one person whose built-in bookshelves I wouldn't begrudge?

In Isis, Mark Madison lauded Bryson's ambition, and recommended the book to historians of science and technology. Nina Baym, in the New England Quarterly, emphasized gender aspects of Bryson's book, reviewing Bryson's blend of the Carolyn Merchant and the Annette Kolodny, and praised Bryson for giving this theme the nuance it deserves (see: Jessie Fremont's involvement with her husband's literary production).

New words: "parthenogenesis" ("reproduction from a gamete without fertilization, occurring most commonly in invertebrates and lower plants, formerly also: asexual reproduction, as by fission or budding" - this is what that shark did recently in Detroit!); "pathetic fallacy" (" the attribution of human emotion or responses to animals or inanimate things, esp. in art and literature" - first used by John Ruskin in 1856).

Books to follow up on: Primary: Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (1971); Loren Eiseley, Darwin's Century (1958); Charlotte P. Gilman's magazine The Forerunner; Olive Thorne Miller's nature books for children, Little Folks in Feathers and Fur (1875) and A Bird Lover in the West (1894); HG Wells, Men Like Gods (1922).

Secondary: Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narratives in Darwin, George Eliot, and 19th Century Fiction (1983); Mario Biagnoli, ed., The Science Studies Reader (1999); George H. Daniels, Science in the Age of Jackson (1968); William Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (1966); Murdo William McRae, ed., The Literature of Science: Perspectives on Popular Scientific Writing (1993); Stephen J. Pyne, The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica (1986).

Indians in Unexpected Places

"New Horse Power in 1913" - Collage by Arthur Amiotte. Oglala Lakota Artist (1994)

Title: Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004)

Author: Philip J. DeLoria, professor of history and director of the Am. Cult. program at Michigan. Author, also, of Playing Indian (1998) and coeditor of the Blackwell Companion to American Indian History (2002). Describes his areas of interest as "Issues of culture and representation, particularly concerning American Indian people; Environmental and Western American history." His family heritage - as Dakota Sioux - is key to his approach to this book. His father, Vine Deloria Jr, is an activist and historian (see reference to his activity in Krech's Ecological Indian); his grandfather, Vine Deloria Sr, who was a minister and an accomplished college athlete, forms the keystone of Unexpected Places' chapter on athletics.

Argument: During modernity, Native Americans, having been supposedly "defeated" at Wounded Knee in 1890, were facing some of the most adverse material (and spiritual) conditions in the history of white occupation. White Americans chose to see Native Americans as stuck in the past, defeated, contained, and/or passive. Deloria's mission is to use selected Native life histories to illustrate how, contrary to "popular" belief, Native Americans during this time were actively seeking out ways to shape and use the processes of modernity (including technology, mass media, film, etc). Through the use of these examples, Deloria asks us to consider the implications of our automatic relegation of American Indians to the realm of the "primitive" through stereotypical imagery, and to challenge the quotidian nature of this "directional" ideology.

Chapter-by-chapter:
Introduction: Expectation and Anomaly: This introduction situates the historical area to be explored in the early twentieth century, when, unexpectedly, "a significant cohort of Native people engaged the same forces of modernization that were making non-Indians reevaluate their own expectations of themselves and their society" (6). Deloria outlines the difference he sees between "ideology" and "discourse", preferring these terms to the more flat "stereotype." He also distinguishes between "the anomalous, which reinforces expectations" and "the unexpected, which resists categorization and, thereby, questions expectation itself" (11). As a broader project, he posits that looking at "secret histories of unexpectedness" such as this one has the power to "change our sense of the past and lead us quietly, but directly, to the present moment" (14).


Red Cloud Woman in Beauty Shop, Denver, 1941. Deloria uses this picture to illustrate how the gap between expectation and possibility for Indian roles both creates humor and reinforces structures of power.

Violence: The Killings at Lightning Creek: One of the first "expected" categories of "Indianness" in the early twentieth century was that of violence. Deloria shows how the massacre at Wounded Knee led to an understanding of the Indian as "contained," and that acts of Indian resistance on reservations were understood from then forward as "breaking out" or "breakouts" (such acts could include hunting illegally or moving from reservation to reservation, as seen in the chapter on cars and technology). These outbreaks, Deloria argues were not feared so much because of their promise of violence, but for "the eruption of resistant forms" of Indian culture. Furthermore, "these stories...helped establish critical contexts for the twentieth-century imagemaking even then beginning to take shape" (49). The fiction of containment meant that white society was apt to "forget" that the twentieth-century Indian was capable of acts such as the 1973 takeover of Wounded Knee (51).

Representation: Indian Wars, the Movie: Here, Deloria discusses the lives of Indians who took part in movie culture, either by acting or producing, and makes a case for their active agency in the new industry (as also articulated by LG Moses in his book about Wild West Shows). Buffalo Bill's "Indian Wars" movie (1914), the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and various pictures including DW Griffith's "Call of the Wild" (1908) are examined. Deloria takes special care to point to Native critiques of pictures which took advantage of Indian stereotypes, and includes an analysis of the pictures by Indian producer James Young Deer. What matters most, according to Deloria, is that "a significant group of early-twentieth-century Indian people...came rapidly to understand the power of representation and cultural production" (105).


