Annotated Bibliography Assignment

I need each article (3 are attached) summerize each one from 150 – 200 words. This is for an annotated bibliography for my anthropology class.

Each summary must contain

1) Summerize the source

2) Identify the pieces main argument or theme

3) Describe strengths and weaknesses of the source

My topic for this bibliography is:

Effects modernization had on culture and way of life in the North

Make note of Inuit people and any tribes in the north describes in the articles***

A Typology of Settlement and Community Patterns in Some Circumpolar Societies
Author(s): Kwang-chih Chang
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1962), pp. 28-41
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40315538

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A Typology of Settlement and Community Patterns
in Some Circumpolar Societies^

KWANG-CHIH CHANG

The effect of cultural ecology (Steward 1955:
3Off) upon social organization through the settle-
ment pattern is a problem area that has received
little of the concentrated attention it deserves in
current social anthropological literature, yet it is
of vital concern to archaeologists who attempt the
reconstruction of prehistoric society. As the
author has suggested in another article (Chang
1958), American archaeologists who have recently
begun to make use of the settlement patterns con-
cept for their reconstructions may have unwitting-
ly limited its usefulness by overburdening its con-
ceptual load. Including a whole range of seeming-
ly related subject matters, all of which pertain to
the spatial aspects of prehistoric settlements but
each of which may actually be determined by a
separate set of factors, the term

* settlement pat-
terns” has tended to serve as a catchall which
must be defined for each archaeological usage or
confusion inevitably occurs. In view of this state
of affairs, the author has suggested distinguishing
those spatial aspects of prehistoric settlements
that could be assumed or demonstrated to be re-
lated to cultural ecological forces from those that
could be attributed to efficient causes in the
sphere of sociology and social psychology. It is
further proposed that for the former the term
“settlement patterns” be retained, whereas the
term u community patterns” might be employed to
designate the latter. It is gratifying to see that
similar classificatory devices have recently been
advanced by other archaeologists (Sears 1961).

It is the attempt of the present article to fur-
ther such lines of inquiry by sharpening a handful
of basic definitions, outlining a problem and of-
fering a hypothesis, and finally by testing this
hypothesis against the ethnographic data from
some circumpolar societies of the Far North.
Some typological definitions will be made in the
following passages, but one basic dichotomy, that
between u settlement” and * settlement patterns”
on the one hand and “community” and “community

patterns” on the other, should be initially charac-
terized at this juncture. To put it briefly, the
settlement refers to the locality of the societal
occupation in relation to natural environment,
technology, and subsistence, whereas the commu-
nity designates a local social group. Assuming
that the dwelling houses in a village can be re-
garded as the basic spatial constituents of the
village, we may consider that the problems as to
where these houses are located topographically,
what considerations in terms of natural resources
underlie the selection of locales, during what sea-
sons of the year and/or for how many years these
locales are occupied, and what subsistence activi-
ties are engaged in by their occupants, can be re-
ferred to as problems pertaining to the settlement
patterns. On the other hand, in a conglomeration
of such houses, no matter where and how these
are located in terms of cultural ecology, there
exist spatial as well as socio-political relation-
ships among the constituent houses. Such matters
as the placement of houses in a community, the
social ties among their inhabitants, their rela-
tionship in terms of political control, social be-
havior, and mental attitude, can be made the sub-
ject of the study of community patterns.

Such a dichotomy inevitably leads to the prob-
lem of whether there is a correlation between the
settlement and the community patterns in the so-
cial structure of a local group. Most students
would probably assume that there is, and the
author is convinced that a correlation cannot only
be assumed, but the general mechanism involved
in this correlation can be understood by an ex-
amination of a structurally meaningful typology of
the settlement and community patterns of particu-
lar societies.

Devising such a typology has motivated the
writing of the present article. The circumpolar
region of the northern hemisphere is selected for
this purpose for two reasons. First, the settle-
ment patterns among hunter -fishers provide a
wide range of varieties particularly suitable for
microtypological purposes. The circumpolar re-
gion further widens this range by means of the
marked seasonal fluctuations of climate and the
resultant seasonal cycles of animal and plant life.

1. The author is grateful to Raymond Thompson,
Leopold Pospisil, and William Davenport for
suggestions and criticisms on the first drafts
of this article.

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CHANG: A TYPOLOGY OF SETTLEMENT AND COMMUNITY PATTERNS 29
Under such a natural environment, the impact of
cultural ecology upon society is more plainly ob-
servable and is less complicated by historical
factors than in other areas of the world. This
area, furthermore, happens to be abundant in
ethnographic data. Second, it is hoped that this
typology for the circumpolar societies may sug-
gest new approaches to archaeological recon-
structions of some of the Palaeolithic and Meso-
lithic materials which are often regarded as rep-
resenting occupation during climatic conditions
similar to those of the present Far North. Al-
though an extensive survey of the literature on the
Far North would seem to be a tremendously for-
midable task, the author believes that a controlled
comparison with regard to the settlement and
community patterns of some of the circumpolar
peoples may possibly lead to limited but useful
generalizations (Eggan 1954).

The Settlement

By settlement is meant here any form of hu-
man occupation of any size over a particular lo-
cale for any length of time with the purpose of
dwelling or ecological exploitation. The term
conceptually stresses the ” locale* rather than its
inhabitants. Taking a bird’s-eye view of a portion
of the landscape, we observe a number of locales
where cultural activities serving various purposes
record themselves by altering the natural land-
scape and by leaving marked or latent traces of
human occupancy. Some of these are clusters of
dwellings which groups of men have occupied for
considerable periods of time, developing group
consciousness and common interests; we call
these community sites. Others are short- time
residences for certain seasons of the year where
people gather for certain subsistence purposes
and leave as soon as these purposes are achieved;
these we call hunting or fishing camps. Still
other locales might be temporary gathering places
where people come periodically to exchange
goods; we refer to these as markets. All these
locales perform certain specific functions and
people gather at them at intervals; the length of
such gatherings depending on the purposes for
which they come together. The landscape in a
certain region can thus be regarded as yielding an
ecological cycle by assigning to various locales
different functional potentials, while a human
group occupies different locales at intervals ac-
cordingly. We call each of these locales, which
serves certain purposes for its inhabitants, a
“settlement.” To rephrase this from another

angle, the human occupants select different lo-
cales suitable for their seasonal subsistence pur-
poses. As the subsistence level of the people
changes, so does the settlement pattern, or the
time-space relationship of settlements.

