Multireferentiality and Seven Cities of Cibola

Zuni World view: Zuni Ceremonialism

 

 

In a unique language such as Zuni where multireferential names and metaphoric symbolism are prevalent it is certain that much would be lost in translation to a universal syntax.  Modal language is ineffective as well, for there are no possible worlds for the Zuni.  Epistemic fulfillment is found and absorbed in the aesthetic.  As Ruth Bunzel noted in her study of Zuni ceremonialism, a final statement of the Zuni worldview would be "The world then is as it is and man's plan in it is what it is"[67].  Necessity has absorbed the possible in the logic of ritual where the failure of prayer is attributed to a deviant utterance or a "bad heart".  Potential is everywhere in animate matter, but its manifestation is the actualization of form and function in cognition[68].  Potential is what it is when it is not thought about, and when thought about it is for the most part restricted to the non-verbal.  In the Zuni language the word for "I think" is the same word for "maybe", or "perhaps" (hinik)[69].

This may seem paradoxical if actualization is cognition and the "I think" is simply the possible or potential, but actualization of form and function is to know the use of the thing, which presupposes knowledge of its context. Knowledge of context and the thing's use is sufficient for naming.  Indeterminacy of context and perhaps one?s belief is the vagary of cross identification making quantification uncertain and ontology relative, leaving potential to the non-verbal and subsequently giving the appearance of a lack of a naming process as well.  Individualism is discouraged and is distinct from personal accomplishment.  Deviant utterance and a bad heart are qualities of individualism.  As Cushing remarked, while learning the language during his tenure as a participant-observer residing in the Governor's household at the Zuni Pueblo, his improper usage of the language never went uncorrected[70].

Thus, Zuni truth is determination according to the beliefs of the individual and subsequently to the reciprocal public intentions of a distinct culture where the individual as a "perspective-taker" performs rationalization in the ontological sense[71] or the "primitive"[72] and intersubjectivity is validated as objectivity in "personal accomplishment"[73].  Personal accomplishment is never identical to individualism and the beliefs of the individual are expressed objectively if their interpretation of an image invokes a proper narrative.

Young states "rock art is of special import because it demonstrates the involvement of the ancestors in present day life, the fluid boundary between events of the myth times and those of today.  Because certain rock art images evoke recitations of traditional narrative, I regard them as a means by which to investigate the relationships between verbal and visual communication codes. This interrelationship is revealed in the way that the Zuni use these codes to recreate and structure the world of the myth time, making it a part of their contemporary existence"[74].  What is important here is that verbal and ostensive definition presupposes myth and that proper interpretation of the image in context requires that it be related in the now, as a present tense, and where what is uttered or shown is always true and the belief of the producer.  Existence is the accumulation of the past that naturally conflates to the present.  While it is always an eternal possibility, existence shows itself only as a necessary present.

 Cushing referred implicitly to this phenomenon in equivocating the Zuni term "I-shothl-ti-mon"[75], meaning "always", with "ahâi" (ahoi)[76], meaning "beings"[77].  The prefix I in Zuni is either reflexive or inchoative[78] and the prefix a[79] is either a verbal pronominative for the plural absolute or a derivational prefix pluralizing particles referring to persons[80]. Miner notes that either of these uses of a is homophonous with the other and as a linguist one must assume that he intended that while pronunciation is the same they have different derivations, whereas Cushing, who knew the Zuni language and was familiar with the musicality of Zuni narrative, translated a as a unison, conflating their usage in, for example, his translation of Apoyan (sky or cover) Tatcu (father) as "all covering Father Sky"[81].  Cushing implies this function of individuation several times throughout his essays, referring to the "Seven Cities of Cibola" while Frederick Hodge complained of finding the physical remnants of only six cities (pueblos), the seventh kiva or direction (there are six), and the nineteenth clan (eighteen clans divided into the dichotomy of Summer and Winter people)[82].

Frederick Eggan seems to agree with Cushing's observations[83] and Young notes Eggan's agreement when citing Cushing's Outline of Zuni Creation Myths[84].  Young comments a number of times in her essay that the principle theme of the Zuni cosmology is the notion of the "center" where its multireferential aspects are integrated as a motion through time directed inward[85], "collapsing the boundaries of space and time into the base metaphor, giving it the ability or power to refer to many disparate concepts simultaneously"[86].  The center is represented as a class that is itself a member of its class where the multireferential images of the center refer to themselves and to the class as a whole in a seemingly paradoxical as well as tautological sense of logical extension, and is probably responsible for Cushing's observation that the Zuni seemed to confuse the subjective with the objective[87].  The extended and the non-extended are tautologically present in every image, where, for example, the seventh city is manifest in the collectivity of the six pueblos known to exist, or the summer-winter dichotomy which is one representative of the idea of the center as indicative of the nineteenth clan.

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Notes


[67] Op. cit. Bunzel, 1932:a486.

[68] Images for water are not put on water vessels, but on bowls for holding cornmeal; hence, the desire for increase (Bunzel   1929: 23-24, 69-71).

[69] Bunzel, Ruth L.  Zuni Texts. Publications of the American Ethnological Society, 15. New York: G.E. Steckert & Co., 1933, and Newman, Stanley.  Zuni Dictionary. Indiana University Research Center Publication Six. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1958.

[70] Cushing, Frank Hamilton.  My Adventures in Zuni.  1882.  Palmer Lake, CO: Filter Press, 1999 reprint.

[71] Op. cit. Willard, 1989: 160.

[72] Fabian notes that "primitive" is a essentially a temporal concept (and temporally distancing), is a category, not an object, of Western thought (1983: 18).  Dunn defines the "primitive" as an interpreter or seer, and that every culture has them, making them a category of individuals.  She also refers to the universal use of systems of symbols by cultures and implies that symbols, as objects of the interpreters, are primitives.  Dunn, Dorothy.  American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plain?s Area.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1968: 24-25.  Fabian, Johannes.  Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object.  NY: Columbia University Press, 1983.

