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Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?
Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler
The third line of evidence considered the tribes of the present-day United States of America, and especially those of the Prairie and Plains. The latter nations were, we have found, marked off clearly both from the Prairie nations to the east and those to their west by the fact that only in their late teens and not as children did berdaches emerge from the visions that were a characteristic trait of this area. (76) Given the lack of direct evidence, I assumed that the particular visions that led some young men to become berdaches came early in these individuals' vision existence, about eighteen years of age. I then reported the all-but unanimous findings of serious students of the Plains visions which establishes that the interpretation of visions among these nations was carefully monitored by family elders, secret-society heads, and the like, to legitimate and replicate preexisting social bonds: In the end, there was little room for the notion of free choice, and it was seldom enough claimed. Thus while the visions of future berdaches among the Plains nations seem to definitely announce a (later) departure from the infantile assignment of gender among most previous nations, the constraint that "forced" Plains young men into the status of berdache continued to be a dominant feature of this life "choice." Proof of these three summary points will of course rest in their validation or refutation by subsequent documentation and analyses. The present essay is one persons attempt to recontextualize the study of the berdache
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We wish finally to observe again that American anthropologists themselves contributed and even built up the romantic notion of the free warrior who did not have any of the hangups of his white brethren, a theme grounded of course in popular writers like Karl May and Zane Grey. In a previous work, I have explained how gay activists were moved to this notion, and will not pursue that story further here, other than to note that their inspiration often came from mainline anthropology. (77) In closing I would point to one of the outstanding figures in American anthropology, Alfred Kroeber, in order to show by one example how deeply a certain ideology of the American native has sunk into the marrow of modern scholarship.
Kroeber was a great admirer of the Franciscan ethnographer Girolamo Boscana, the same Boscana who has been our main source for the Angelinos and associated tribes of southern California that produced berdaches from earliest childhood. The Berkeley savant's enthusiasm was justified, for Boscana had lived most of his mature life among these nations, knew some of their languages, and was an unequaled kenner of their customs. Despite that admiration, however, Kroeber proved incapable of accepting Boscana's account of the creation of these young boy-girls. Twice in his monumental study of The Indians of California, Kroeber addressed the friar's claim that certain boys had been "selected." Both times he rejected that claim, asserting instead and with no evidence that the conversion of gender was a voluntary act on the part of the boys. (78) Yet on its very face, it is Boscana who is trustworthy here and Kroeber whose bald assertion is spurious. He gives no reason why in this instance we should believe him rather th an this expert of a century before, who was on the ground in the midst of these peoples. Clearly, something more was at stake in Kroeber's assertion than his scientific method could justify. That something may in fact have been the need to preserve "his Indians" from the criticism of his white countrymen. While that was certainly well-intended, as is much other paternalistic piety, it ended by being a disservice to the truth, and to the native Americans Kroeber treasured. (79) For it was and is not particularly surprising that like children everywhere, those of native America inevitably were to a greater or lesser degree the product of their parents' needs and wishes.
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