Definitions of several other terms are here in
order. If the annual cycle of the main mode of
subsistence of the inhabitants can be completed at
a single locale, and the main body of them occu-
pies that locale all the year round, we may call
the locale a “year- round settlement.” An irri-
gated agricultural settlement, for instance, be-
longs to this category. Such a settlement may
further be characterized by the permanent occu-
pancy of the particular locale year after year, un-
less that locale’s ecological potentiality is cata-
strophically terminated. The term “permanent
settlement” seems to agree with the ordinary
usage for such types. Nevertheless, a year-round
settlement might not be made to occupy a particu-
lar locale forever, because the relative ecological
potential of that locale may be exhausted after a
short time interval without the possibility of arti-
ficial recuperation. A slash- and-burn agricul-
tural settlement is an example in point. Though
within the cycle of a single year it can serve the
principal subsistence activities at one locale, a
slash- and-burn agricultural settlement has to be
abandoned several years after its initial forma-
tion, and can be conveniently called a “semi-
permanent settlement.” On the other hand, if the
annual cycle of subsistence activities of a group
of men cannot be completed at a single locale, and
a number of different locales are consequently
necessary for different seasons of the year, we
may call this network of functionally complemen-
tary locales, within the confines of which the an-
nual cycle of subsistence of the group is com-
pleted or so restricted, an “annual subsistence
region.” The settlements within this region may
then be called “seasonal settlements.” If the an-
nual subsistence region can be occupied year after
year, we have within it “sedentary seasonal settle-
ments.” The seasonal settlements remaining
within the annual subsistence region and at the
same locales year after year are “sedentary sea-
sonal settlements with permanent bases.” Those
remaining within the limits of annual subsistence
regions but changing their main occupation sites
from one set of locales to another after one or
several years’ occupancy are “sedentary settle-
ments with transient bases.” If the ecological po-
tentials of the annual subsistence region will be
exhausted after one or several years of occupancy,
and the whole group of inhabitants within it will
have to move to a new region, we have “temporary

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30 ARCTIC ANTHROPOLOGY 1,1
seasonal settlements.” It is altogether clear that
the settlement pattern is determined by the ecolo-
gical potentiality of the locale on the one hand,
and by the exploitative ability of the human occu-
pants on the other. (Table 1; compare Beardsley
et al 1956.)

Table 1. Categorization of Some Important
Settlement Patterns

I. Year-round settlement (abbreviated as Y-
settlement): A settlement within which the
annual cycle of the main subsistence activities
of its occupants can be completed.

A. Permanent settlement: one which occu-
pies a locale permanently.

B. Semi-permanent settlement: a settlement
to be abandoned after one or several
years’ occupancy because of the exhaustion
of the ecological potentiality of the locale
and the occupants’ inability to effect arti-
ficial recuperation, among other factors.

II. Seasonal settlement- complex: a network of
seasonal settlements (abbreviated as S-settle-
ments) occupied by a group of people in turn
in different seasons of the year and being dis-
tributed within the confines of an annual sub-
sistence region.

A. Sedentary S-settlements: the annual sub-
sistence region of a group of occupants
remaining permanently unchanged.

1. With permanent bases: the locales of
the main seasonal settlements remain
permanently unchanged.

2. With transient bases: the locales of the
various seasonal settlements (particu-
larly the main sites of occupation) keep
changing after one or several years’
occupancy because of the exhaustion of
ecological potentiality of particular lo-
cales and the occupants’ inability to
effect artificial recuperation, among
other factors, though the whole annual
subsistence region of the group re-
mains unchanged.

B. Temporary S-settlements: a group of
people has to change its habitation from
one annual subsistence region to another
after one or several years’ occupancy be-

cause of the exhaustion of the ecological
potentiality of the whole region and the
occupants’ inability to effect artificial re-
cuperation, among other factors.

To make a settlement pattern classification of
a people on the basis of ethnographic sources is
evidently no easy task. Such oft- seen words of
characterization as “a permanent settlement,

”
“a winter base,” “a nomadic camp,” “a semi-
nomadic people,” and so forth, cover a wide field
and one may often find himself at a loss in trying
to transform them into the more precise terms
suggested above. Notwithstanding this difficulty,
after a review of the literature on the circum-
polar peoples one would probably not be too hesi-
tant in classifying the settlement patterns of this
whole zone into the second major category, SEA-
SONAL SETTLEMENT-COMPLEX. The circum-
polar zone is by and large characterized by a
seasonal cycle of human settlements, as well as a
seasonal cycle of the subsistence pursuits, the
movements of animals (fish, land and sea mam-
mals, and birds), the growth of vegetation, and the
climatic and physiographic changes (Bogoras
1931). It is evident that a circumpolar hunting-
fishing group cannot subsist on the basis of a
single kind of food resource all the year round at
a single locale and has to move about among vari-
ous locales according to the seasonal movements
and growths of wild animals and plants, which in
turn follow the seasonal climatic fluctuations.
Such movements of settlements usually are made
among a network of locales, with a central base
where most of the members of the group gather
together at a particular season of the year and a
varying number of scattered camps occupied by
large or small branches of the group in particular
seasons, engaging in various and specific kinds of
subsistence activities.

Such a generalization could only be rendered
meaningful by specific descriptions of certain
representative regional cases. Except for the
Tungusic reindeer herders and the Reindeer divi-
sions of the Chukchi and the Koryak, who seem to
have a pattern of temporary seasonal settlements,
most of the Siberian hunter-fishers appear to have
a sedentary seasonal settlement pattern, with
either permanent or transient bases. The latter
subdivision is in many cases impossible to make
due to the paucity of pertinent data. The rhythm
of seasonal movements of the Siberian hunter –
fishers seems to fall into three major types ac-
cording to their ecological adaptations: (1) The
interior river and lake fisher-hunters, including
the Vogul-Ostyak (Raun 1955:14), the interior

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CHANG: A TYPOLOGY OF SETTLEMENT AND COMMUNITY PATTERNS 31

Samoyeds (Kopytoff 1955:32), the Ket (Shimkin
1939:151; Czaplicka 1917:578), and the Yukaghir
(Jochelson 1910:48-53). The main cycle of their
annual movements is characterized by a winter
settlement, where they spend the frozen winter
and occasionally pursue some hunting in order to
obtain meat to supplement their winter stores of
fish, and one or several summer settlements
along the rivers or by lake shores where they
follow the migratory shoals and fish. They seem
to occupy the same locales for winter settlements
year after year, though the Ket are said to be * never living long in one place.” (2) The Arctic
Samoyeds, who settle in the winter at the edge of
forests, move to the tundra in the summer, pre-
sumably to follow the reindeer herds. The whole
range of this forest-tundra migration can be re-
garded as an annual subsistence region for each
group: a region which can reasonably be assumed
to have expanded considerably during relatively
recent periods on account of the adoption of rein-
deer herding. Accordingly their settlements can
be considered as being of the sedentary seasonal
type, although whether they occupy the same lo-
cales every winter is not altogether clear. (3) The
eastern coastal hunter-fishers, including the
Goldi (Ling 1934:226), the Ainu (Murdock 1934:
168), the Gilyak, the Kamchadal (Chard 1953:22),
the Maritime Koryak (Jochelson 1908:453, 466),
and the Maritime Chukchi (Bogoras 1909:28).
All of these peoples live a highly sedentary life,
which means that instead of being marked by a
winter gathering and a summer scattering pattern,
their annual subsistence cycle is characterized by
a winter site and a summer site, one on river
banks and the other by the sea shore in many
cases, though temporary hunting and fishing
camps are also common during the summer.
These two sites may be overlapping and are in
some cases differentiated merely by two different
sets of dwelling houses at the same locale. Fur-
thermore, there are settlements occupying the
same annual subsistence region permanently,
though in other cases a set of seasonal settle-
ments has to be moved to a new region, following
the infrequent change of faunal habits. Bearing
these points in mind, some of the sedentary S-
settlements with permanent bases, such as those
among the Goldi, the Ainu, and the Kamchadal,
are from a classificatory standpoint so close to
the real annually sedentary settlement that their
differentiation from the latter category is a mat-
ter more of kind than of degree.