[73] Op. cit. Willard, 1989: 163.

[74] Op. cit. Young, 1988: 7-8.

[75] Cushing, 1883, (ishalhma-te, per Newman, 1958)

[76] The term ahoi is a  superordinate generic term.  Ahoi has become a term translated as "people" by English speaking bilingual Zuni, and is a secondary echelon in the being hierarchy subsumed under the superordinate generic term. (Walker 1966a).

[77] Cushing, 1883: 10.  Compare this with Plato dropping "now" from timeless propositions and importing "always" in its place (Timaeus 38a, cited from Owens 1966: 333).  Owens, G.E.L.  "Plato and Parmenides on the Timeless Present".  Monist.  50: 317-340, 1966.

[78] Op. cit. Newman, 1958.

[79] Zuni informants suggest a slight difference is pronunciation corresponding to context, but it is imperceptible to my ear.  They confirm, however, that it can be used to have simultaneous meaning, but the term apoyanne is associated to strict religious dialogue and is presently archaic.

[80] Miner, Kenneth L. "Noun Stripping and Loose Incorporation in Zuni".  International Journal of American Linguistics.  52: 242-254, 1986: 246n.8.  Walker states that a is not only a particle referring to persons, but also categorizes it as a being (1966a).

[81]  Cushing, Frank Hamilton.  "Outlines of Zuni Creation Myths".  Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1891-1892.  Pp. 321-447.  Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1896.  Reprint.Bunzel criticizes Cushing's interpretations as containing "endless poetic and metaphysical glossing of the basic elements" (1932b: 547).  Bunzel translates apoyanne as "stone cover" where a is denoted by its root use as a term for "stone" (1932a: 487).  The distinction is viewed here as relative to the distinction between folklore and mythology, where, as Benedict notes, a Zuni narrator is free to incorporate his knowledge into folklore and tales (1969: xiii, Benedict, Ruth.  Zuni Mythology.  2 vols.  Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology, no. 21.  New York:  Columbia University Press, 1935. AMS Press reprint, 1969..  Bunzel's received her version from a man who was not a priest and was a story that belonged to all the priests for the purpose of storytelling during the winter retreats.  Her source had learned the story from an uncle who had refused to give the origin myth of his society since that was his ?very own prayer? (1932b: 548). 

In a letter to the to the Peabody Museum, Cushing distinguished between the "abundant folklore and more serious mythology" (Green, Jesse. 1990: 304, Cushing at Zuni: The Correspondence and Journals of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1879-1884.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990.).  It is apparent from information in several correspondences (including Lt. John Bourke's journal; Ibid, 188, 394 n. 67), that Cushing learned his version of the origin myth from Keasi, who was second in command in the Order of the Priests of the Bow (Apila Shiwani) and whose duty it was, according to Keasi, to preserve the "Sacred Genesis" of the Zuni, handed down by word of mouth from the "Old Days...given to me by...day and night pouring it into my ears" (Ibid: 187).  In Cushing's day the Society was the most powerful of all the kivas and its strength depended upon its secrecy, even to the exclusion of the collective, for this was the source of its motive as an enforcement agency of the secular, and was also the unification of the collective (Harvey, Byron III. p.204.  "An Overview of Pueblo Religion".  New Perspectives on the Pueblos.  Ed. by Alfonso Ortiz.  Pp. 197-217.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972.). 

By the time of Bunzel's field work however, the war cult was "greatly in abeyance" and had been "stripped" of its power: the pattern of assignment of the priestly hierarchy had been drastically altered and the dissemination of information and the handing down of the society's ritual history had been drastically curtailed (Bunzel 1932b:  525-526).  Thus, it is likely that information that had been available to Cushing as a member of the Bow was, for the most part, unavailable to Bunzel, at least in its original form.  The most interesting aspect of this is that Bunzel's informant was in all likelihood Nick Tamaka, who was persecuted for witchcraft by the Bow in or around 1895.  Tamaka immediately informed the U.S. authorities and later become Governor of Zuni.  Throughout these years it was he who stripped the Bow of its power.

[82] Cushing gives an account of the division of the summer and winter people in a myth telling "how soon after the emergence from the under world Yanauluha carried a staff among the plumes of which appeared four round things, seeds or eggs, two blue like the sky or turquoise, two dun-red like the earth. Yanauluha told the people to choose.  From one pair would issue beings of beautiful plumage, and where they flew would be everlasting summer; from the other would come evil beings, 'uncolored, black, piebald with white', and where these flew, and the people should follow, winter would strive with summer, and food would be obtainable only by labor. The people choose blue eggs, and the strongest seized them.  Worms issued from this pair of eggs, which grew into ravens.  But the other eggs held by Yanauluha and by the fewer and weaker but wiser people who waited with him, grew into macaws, who flew to the summer land of the south".  Yanauluha became the "speaker to and of the Sun-father".  In this myth there seems to be an implied moral prescribing aesthetics should be informed by qualities of a more immanent nature for there is an inherent danger in the aesthetic (quote cited from Kroeber , 1919: 94-95.  Kroeber, Alfred L.  "Zuni Kin and Clan".  Anthropological Papers of the Museum of Natural History, 18.  1919: 39-204.  Reprint, AMS Press.).

[83] Eggan, Fred.  Social Organization of the Western Pueblos.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970: 300.

[84] Op. cit. Young, 1988: 257n.31.

[85] Ibid, 136.

[86] Ibid, 106.

[87] Op. cit. Cushing, 1883: 10.

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