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Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler

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So rooted is this comprehension of the native vision that it has recently drawn forth a book that sets out to oppose, or at least qualify, this social interpretation of the vision process. In his Dream Seekers, Lee Irwin uses a phenomenological approach to make his case for the individual transformative power of the native American vision. At his best in showing how visual patterns are legitimately changed through the process of visions, Irwin did persuade this reader of his thesis that "the conventional notion that dreams and visions are stereotyped experiences strictly reflecting cultural norms is not supported by the ethnography" of the Plains and Prairie (my italics). But this is something of a straw man--the literature on the subject does not claim any 100% parity between cultural norms and individual vision experience--and where it counts, Irwin himself pays his respects to the impressive power of the community in defining the nature and reading of the vision. (69) How could it have been otherwise? If free choice was dominant in the world of visions, then one-half the berdaches emerging from them would conflict with their elders' expectations. I have yet to encounter one such case.

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It is customary in the literature of the vision to distinguish between an individual vision that is discretely social in nature and one that is more private, and that distinction might seem to have some merit. For instance, it is definitely necessary to preserve a distinction between the programmed vision in which a future berdache receives his life calling and any future visions that person might have with "his" alter ego. Yet on closer examination, the distinction between a social and private vision may be misleading. It is a fact that the most private of visions rely upon a grammar and heuristic apparatus that is historical or cultural in nature, and only that apparatus can make sense of them. These infra- and superstructures of the vision are, to be sure, products of the collectivity rather than of any given individual. Further, a mechanism that I have called "the unseen seer" in studying medieval European visions appears to have been at work in the Americas as well: an assertedly one-on-one conversation between the visionary and his spirit is in fact observed by a person who is present allegedly without the visionary being aware of him. It is that person's report of this "private" vision which in the end provides the vision's legitimation. (70) No validating witness, in effect, no authority. No wonder, then, that Ruth Benedict was so firm in circumscribing the range of a given vision image. "There would be little difficulty," she said, "in placing any vision-text from any part of North America within at most a group of three or four neighboring tribes. Even the most individualistic of the visions blurs but slightly the tribal outline." (71)

In his recent work, Roscoe does at one point actually recognize the force of the community in these visions. "Most tribal cultures," he says, "and especially those in which visions are credited with bestowing skills and inclinations," "do not view gender identities as being chosen." (72) Yet throughout the book, the same writer repeatedly speaks of these same native individuals desiring an alternate gender identity, and would have us believe, as we have shown, that overwhelmingly, individuals did so desire. (73) This repeated affirmation provides the best evidence of this author's determination to find his homosexual present in the deep American past.

Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler

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