For the sake of brevity but at the risk of over-
simplification, the settlement patterns of the
Northern Na-Dene2 can also all be classified

under the category of sedentary seasonal settle-
ments. All of the groups under examination, in-
cluding the Haida (Murdock 1934:227), Tlingit
(Krause (956:85, 91), Chilcotin (Teit 1909), Carrier
(Jenness 1943:531-532), Tahltan (Teit 1906:341;
Emmons 1911:30), Kaska (Honigmann 1954:31-32,
41, 44), Ingalik (Osgood 1958), Ahtena (Allen 1889:
261-262), Tanaina (Osgood 1937:55), Kutchin
(Osgood 1936b:48-54), Satudene (Osgood 1932),
Slave (Honigmann 1946:40; Jenness 1932:390),
Sekani (Jenness 1937:32-33), Beaver (Goddard
1916:210-212), Sarsi (Jenness 1938:11-12), and
Chipewyan (Birket-Smith 1930:29; Jenness 1932:
386), seem to have an annual cycle of shifting
occupations among one or two concentrated settle-
ments and a number of scattered camps, all of
which, occupied in turn by a certain group of
people, seem to remain in one and the same an-
nual subsistence region year after year, though
the locales they choose for settlement (within the
limits of this region) might be constantly changing.
This general pattern, on the other hand, further
diversifies, owing to the variety of ecological con-
ditions in different parts of the whole area. A
useful, but possibly oversimplified, subdivision in
this regard is to subdivide the whole Northern
Athapaskan area into a Western Zone, where fish-
ing is equal to, if not dominant over, game hunting
as the subsistence here, and an Eastern Zone,
where the hunting of wild game (mainly caribou)
predominates though fishing remains important.
In the former zone people gather on the seashore
or by the river banks or lake shores in concen-
trated settlements in the fishing seasons, the tim-
ing of these depending on the running seasons of
various species of fish (mostly salmon). During
the intermittent seasons, small groups move
about, often into the mountains, to hunt wild game.
In the Eastern Zone, on the other hand, people
follow the migratory routes of their game herds,
caribou or buffalo, settling on the forest borders
in the winter and moving out onto the barren
grounds in the summer. This Western-Eastern
subdivision based on settlement patterns largely
coincides with the generally accepted subdivision
of the Northern Athapaskans on the basis of gen-
eral cultural configurations (Jenness 1932:351-
404; Osgood 1936a:20-21; Kroeber 1953:99-101)-
with the single exception of the Kaska, who are

2. For subdivision and names of tribes, Osgood
1936a is followed here. The Tlingit and the
Haida, belonging linguistically also to the Na-
Dene phylum, are added here because they help
to clarify some points with reference to the
Northern Athapaskans in the strict sense.

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32 ARCTIC ANTHROPOLOGY 1,1

classified by Osgood into his Arctic Drainage
Culture (in contrast to the Pacific Drainage Cul-
ture) but are here placed in the Western Zone
with respect to settlement patterns. Generally
speaking, the settlement patterns of the Eastern
Zone resemble those of the Arctic Samoyeds in
Northern Eurasia. Those of the Western Zone, on
the other hand, can be classified with the Siberian
Interior Fisher-hunters, though their fishing sea-
sons are not necessarily alike.

The settlement patterns of the Eskimos have
been dichotomized into a Canadian Arctic or Cen-
tral Eskimo type and an Alaskan- Greenland Eski-
mo type. The former is that of “the only truly
migratory Eskimos . . . who live in snow houses
built on the sea ice in winter, and who roam in the
interior, hunting caribou, in summer,” while the
latter type is that of those groups who “live in
permanent settlements of semi-subterranean
houses. In summer they live mostly in skin tents
and move about from place to place hunting and
fishing.” (Collins 1954:18-19.) A closer look into
details of the Eskimo settlements tends to show
that a more elaborate subdivision and an explana-
tion of such terms as “migratory” and “perma-
nent” is pertinent and called for. The Eskimos
inhabiting both shores of the Bering Strait seem
to be characterized, in our terminology, by a
sedentary seasonal settlements-complex. Their
annual cycle is divided into a winter season when
people gather together at their winter settlements,
having limited subsistence activities, and a hunt-
ing-fishing season from the spring to the fall when
people are scattered in small sealing or fishing
camps (Moore 1923:349; Lantis 1946:158-159;
171-181; Nelson 1899:241, 267, Birket-Smith
1953:5). The settlement patterns of the Northern
Alaskan Eskimo are not very clear in our terms,
though the division between a winter base and
summer camps is also recorded (Murdoch 1892:
72, 83). According to a recent report by Robert
Spencer (1959:46-61), the North Alaska Eskimos
seem to have seasonal settlement-complexes of
the temporary variant, though the maritime settle-
ments are reported as being considerably more
“stabilized” than the interior ones. Compared
with the Southern Alaskan Eskimos, the settle-
ments of the Greenland Eskimos seem much more
of a “temporary” pattern. They too divide their
annual cycle into a winter season when subsist-
ence activities are carried out on a smaller scale
and people gather together at concentrated “vil-
lages” or “long houses,” and a summer hunting
season when people split into small camps scat-
tered about. Their winter sites seldom remain at
the same locales year after year, however, unless

those locales have proved to be particularly favor-
able for the pursuit of game. Nevertheless, there
seems to be considerable diversity of patterns of
settlements even within a single area. There are
completely temporary seasonal settlements
(Mirsky 1937; Holm 1914:26; Thalbitzer 1941:625;
Ekblaw 1947:41; Ekblaw 1927/28:156; Kroeber
1900:268-269); there are also sedentary seasonal
settlements with transient bases (Birket-Smith
1924:133; Ekblaw 1927/28:156), to which category
some of the settlements of the last category proba-
bly can be assigned if considered as wandering in
one annual subsistence region instead of several.
Among the Polar Eskimos there even are seden-
tary seasonal settlements with permanent bases
(Ekblaw 1927/28:158) or even annually sedentary
settlements (Ekblaw 1947:41). Such great diversity
of settlement patterns in Greenland is by no means
remarkable, because in this region there happen
to be more detailed descriptions available on set-
tlement patterns. For other areas, the data are
much more scanty and far less specific. On the
strength of the available data, one would tend to
characterize the settlement patterns of the Cen-
tral Eskimos as of the temporary seasonal settle-
ment type, even though this may only reflect our
ignorance in this respect. The annual cycle of the
Central Eskimos is divided into an inland caribou
hunting season and a coastal sealing season, with
local variations (Boas 1888:419-420; Tanner 1944:
491; Jenness 1921:546; Stefánsson 1919:61ff;
Birket-Smith 1929:71; Mauss 1904/05:83). Their
settlement pattern is characterized by the im-
permanence of all seasonal settlements with re-
spect to particular locales, while the range of
their movements is too great to be considered as
being within the same annual subsistence regions
(Turner 1894:204; Birket-Smith 1929:261).

The foregoing brief survey of the circumpolar
settlement patterns is necessarily incomplete
owing to the paucity of data, the lack of precision
of terminology in the ethnographic records, and
the author’s unfamiliarity with a number of spe-
cific areas. As far as can be seen, there are in-
dications that the overwhelming majority of the
circumpolar hunter-fishers have settlements of
the seasonal settlement- complex type. The sea-
sonal settlements of the North Eurasian hunter –

fishers, the Northern Na-Dene, the Alaskan (Pa-
cific) Costal Eskimos, and a part of the Greenland
Eskimos seem to be of the sedentary seasonal
settlements pattern. Whether their sedentary
seasonal settlements are at permanent or transient
bases is difficult to determine on account of the
inadequate descriptive data, and is further com-
plicated by extra-ecological factors (such as the

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CHANG: A TYPOLOGY OF SETTLEMENT AND COMMUNITY PATTERNS 33

problem of territorialism). The seasonal settle-
ments which are most likely to be of the tem-
porary pattern seem to have been found among the
Central Eskimos and some of the Greenland and
North Alaska Eskimos.

