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Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?
Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler
Yet precisely supernatural legitimation, though not unknown in other cultural areas, figures among the Plains nations as a predominant mode of justifying changing the young from their given sex to the opposite gender, and it is to this area with its somewhat later sources that we now turn. In this cultural area, the vehicle for divine intrusion is one or more visions experienced by the young person not as a child, but usually at puberty, when he passes from childhood to young adulthood. So uniform is this point in time that Ruth Benedict, referring to the Plains nations, actually defines berdaches as "those who at puberty or thereafter took the dress and the occupations of women," (60) and I found no case in which that conversion is said to have taken place at an earlier age in this area. Now, as we shall see, many ethnographers describe the process by which these visions led boys to assume the status of a berdache as an exercise in free will. They had, after all, passed into the age of reason. In this way, the process of the Plains vision becomes standard evidence for the general claim that berdaches as a group chose freely, whereas that context of becoming a berdache in the Plains cannot, as the reader will see, be made to stand for all native peoples and for all earlier times. Still, a correct reading of the scientific literature on these visions will show that constraint and force were at the very heart of the experience of these adolescents when a vision led them to the status of berdache.
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We begin with a sensational report of a vision from outside the Plains. Do not be disconcerted: this account will give a sense of the terrible need for authority in the native American's unpredictable world. Just as it does for most of humanity today, this uncertainty in the face of cosmic force led native Americans to at all costs seek signs of supernatural approval before initiating important actions. In southern California in the early nineteenth century, Girolamo Boscana describes how sorcerers gave alcoholic drinks to boys arriving at puberty (even some of the same ones who had been made berdaches in infancy?). After such a boy became intoxicated, he was kept awake and semi-hypnotized by being asked repeatedly if he did not see a lion, or a beaver, a bear or a deer, an eagle or coyote. Obviously, Boscana averred, the exhausted young victim of this treatment was prone to hallucinations involving such animals, imaginations that were then interpreted as visions. (61)
While this vision makes no reference to the status of berdache, it still does introduce us to the heightened sensitivities among those in puberty that made them ideal subjects for determining the collective future. A particular significance was attached to each of the animals listed above, the combinations of animals being open to interpretation by the elders in charge of the visions. (62) Now among the various animals and objects that might appear in a vision, none might be more decisive in this region than the buffalo or the moon, both linked in various ways to womanhood. In the simplest scenario, if one of these two objects appeared repeatedly to a young brave, he was destined to be a she. It might appear, therefore, that these pubescent boys offer solid proof that the Plains berdaches exercised individual choice in adopting that status.
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