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The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West

Folklore, August, 2005 by J.V. Powell

The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West. By Barre Toelken. Logan, Ut.: Utah State University Press, 2003. 204 pp. Illus. $22.95 (pbk). ISBN 0-87421-556-0

I am not sure what to call this book. It is neither textbook nor treatise, really. Maybe we should rely on the author's perception of it, when he says at the end of the Dedication, "--what can I give more than this account of my life." That statement becomes poignant when we realise that Toelken completed the book during his recovery from a major stroke in 2002 that left him paralysed and unable to speak. And what a life he has lived. This is Barre Toelken, who edited three prominent folklore journals and served as president of the American Folklore Society (1977-8) and on the Society's Executive Board for ages, who wrote The Dynamics of Folklore, the introductory text that three decades of students had to memorise. So, let us call this book what it is. It is an autobiographical festschrift; the view from "where one is at" after a lifetime of getting there.

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In the prologue, Toelken tells us that he had two motives for writing this study of Native American folklore. First, he feels an obligation to the Navajos, a family of whom adopted him when in 1955 they found him wandering in their valley as a lost uranium prospector. That debt prompts him to make "small payments on it by trying to use Navajo--and other Native--folklore to dispel stereotypes and misinformation about Native peoples and their cultures." He was also motivated by a second obligation, which is to "colleagues in folklore and anthropology, many of whom, I believe, have inadvertently distanced themselves from the richness of the Native cultures they study in the name of objective research." His style is evangelistic without being preachy. There is a message here: the joy of coming to be welcomed and comfortable in another culture, what I call the "gift of otherness."

Toelken divides his message into an introduction (Cultural Patterns in Native American Folklore) and five chapters: Visual Patterns of Performance (Arts), Kinetic Patterns of Performance (Dance), Oral Patterns of Performance (Song and Story), Patterns and Themes in Native Humour, and Cultural Patterns of Discovery. The section on humour is worth the purchase price. As they say, there is no excuse for a boring social scientist. His discussion of humour and many of the parables throughout the text are well told and poignant. The illustrations are helpful. Some are memorable.

All that said, there are things that do not work for me. An example is the title, which is drawn from Barry Lopez' River Notes, based on an observer studying a random snail shell. Lopez concludes that the shell's form and condition provide us with the evidence we need in order to reconstruct the incidents of the snail's life (i.e. the snail's personal agonies). Toelken sees this as an analogy for how folkloric observations allow us to account for the cultural values underlying folkloric productions. It is a metaphor that Toelken refers to repeatedly. But, whereas the snail's shell reflects genetic structure (i.e. nature) and shows the scars of trauma, Toelken is usually referring to ethnographic issues (i.e. nurture). This makes me uneasy because it confuses nature and nurture, those basic concepts from the first lecture of Anthropology 100. I was disturbed to find many examples of this conceptual fuzziness--in fact, my copy of the book is a mess of marginal questions and quibbles.

Toelken uses definitions stated in ways that I would circle in red on introductory anthropology essays. For example, he defines legend as "a story told as true by someone who nonetheless was not an eyewitness" (p. 29), which inflates legend to include everything from gossip to myth, but probably excludes truly legendary accounts like Paul Bunyan stories, of which narrators generally belie the truth by using interactional devices to indicate that "this is just a story." Another example: "Tribe does not denote a backward or primitive society, but simply one which believes it continues to exist because individuals cooperate rather than compete" (p. 34). This definition comes from someone who has lived among the rivalries of Northwest Coast tribal groups? Are tribes not defined in terms of leaders with ascribed accession and legitimate power and in terms of language, land and economics? Intentionally or not, Toelken seems to use the term "stereotype" like a four-letter word. Euro-American stereotypes about native people arise from prejudice and insensitivity. On the other hand, Native generalisations about "whitemen" are presented as valid ethnographic institutions that are part of the richness of the Native cultures. These are three examples of many. (Are these not issues that the editors and peer reviewers of the Utah State University Press should have questioned?)

The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West

Folklore, August, 2005 by J.V. Powell

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