The Community

A definition of the community may be super-
fluous, but it might be emphasized that, in con-
trast to the concept of “settlement” which stresses
the locale rather than its occupants, the concept
of ” community,” a social group, centers around
the occupants of a locale rather than the locale
per se. This point may be made clear by stating
that conceptually a community does not refer to
the community site but to the whole group of in-
habitants of that site, whether at a certain point of
time they are inhabiting the community site or
happen to be scattered around at small camp sites
fishing and hunting. With reference to a commu-
nity, we aim at investigating its demographic con-
stitution, the recruitment of community members,
the relations among the occupants at a particular
locale, and the regulations governing the relations
between a local group and its locale of settlement.
In a loose sense, we might refer to the aspects
these questions involve as “the community pat-
terning.” Among these aspects, the physical or
tangible ones of the community patterning which
in many ways seem to mirror the sociological
aspect are of particular interest for the present
purposes. In other words, the principal topics to
be discussed will include the social grouping of
the inhabitants over a significant area (with spe-
cial emphasis as regards community), the manner
in which buildings of various functions are distri-
buted or arranged over that area, and the way in
which their distribution or arrangement is indica-
tive of the composition, the function, the cohesion,
and the internal order of the various groups.

A description of the various features of the
local groups can conveniently start with a classi-
fication of the community patterns into a Siberian
type and an Eskimo type, according to the commu-
nity composition and the rule of recruitment
(Table 2).

Table 2. Categorization of Major Circum-
polar Community Types

COMMUNITY of the SIBERIAN type:

including communities composed of a more or
less permanent body of individuals. The mem-

bership of the community is determined or re-
cruited by birth, by marriage, and, occasionally,
by adoption and is more closed than open to
outsiders.

COMMUNITY of the ESKIMO type

including communities composed of a more or
less transient body of individuals. The mem-
bership of the community is determined or re-
cruited by consent of its former members, as
well as by birth, marriage, and adoption. It is
more open (with or without restrictions) than
closed to outsiders.

The community of the Siberian type varies in
size but as a rule tends to be on the large side.
Ordinarily, it is composed of individuals unilineal-
ly determined by descent and/or unilocally re-
cruited by marriage. It is a basic unit of economic
cooperation and is strongly integrated as a co-
hesive body. The internal order is maintained by
a relatively powerful political organization on a
kinship basis. An alternate term for this type of
community in the circumpolar area would be the
kinship -bound community. Physically, it often
takes the form of a multi-dwelling village, with
planned or otherwise symbolically oriented lay-out
(segmented or not), or of a single or a small num-
ber of multi-compartmental communal houses
(for definitions of terms see Chang 1958). Gen-
erally speaking, the whole community is composed
of either a localized lineage, occupying the planned
village or communal house, or a few localized
lineages or clan-sectors each occupying a seg-
ment. Most of the community -pattern/social
grouping correlations for the agricultural commu-
nities (Chang 1958) seem to hold good for the
communities of the Siberian type in the circum-
polar zone as well. The households are integral
and subordinated parts of the community, though
they maintain to a large extent economic and do-
mestic independence which is marked off at the
basal settlements by the functional self-sufficiency
of household furniture, utensils, and an independ-
ent hearth. On the other hand, the community of
the Eskimo type is a comparatively weak social
unit. It consists of a number (which tends to be
small) of loosely organized households, with the
“looseness” indicated by the irregularity of com-
munity layout, which has resulted from the flexi-
bility of membership (a newcomer can settle
wherever he likes) (Boas 1888:581; Honigmann
1946:51) and, presumably, by the lack of an ex-
plicit tendency for a symbolically oriented layout.
The descent system of its inhabitants is often

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34 ARCTIC ANTHROPOLOGY 1,1

bilateral, and the post-marital residence bilocal,
neolocal, or unilocal. There are no strict kinship
bonds among the members of the community ~
hence it could be called a kinship -free community
-a household can leave a community at any time
and join another by obtaining its members’ con-
sent. Murdochs (1955:85) characterization of the
Eskimo social organization, i.e. that

” nuclear
family is the strongest social unit . . . [that] local
groups are characterized by shifting affiliations,
as are compound families in the few instances
where they occur, [that] residence … is every-
where fluid, [and that] in the absence of any kind
of localization which would favor a unilinear em-
phasis, descent has remained bilateral” seems to
hold pretty well for all the circumpolar communi-
ties of the Eskimo type. In communities of both
the Siberian and the Eskimo types, the inter-
community ties seem to be on occasion relatively
significant in connection with communal hunting
(of reindeer or caribou and buffalo) in particular,
but unimportant in general.

The terms “Siberian” and “Eskimo” are used
here as typological labels because they are non-
characterizing, but they may be slightly mislead-
ing in the sense that these terms tend to give the
impression that the types have geographically
homogeneous distributions. For the sake of clari-
fication, a brief area survey is called for. All of
the northern Eurasian groups that have been ex-
amined, with the exception of the Chukchi and the
Koryak, have communities of the Siberian type.
A community is usually a localized lineage or a
clan sector, while in the latter case sectors of
the same clan often occupy several neighboring
communities. With the possible exception of the
Ainu who are said to be matrilineal, all others
have patrilineages or patricians. A localized
lineage or clan sector ordinarily occupies a defi-
nite territory which is divided among the consti-
tuent extended families. The clan is often sym-
bolized by a common name, a fixed territory, a
common cemetery, and an ancestral cult, and
clans are often said to be organized into phratries
or moieties (Raun 1955:35; Kopytoff 1955:70-75;
Shimkin 1939:154; Jochelson 1910:115-118; Ling
1934:224-225; Murdock 1934:174; Chard 1953:30).
Concerning the question of whether the community
layout symbolically reflects its kinship -bound
structure, there is little information. The signifi-
cant point is that when the community makes its
seasonal movements, it either splits according to
kinship lines of demarcation or moves as a unit,
the result being that the same group of people re-
turns to its winter base year after year (See, e.g.,
Shimkin 1939:151). Also noteworthy is the fact

that among some of these peoples the basic unit of
subsistence activities is the nuclear family rather
than the community or the extended family (Shim-
kin 1939:155). In others, there is a tradition of a
former existence of the free-recruited “clan”
(Jochelson 1910:118). One would wonder whether
these do not indicate that the Siberian unilinear
system in some groups was derived from a bi-
lateral basis, like that of the Koryak and Chukchi.
The Chukchi local group seems to be “a group of
kindred families,” which “is unstable” and “the
number of families that ‘are together* changes al-
most every year” (Bogoras 1919:541). The family
with the longest continuous residence in a com-
munity inhabits the “front house” and enjoys cer-
tain privileges and authority. Their descent is
accordingly bilateral, and their households are
most often of the nuclear family type (Bogoras
1909:628; Czaplicka 1914:27-28). The community
of the Koryak is likewise characterized by lacking
unilinear descent and by a kinship-free recruit-
ment of new members (Jochelson 1908:761, 767).
On the other hand, it is said that in former days
“among the Chukchee a union of ‘those who are
together’ was of a stricter character” and con-
stituted a localized lineage composed of ten to
fifteen families “who always camped together”
(Bogoras 1909:542). It would also seem possible,
then, that the bilaterality of the Chukchi and
Koryak might have been a relatively recent de-
velopment out of a former unilinear organization.
These may be two alternative interpretations, but
probably there is no reason to assume that all of
the groups in question passed through the same
developmental course.