The actor Luther Standing Bear.

Athletics: "I Am of the Body": My Grandfather, Culture, and Sports: This chapter opens with a very personal interlude introducing the life of Vine Deloria, Sr., who was a committed college athlete, and who, as Deloria says, at the end of his life, focused on this aspect of his past even beyond the other work he had done as a minister for, and elder of, the Lakota Sioux: "For my grandfather, race, religion, culture, and family were inextricably tangled with his feats on the playing field" (112). This revelation spurs Deloria to reconsider narratives of Indian athletes which could see them as having been exploited or denigrated by the teams and leagues they played for. Here he discusses the story of Charles Albert "Chief" Bender, a player for the Philly Athletics in the 1910s, the runner and Olympic medalist Louis Tewanima, and the many athletic teams fielded by the Carlisle School. In these situations, he says, "Indian mimicry of Indianness back at white audiences made it clear that there was both a shared sense of expectation and a critical Indian intelligence at work" (130). However, after the reservation system calcified in the post-WWI era, and the athletic system of the greater US rearranged along institutional lines, "the entire cultural, social, and economic system that had supported Indian athletes in the early twentieth century had been transformed in ways that almost completely shut them out" (133).

"Chief" Bender, of the Philadelphia Athletics.

Technology: "I Want to Ride in Geronimo's Cadillac": Here Deloria examines expectations that Indians would not be participating in the technological revolutions of the early twentieth century, with the most obvious exemplar being automobility. He looks at photography and advertising of the time period that portrayed Indianness as an *inspiration for* automobility (signifying freedom, fleetness, etc) without making a place for Indians themselves in the picture (hence, the photograph of Geronimo in the Caddy, which Deloria sees as a sight-gag set up by a white photographer, but then proceeds to use as a way to interrogate Geronimo's investment in being so portrayed). Indians who bought cars, using money gained from the sale of reservation land or oil, were seen as spendthrifty, while whites who mortgaged houses while keeping cars (see Middletown) were not. Meanwhile, in the lives of Indians, automobility "allowed Native people to imagine an even broader vision of Indian country, one that transcended individual tribes and places and helped create new expressions of the pan-Indian and the intertribal" (153).


Geronimo in the Cadillac.

Music: The Hills Are Alive...with the Sound of Indian: White fascination with the "primitive" in the early twentieth century led to white musicologists and composers visiting Indian reservations to try to "salvage" their music. Here, Deloria outlines the creation of an "Indian sound", which signifies, per Deloria, all of the expectations of what-is-Indian: "primitivism and social evolution, violent conflict, indigenous nationalism, Indian disappearance, the romance of the forbidden exotic, the haunted American landscape..." (184) However, he writes, there were also Indian performers in the realm of musical "high culture", most significantly, Tsianina Redfeather, a Creek Indian who performed in pieces which encapsulated Indianness (especially "Shanewis", an opera). Deloria examines how Redfeather was prized for her authenticity, but how her talent was sometimes written off as a result of a "natural" Indian gift, stripping her of agency for her accomplishments. As happened in the athletic realm, Indian musical performers lost the public's attention by midcentury.


"Princess" Tsianina Redfeather.

Conclusion: The Secret History of Indian Modernity: Deloria reiterates his idea that "expectations exist in relation to concrete actions" (225) and explains that this is why "stereotypes" such as the ones that manifest themselves in the Tomahawk Chop or the P. Diddy/Nelly song "Shake Ya Tailfeather", matter to Indian realities. Deloria writes, summing up, "These expectations have concerned, among other things, Native technological incapacity, natural proclivities toward violence and warfare, a lack of social development, distance from both popular and aesthetic culture, and an inability to engage a modern capitalist economy" (230). He then diverges into a brief discussion of how African-American culture overtook Indian culture as the touchstone of modernism, pointing to the urbanization of African-Americans as a significant factor (238).

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Gretchen Bataille wrote that Deloria's book succeeded at its project, but did not offer very much more in the way of in-depth criticism. Meanwhile, in Reviews in American History, Leonard Sadosky lauded Deloria for managing to find a mode of examination that eschewed the traditional tragic story of Indian victimization by governmental forces, and calls the book "cultural history at its best".

Stories: The Pawnee word for "car", when cars first came out, was kiriir aawis tarusta, which means "smoking anus" or "smoke from the anus dragging" (154). In 1940, "the Cherokee actor Victor Daniels apparently applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for federal recognition for a new tribe - what one reporter called the 'Demille Indians' of Hollywood" (80).

Leads to follow up on: The broadside for the 1912 movie "Custer's Last Fight" pitched the movie as "educational - every school boy and girl should see it!" (82) The Redpath Chatauqua Collection, which is at U. Iowa.

New words: "sodality" ("association or confederation with others; brotherhood, companionship, fellowship").

Books to follow up on: Primary: John Joseph Matthews, Sundown (1934); Luther Standing Bear, My People, The Sioux (1928).

Secondary: Christopher Castiglia, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (1996); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (p-back, 2002); Ivan Karp and Steven Levine, eds, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (p-back, 1991); Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (2000); Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (1999); Stephen Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (p-back, 1998); Andrew Brodie Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood (2004).