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Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?
Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler
(59.) Among the Spanish friars, one does encounter an occasional claim that "the devil" fostered such conversions, but the claim is of little value since these nations knew nothing of "the devil," who was the friars' automatic explanation for all things bad. Yet did the friars mean to refer to the indigenous naguales? See "The Talking Image," in my Religion in Social Context, 452.
(60.) R. Benedict, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (London, 1959), 268.
(61.) Cited in Duflot de Mofras' Travels on the Pacific Coast, ed. and trans. M. Eyer Wilbur, vol. 2 (Santa Ana, California), 191.
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(62.) In general on these visions, see L. Irwin, The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plains (Norman, 1994); R. Benedict, The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America (Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, no. 29, n. d.), and her "The Vision in Plains Culture," American Anthropologist, n. s. 24 (1922): 1-23; P. Albers and S. Parker, "The Plains Vision Experience: a Study of Power and Privilege," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 27 (1971): 203-33.
(63.) For the Hidatsa, see Desy, "L'homme-femme," 72; For the Oglala, Sioux, Winnnebago, etc., see Irwin, Dream Seekers, 51.
(64.) C. Wissler, "Societies and Ceremonial Associations in the Oglala Divison of the Teton-Dakota," Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 11.1 (1912): 92; also D. Forgey, "The Institution of Berdache Among the North American Plains Indians," Journal of Sex Research 11(1975): 5.
(65.) Landes, The Mystic Lake Sioux, 112; J. Dorsey, "A Study of Siouxan Cults," 378.
(66.) J. Fine, Lame Deer, and R. Erdoes, Lame Deer, Sioux Medicine Man (London, 1972), 117.
(67.) Benedict, Concept of the Guardian Spirit, 41, and her "The Vision in Plains Culture," 17, 19; R. Landes, The Prairie Potawatomi: Tradition and Ritual in the Twentieth Century (Madison, 1970), 26 (1936); C. Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Associations in the Oglala Division of the Teton-Dakota (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 11.1 (1912), 92; Albers and Parker, "The Plains Vision Experience," 206, 209-10, 214, 218-19, 225-29; Irwin, Dream Seekers, 51, 168-69, 189.
(68.) Benedict, "The Vision in Plains Culture," 19.
(69.) Irwin, Dream Seekers, 189, and 168-69 on the "pattern of dialogical exchange" by which the neophyte was led by adults. Further on the passage from one set of legitimated weaving patterns to another is in W. Morris, Jr., Living Maya (New York, 1987).
(70.) R. Trexler, "Legitimating Prayer Gestures in the Twelfth Century: The De Penitentia of Peter the Chanter," in my Religion in Social Context, 335-73.
(71.) Benedict, The Concept of the Guardian Spirit, 41.
(72.) Roscoe, Changing Ones, 130.
(73.) Ibid., 196, one of scores of such assertions. I have reviewed Roscoe's work in some detail in my "Gender Subordination."
(74.) Cf. for example the Arabian cases studied by E. Rowson ("The Effeminates of Early Medina," Journal of the American Oriental Society 111 [1991]: 671-93) and U. Wikan (Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman [Baltimore, 1982]). A. Kroeber noted this song and dance occupation of the berdaches in California; Handbook of the Indians of California (Berkeley, 1953), 497. Studying the Pueblo, E. Clews Parsons, "The Last Zuni, 338ff. at least pinpoints the economic factor, distinguishing between "the authentic lifelong economic line" and the "pseudo- or temporary ritual line of burlesque or dance in which clowns or dancers take on parts of women's array or impersonate women or "unsuccessful warriors"; "The Last Zuni Transvestite," American Anthropologist 41 (1939): 338ff. Especially important in this regard is A. Bowers, Hidatsa Social and Ceremonial Organization (Washington, D.C., 1965), 315, 326, 331, and 168, where Bowers notes that that tribe's berdaches "tended to disappear once warfare had ceased and thei r ceremonial system had collapsed."
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