In contrast to most of the Siberian groups,
most of the Eskimo communities are character-
ized by the looseness of their organization, the
fluctuation of their membership, and the bilateral
system of their inhabitants (Murdock 1955:85;
Birket-Smith 1936:147; Jenness 1932:120). Among
the temporary settlements of the Central Eskimos,
the community is “an incoherent conglomerate of
families or households, voluntarily connected by a
number of generally recognized laws” (Birket-
Smith 1929:260), and “every family is allowed to
settle wherever it likes” (Boas 1888:581). “The
individual members are constantly changing from
one group to another, not merely temporarily for
some special purpose, such as the acquisition of
stone lamps and pots or the obtaining of woods for
sleds and tables, but permanently also, whenever
the new district offers greater advantages, espe-
cially in the matter of game” (Jenness 1922:32).
“The new arrival at once acknowledges his de-
pendence and is, in a manner, under the influence,

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CHANG: A TYPOLOGY OF SETTLEMENT AND COMMUNITY PATTERNS 35
if not control, of the leader of the community
which he joins.” (Turner 1894:190.) Under such
conditions, it can be expected that the kinship
tends to be bilateral, the residence ordinarily
neolocal or bilocal, and the basic social and eco-
nomic unit the nuclear family. Among the North
Alaska Eskimos a similar situation seems to pre-
vail. There the coastal groups lead a fairly
sedentary life, but the intra-community ties seem
to be fairly weak; “while a village or settlement
represented community interest, it lacked reality
as a corporate unit” (Spencer 1959:443). As a
while, these groups are said to lack a recognition
of unilineal descent, the nuclear family is said to
be the only coherently organized social group,
and their community pattern is said to be above
all characterized by a “haphazard” patterning
(Spencer 1959:51, 62).3 The same condition of
community composition is also seen among the
so-called “sedentary” Greenland Eskimos
(Birket-Smith 1924:135-136; Ekblaw 1927/28:156;
1947:41; Kroeber 1900:268; Steensby 1920:365).
There “people live together because of prefer-
ence” and “it is during the summer hunting sea-
son, when they move freely about, that places are
made for the following winter’s settlements, who
is to live with whom and where” (Mirsky 1937).
The lack of permanence of the community com-
position is attributed to being “due in part to the
nomadic restlessness of the Eskimo temperament,
but more impellingly to the desirability of obtain-
ing at least a seasonal change in diet and the ne-
cessity of a variety in skins and furs for the sev-
eral articles of dress and home furnishings, of
which only a few, at best, may be obtained at any
one village” (Ekblaw 1927/28:157). The layout of
their winter settlements, described but occasion-
ally, is characterized by its irregularity. In
Greenland the long-house sheltering a number of
families can be distinguished by its extreme
brevity of occupancy from the communal house of
communities of the Siberian type on the Northwest
Coast of North America, or of many agricultural
communities all over the world. Except the
Greenland long house, most of the Central-East
Eskimo households are commensal or hearth units
and are composed of nuclear families or extended
families consisting of pairs of related nuclear

families, with variations. A possible explanation
for the prevalence of two-family households or
two-household associations among some Eskimo
and Northern Athapaskan groups is that two males
are often the minimal number of an effective hunt-
ing team in connection with some particular hunt-
ing devices (Boas 1888:485).

Among many of the Western or Alaskan Eskimo
groups, the fluctuation of community composition
is again characteristic; but the extended family
household becomes significant (Mickey 1955:18,
20-21). The Eskimos on St. Lawrence Island and
those on Nunivak Island even developed a fixed
community composition by a sort of unilineal de-
scent. There individuals are tied together by
common names in the former case and by uni-
lineally inherited amulets and songs in the latter.
In the course of seasonal movements, a kinship-
bound community moves as a concrete unit or
splits along kinship lines (Moore 1923:34; Lantis
1946:239-244). Traces of unilineal organization
are reported from other Eskimo groups on the
Pacific coast of Alaska from the Kuskokwim River
northward to the shores of Bering strait and
Kotzebue Sound (Nelson 1899:322). Though the
reliability of this information is open to doubt
(Mickey 1955:20), we do find a tendency toward
regularity of community layout in this area
(Nelson 1899:247, 261, 265; Birket-Smith 1953:52).

The twofold division of the Northern Atha-
paskans into a Western and an Eastern Zone ac-
cording to the settlement patterns holds equally
good with reference to the community patterning.
The community of the Western Zone is largely of
the Siberian type, ordinarily composed of a matri-
lineage, a localized sector of a matri-clan, or
several matri-lineages or matri-clan sectors. A
clan has a name derived from the locality and a
common territory which is subdivided for use
among its constituent extended families. Its lo-
calized sector always resides together, either in
separate houses or in a communal house. The
kinship-bound unity is also symbolically repre-
sented by a preconceived plan of house clusters,
by segmentation into “barrios,” or, as among the
Haida, some Tlingit, and some Carrier, by the
totem pole. When the segments are inhabited by
lineages of the same clan, the segments are fur-
ther arranged regularly into a larger whole, re-
flecting a two-level structure. During the wander-
ing seasons, the inhabitants of a community split
according to the kinship line of demarcation, and
each section moves to its particular hunting or
fishing territories (Murdock 1934:235-237; Krause
1956:85-86, 77; Teit 1909:786; Jenness 1943:482-
488; Teit 1906:348-349; Jenness 1932:375:

3. Spencer’s findings may be applicable to only
some peoples in the area of Northern Alaska,
for an entirely different picture has been re-
ported by Leopold Pospisil for the interior
Nunamiut Eskimo (see his Law and Societal
Structure among the Nunamiut Eskimo, in
press).

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36 ARCTIC ANTHROPOLOGY 1,1
Emmons 1911:13, 27; Honigmann 1954:75, 84;
Osgood 1937:128; 1933:707). The Kutchin seem
to be in an intermediate position between the
Western and the Eastern subdivisions in this re-
spect, since they possess the matrilinea! clan
organization on the one hand, and are in the mean-
time believed to be characterized by a “plastic”
composition of community on the other (Osgood
1936:107, 110-111). Both of the characteristic
features of the Western groups (clan and fixed
community membership) are lacking in the East-
ern Zone, where nuclear families play eminent
roles in social and economic activities, the kin-
ship is bilateral, the membership of a community
(a “band” or part of it), which is of the Eskimo
type, is kinship -free, and families change from
one community to the next even within a single
season. The layout of the community, in contrast
to the Western planning and segmentad patterns,
is ordinarily irregularly arranged, the only ex-
ception being the circular layout of camp sites of
the Sarsi at the southern end which is thought to
be an import from the Plains (Osgood 1932:70-74;
Honigmann 1946:64-65; Jenness 1932:391; 1937:
44-45, 52; Goddard 1916:221; Jenness 1938:10, 12-
13; Birket-Smith 1930:169). It is believed by
many authors (Teit 1906:348; Jenness 1932:373;
Emmons 1911:27; Driver 1956:28; Steward 1955:
147-148; Eggan 1955:541-542) that the unilinear
system of the Western groups of the Northern
Athapaskans (in the strict sense) was derived
from their contacts with the Tlingit and that the
Eastern pattern is indigenous. Murdock, on the
contrary, asserts that the matrilineal kinship
groups are indigenously Athapaskan. “I consider
it preferable,” he says, “to assume that the an-
cestors of the Nadene peoples entered the New
World with remnants of an old matrilineal organi-
zation, that these were lost by the tribes which
migrated eastward but retained by those remain-
ing in the west, [and] that those of the latter who
moved from the interior to the coast and became
the Eyak, Tlingit, and Haida elaborated their
simple original system into the complex forms
found there” (Murdock 1955:85-86). Whether this
interpretation is valid or not, it tempts one to
consider the possibility of a similar development
among the Eskimos. This possibility is suggested
by the considerable size and comparative fixity of
ancient Eskimo settlements, by the prevalence of
multi-family houses among the modern Eskimos
though the nuclear family is invariably the basic
economic unit (Laughlin 1952:34), and by the pos-
sible survival of the unilineal organization in the
west, ff the abundance of ecological potentials of
the Western Eskimo habitat is significant at all

(Laughlin 1952:37-38), then it would seem that we
are faced with two equally plausible alternative
explanations for the modern diversity of Eskimo
community patterns: one assuming that the west-
ern conditions developed subsequent to their move-
ment into this area- owing to the rich ecological
potentiality of their habitat- whereas the Central-
Eastern groups maintain their original conditions;
and the other speculating a unilineal proto-Eskimo
organization which is now completely lost in the
Central-East groups on account of the nature of
the resources, while the western groups are able
to retain the indigenous pattern to a certain ex-
tent. In spite of the fact that the former alterna-
tive is in fact accepted by most ethnologists today,
the latter one should probably not be ruled out
completely (cf. Giddings 1952:118).

Structural Implications

The foregoing analysis and comparison are not
extensive, and our categorizations and characteri-
zations are obviously restricted in many cases
owing to the paucity of pertinent data. But the
typology of circumpolar settlement and community
patterns that has been worked out can at least
serve as a basis for a preliminary structural
analysis and correlation of the few societies to
which the typology is applicable.

In the first place, the above analysis may serve
to elaborate and sharpen the term “settlement
pattern,” fashionable among American archaeolo-
gists. Under this all-inclusive term a wide range
of problems concerning the physical characters of
prehistoric settlements has been included- prob-
lems that actually involve widely different aspects
of the physical characters of settlements and
widely different determining factors for them.
The author has suggested that the term “settle-
ment patterns” be retained and reserved for those
physical aspects of the settlement that are directly
related to ecology and subsistence of the inhabit-
ants, and that for those aspects that can best be
interpreted in terms of social organization and
social psychology the term “community patterns”
be coined (Chang 1958:299). The comparative
studies presented above for the arctic hunter –
fishers further indicate that among the hunting-
fishing peoples this dichotomy of concepts is the
more necessary and serviceable, for it is evident
that among such peoples a community ordinarily
inhabits more than a single settlement site. For
archaeologists who are left with a network of
settlement sites which during prehistoric times
were occupied not by many, but by a single group

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CHANG: A TYPOLOGY OF SETTLEMENT AND COMMUNITY PATTERNS 37
of people, it seems to be of crucial importance to
consider the problems inherent in settlement pat-
terns and those in community patterns separately.
For problems concerning settlement patterns
among these peoples evoke considerations along
the lines of the site ecology and the nature of sub-
sistence activities, whereas those concerning
community patterns require insights into the so-
cial category whose members occupied the vari-
ous sites in turn or in sectors. Failure to dis-
tinguish between these two different sets of prob-
lems may easily result in such blunders as group-
ing the various settlement sites into different
cultural traditions, or recognizing tribal groups
and camp -alliances when these camps had never
been occupied concurrently nor by different
groups of people.

As far as the settlement patterns of some of
the circumpolar societies are concerned, it is
evident that the seasonal settlement-complex
among the hunter-fishers in this region is the
predominant if not exclusive type, no matter how
abundant the region’s ecological potential may
happen to be. This predominant pattern apparent-
ly results from the physical environment via its
marked climatic fluctuations within the span of a
single year and the f aunal movements owing to
such climatic changes. Under this general cate-
gory, the various circumpolar settlement patterns
differ in the extent of movement of the entire
settlement- complex, resulting in the further
breakdown into a sedentary and a temporary sub-
type. This is apparently related to the nature of
food resources of the various regions and the in-
habitants’ preference and material equipment to
cope with the ecological potentials. Generally
speaking, a predominantly fishing subsistence en-
ables not only relatively more intensive sedentism
of settlements but also comparatively stable
membership of the community- apparently be-
cause of the fact that fishing of migratory species
of fish assures a stable food supply at single lo-
cales both all the year round and year after year
(cf . Hewes 1948). On the other hand, a predomi-
nantly hunting subsistence tends to coincide with
a settlement pattern of the more temporary and
transient type. Such generalizations, to be sure,
are oversimplified, but they do represent central
tendencies as observed among the arctic peoples.

It is also apparent that the community struc-
ture of a group of hunter -fishers is to a consider-
able extent conditioned by the same group’s settle-
ment patterns. Here, as far as the above data can
disclose, the stability and mobility of community
membership is the area in social structure most
immediately influenced by subsistence and

ecology. It seems highly probable that the de-
scent system of a local group is intimately related
to its rules of membership recruitment: uni-
lineality tends to occur under the situation where
a community is composed of a number of nuclear
families which are by one factor or another held
constantly together, by birth and by marriage; and
bilaterality where the nuclear families that com-
prise a community are not held constantly to-
gether, and when the membership of a community
can be obtained by consent or even by free will,
as well as by birth and marriage. This principle
has been clearly formulated by Ralph Linton when
he says that * strong functional clan organization
. . . does seem to be correlated, in a very general
way, with stability of culture and fixity of resi-
dence. . . . The membership of local units, espe-
cially in agricultural societies, also tends to be
fairly constant. Even when such units are nomadic
the result is simply a transfer of the total village
from one site to another and an individual normally
lives and dies among the same neighbors.* (Linton
1936:201-202). A similar point-of-view has also
been presented by Paul Kirchhoff (1955). When
such rules of fixed residence prevail, a lineage
type of kinship is bound to appear if the incest
taboo within an expanded extended family is to be
observed (Murdock 1949:75; Titiev 1943). Such
structural correlations find support of consider-
able strength in the circumpolar cases that have
been reviewed above. Wherever a cohesive core
of inhabitants constitutes the nuclear membership
of a community under stable and sedentary condi-
tions, one finds in most of the cases a tendency in
descent reckoning leaning toward unilineality. On
the other hand, when the membership of a com-
munity is freely recruited among the ever -movable
hunting families, a bilateral kinship and a loosely
organized political structure tend to be in evidence.

Furthermore, when the community member-
ship is kinship-bound and follows stable rules of
recruitment, such internal integrity tends to call
for a symbolic projection of the community struc-
ture in the lay-out of the settlement site. Levi-
Strauss has recognized, along with other social
anthropologists (Lowie 1948:239; Nadel 1951:237),
that *in many parts of the world there is an obvi-
ous relationship between the social structure and
the spatial structure of settlements, villages, or
camps,* since, in part, « spatial configuration
seems to be almost aprojective representation of
the social structure* (Levi-Strauss 1953:533-534).
As far as the circumpolar hunter-fishers are con-
cerned, such symbolic projections are made pos-
sible only when there is a fixed rule of member-
ship recruitment for the community composition,

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38 ARCTIC ANTHROPOLOGY 1,1
and are necessary only in cases when such kin-
ship ties necessitate symbolic strengthening by
means of the physical arrangement of residential
quarters.

At the ethnographic level, such structural im-
plications are certainly of wide-ranging conse-
quence for studies in the static and dynamic
mechanisms of the circumpolar peoples’ cultural
and social growth. To what extent these can also
be of use to archaeologists for their reconstruc-
tive undertaking is a problem which calls for very
careful assessment and scrutiny. The pitfalls in
making such uncritical equations as fishing-uni-
lineality or hunting-bilaterality are apparent. But
such implications should at least be taken into
consideration by archaeologists working among
hunter-fishers’ remains and may hopefully pro-
vide some useful hints for making their practical
and interpretative devices.

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Article Contents

p. 28
p. 29
p. 30
p. 31
p. 32
p. 33
p. 34
p. 35
p. 36
p. 37
p. 38
p. 39
p. 40
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Issue Table of Contents

Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1962), pp. 1-133
Front Matter
Raven Myths in Northwestern North America and Northeastern Asia [pp. 1-5]
Onion Portage and Other Flint Sites of the Kobuk River [pp. 6-27]
A Typology of Settlement and Community Patterns in Some Circumpolar Societies [pp. 28-41]
Some Aspects of the Comb-Pattern Pottery of Prehistoric Korea [pp. 42-50]
Ethnographic and Anthropological Materials as Historical Sources [pp. 51-57]
Solutrean Origins and the Question of Eastern Diffusion [pp. 58-67]
Ethnohistory in the U.S.S.R. [pp. 68-75]
1961 Field Work in the Western Brooks Range, Alaska: Preliminary Report [pp. 76-83]
First Radiocarbon Dates from the U.S.S.R. [pp. 84-86]
New Blood Group Data from Siberia [pp. 87-92]
Neolithic Settlements in Cis-Baikal (1957-59 Excavations) [pp. 93-95]
Work of the Yukagir Expedition [pp. 96-97]
The Place of Jomon Pottery in Assessing Woodland Pottery Origins [pp. 98-103]
Aleut-Konyag Prehistory and Ecology: 1961
Rationale for the Collaborative Investigation of Aleut-Konyag Prehistory and Ecology [pp. 104-108]
Archaeological Investigations on Umnak Island, Aleutians [pp. 108-110]
Report of Field Biologists [pp. 110-113]
Archaeological Investigations on Kodiak Island [pp. 113-115]
Preliminary Report of the Dentition Study of Two Isolates of Kodiak Island [pp. 115-116]
Russian Source Materials for the Racial History of Northern Eurasia [pp. 117-125]
Notes on Nineteenth Century Trade in the Kotzebue Sound Area, Alaska [pp. 126-128]
Andrei Alexandrovich Popov, 1902-1960 [pp. 129-133]

How Native Is a “Native” Anthropologist?
Author(s): Kirin Narayan
Reviewed work(s):
Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 671-686
Published by: Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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ESSAYS 671

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How Native Is a “Native” Anthropologist?

KIRIN NARAYAN

Department ofAnthropology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

HOW”NATIVE”
IS A NATIVE ANTHROPOLOGIST? How “foreign” is an anthropologist from

abroad? The paradigm polarizing “regular” and “native” anthropologists is, after
all, part of received disciplinary wisdom. Those who are anthropologists in the usual
sense of the word are thought to study Others whose alien cultural worlds they must
painstakingly come to know. Those who diverge as “native,” “indigenous,” or “insider”
anthropologists are believed to write about their own cultures from a position of intimate
affinity. Certainly, there have been scattered voices critiquing this dichotomy. Arguing
that because a culture is not homogenous, a society is differentiated, and a professional
identity that involves problematizing lived reality inevitably creates a distance, scholars
such as Aguilar (1981) and Messerschmidt (1981a:9) conclude that the extent to which
anyone is an authentic insider is questionable. Yet such critiques have not yet been
adequately integrated into the way “native” anthropologists are popularly viewed in the
profession.

In this essay, I argue against the fixity of a distinction between “native” and “non-na-
tive” anthropologists. Instead of the paradigm emphasizing a dichotomy between
outsider/insider or observer/observed, I propose that at this historical moment we
might more profitably view each anthropologist in terms of shifting identifications amid
a field of interpenetrating communities and power relations. The loci along which we
are aligned with or set apart from those whom we study are multiple and in flux. Factors

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672 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [95, 1993]

such as education, gender, sexual orientation, class, race, or sheer duration of contacts
may at different times outweigh the cultural identity we associate with insider or outsider
status. Instead, what we must focus our attention on is the quality of relations with the
people we seek to represent in our texts: are they viewed as mere fodder for profession-
ally self-serving statements about a generalized Other, or are they accepted as subjects
with voices, views, and dilemmas-people to whom we are bonded through ties of
reciprocity and who may even be critical of our professional enterprise?

I write as someone who bears the label of “native” anthropologist and yet squirms
uncomfortably under this essentializing tag. To highlight the personal and intellectual
dilemmas invoked by the assumption that a “native” anthropologist can represent an
unproblematic and authentic insider’s perspective, I incorporate personal narrative
into a wider discussion of anthropological scholarship. Tacking between situated
narrative and more sweeping analysis, I argue for the enactment of hybridity in our texts;
that is, writing that depicts authors as minimally bicultural in terms of belonging
simultaneously to the world of engaged scholarship and the world of everyday life.

The Problem in Historical Perspective

The paradigm that polarizes “native” anthropologists and “real” anthropologists
stems from the colonial setting in which the discipline of anthropology was forged: the
days in which natives were genuine natives (whether they liked it or not) and the
observer’s objectivity in the scientific study of Other societies posed no problem. To
achieve access to the native’s point of view (note the singular form), an anthropologist
used the method of participant-observation among a variety of representative natives,
often singling out one as a “chief informant” (Casagrande 1960). A chief informant
might also be trained in anthropological modes of data collection so that the society
could be revealed “from within.” As Franz Boas argued, materials reported and inscribed
by a trained native would have “the immeasurable advantage of trustworthiness, authen-
tically revealing precisely the elusive thoughts and sentiments of the native” (Lowie
1937:133 cited in Jones 1970:252). Or better yet, a smart and adequately Westernized
native might go so far as to receive the education of a bona fide anthropologist and
reveal a particular society to the profession with an insider’s eye. Ordinary people
commenting on their society, chief informants friendly with a foreign anthropologist,
or insiders trained to collect indigenous texts were all in some sense natives contributing
to the enterprise of anthropology. Yet, it was only those who received the full professional
initiation into a disciplinary fellowship of discourse who became the bearers of the title
“native” anthropologist.

Even if such a “native” anthropologist went on to make pathbreaking professional
contributions, his or her origins remained a perpetual qualifier. For example, writing
the foreword to M. N. Srinivas’s classic monograph on the Coorgs, Radcliffe-Brown
emphasized that the writer was “a trained anthropologist, himself an Indian” and went
on to add that he had “therefore an understanding of Indian ways of thought which it
is difficult for a European to attain over many years” (Srinivas 1952:v). As DelmosJones
has charged, it is likely that “natives” who could get “the inside scoop” were first admitted
into the charmed circle of professional discourse because they were potential tools of
data collection for white anthropologists (Jones 1970:252). Admittedly, in an era prior
to extensive decolonization and civil rights movements, that “natives” were allowed to
participate at all in professional discourse was remarkable. In this context, calling
attention to, rather than smoothing over, “native” identity perhaps helped to revise the
ingrained power imbalances in who was authorized to represent whom.

Viewed from the vantage point of the 1990s, however, it is not clear that the term
native anthropologist serves us well. Amid the contemporary global flows of trade, politics,
migrations, ecology, and the mass media, the accepted nexus of authentic culture/de-
marcated field/exotic locale has unraveled (Appadurai 1990, 1991; Clifford 1992; Gupta

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ESSAYS 673

and Ferguson 1992). Although many of the terms of anthropological discourse remain
largely set by the West, anthropology is currently practiced by members (or partial
members) of previously colonized societies that now constitute the so-called Third
World (Altorki and El-Solh 1988; Fahim 1982; Kumar 1992; Nakhleh 1979; Srinivas,
Shah, and Ramaswamy 1979). These scholars often have institutional bases in the Third
World, but some have also migrated to Europe and the United States. Furthermore, in
the First World, minority anthropologists also hold university positions and their
contributions to ongoing discourse have helped to realign, if not overthrow, some of
the discipline’s ethnocentric assumptions (Gwaltney 1981; Jones 1970; Limon 1991).
Feminist scholarship questioning the formulation of “woman as Other” has underscored
the differences between women, and the multiple planes along which identity is
constructed, thus destabilizing the category of “Other” as well as “Self’ (Abu-Lughod
1990; Alarcon 1990; Lauretis 1986; Mani 1990; Mohanty and Russo 1991; Strathern
1987). It has also become acceptable to turn the anthropological gaze inward, toward
communities in Western nations (Ginsburg 1989; Ginsburg and Tsing 1990; Martin
1987; Messerschmidt 1981b, Ortner 1991). The “field” is increasingly a flexible concept:
it can move with the travels of Hindu pilgrims (Gold 1988), span Greek villagers and
New Age American healers (Danforth 1989), or even be found in automobile garages
of South Philadelphia (Rose 1987). In this changed setting, a rethinking of “insider”
and “outsider” anthropologists as stable categories seems long overdue.

Multiplex Identity

“If Margaret Mead can live in Samoa,” my mother is reputed to have said when she
moved to India, “I can live in a joint family.” The daughter of a German father and
American mother, she had just married my Indian father. Yet these terms-German,
American, Indian–are broad labels deriving from modem nation-states. Should I instead
say that my mother, the daughter of a Bavarian father and a WASP mother who lived in
Taos, New Mexico, became involved with her fellow student at the University of
Colorado: my Indian-from-India father? Yet, for anyone familiar with India shouldn’t I
add that my father’s father was from the Kutch desert region, his mother from the dense
Kathiawari forests, and that while he might loosely be called “Gujarati” his background
was further complicated by growing up in the state of Maharashtra? Should I mention
that Mayflower blood supposedly mingles with that of Irish potato famine immigrants
on my maternal grandmother’s side (I’m told I could qualify as a “D.A.R”), or that as
temple builders, members of my paternal grandfather’s caste vehemently claimed a
contested status as Brahman rather than lower-ranking carpenter? Should I add that my
father was the only Hindu boy in a Parsi school that would give him a strictly British
education, inscribing the caste profession-based title “Mistri” (carpenter) onto the
books as the surname “Contractor?” Or would it better locate my father to say that he
remembers the days when signs outside colonial clubs read “No Dogs or Indians?” Also,
is it useful to point out that my mother-American by passport-has now lived in India
for over 40 years (more than two-thirds of her life) and is instructed by her bossy children
on how to comport herself when she visits the United States?

I invoke these threads of a culturally tangled identity to demonstrate that a person
may have many strands of identification available, strands that may be tugged into the
open or stuffed out of sight. A mixed background such as mine perhaps marks one as
inauthentic for the label “native” or “indigenous” anthropologist; perhaps those who
are not clearly “native” or “non-native” should be termed “halfies” instead (cf. Abu-Lug-
hod 1991). Yet, two halves cannot adequately account for the complexity of an identity
in which multiple countries, regions, religions, and classes may come together. While
my siblings and I have spent much of our lives quipping that we are “haylf’ (pronounced
with an American twang) and “hahlf” (with a British-educated accent), I increasingly
wonder whether any person of mixed ancestry can be so neatly split down the middle,

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674 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [95, 1993]

excluding all the other vectors that have shaped them. Then too, mixed ancestry is itself
a cultural fact: the gender of the particular parents, the power dynamic between the
groups that have mixed, and the prejudices of the time all contribute to the mark that
mixed blood leaves on a person’s identity (cf. Spickard 1989).

Growing up in Bombay with a strongly stressed patrilineage, a Hindu Indian identity
has weighted more than half in my self-definition, pushing into the background Pilgrim
fathers and Bavarian burghers who are also available in my genealogical repertoire. This
would seem to mark me as Indian and, therefore, when I study India, a “native”
anthropologist. After all, researching aspects of India, I often share an unspoken
emotional understanding with the people with whom I work (cf. Ohnuki-Tierney 1984).
Performing fieldwork in Nasik on storytelling by a Hindu holy man whom I called
“Swamiji,” I had the benefit of years of association with notjust Swamiji himself, but also
the language and wider culture. Since Nasik was the town where my father grew up, a
preexisting identity defined by kinship subsumed my presence as ethnographer (cf.
Nakhleh 1979). Similarly, researching women’s songs and lives in the Himalayan
foothills, I bore the advantage of visiting the place practically every year since I was 15,
and of my mother having settled there. All too well aware of traditional expectations for
proper behavior by an unmarried daughter, in both places I repressed aspects of my
cosmopolitan Bombay persona and my American self to behave with appropriate
decorum and deference (cf. Abu-Lughod 1988).

In both Nasik and in Kangra, different aspects of identity became highlighted at
different times. In Nasik, when elderly gentlemen wearing white Congress caps arrived
and Swamiji pointed me out as “Ramji Mistri’s granddaughter,” my local roots were
highlighted, and I felt a diffuse pride for my association with the Nasik landmark of the
Victorian bungalow that my grandfather had built in the 1920s. Visiting Nathu Maharaj,
the barber with buckteeth and stained clothes, to discuss interpretations of Swamiji’s
stories, I felt uncomfortable, even ashamed, of the ways in which my class had allowed
me opportunities that were out of reach for this bright and reflective man. My gender
was important in the observance of menstrual taboos not to touch Swamiji or the
altar-injunctions that left me so mortified that I would simply leave town for several
days. Borrowing the latest Stevie Wonder tapes from one of “the foreigners”-a disciple
from NewJersey–I savored a rowdy release, becoming again a woman who had lived
independently in a California university town. When Swamiji advised that in written texts
I keep his identity obscure (“What need do I have for publicity?”-yet his doctor took
me aside to advise that I disregard such modesty and identify him by name, “so people
abroad will know his greatness”), I felt my role as culture broker with the dubious power
to extend First World prestige to Third World realities. Yet, when Swamiji challenged
my motives for taking his words on tape “to do a business,” I was set apart from all planes
of locally available identification, thrown outside a circle of fellowship forged by spiritual
concerns, and lumped instead with academics who made it their business to document
and theorize about other people’s lives (Narayan 1989:59-62).

For my second extended research project in the Himalayan foothill region of Kangra,
I had no deep local roots. Unmoored from a certain base for identification, the extent
to which others can manipulate an anthropologist’s identity came into dizzying focus
(Dumont 1978; Stoller 1989). Explaining my presence, some of the village women I
worked with asserted that I was from such-and-such village (where my mother lives),
hence local. At other times I was presented as being “from Bombay,” that is, a city dweller
from a distant part of the country although still recognizably Indian. A wrinkled old
woman I once fell into step with on an outing between villages asked if I was a member
of the pastoral Gaddi tribe (to her, the epitome of a close-by Other). At yet other times,
and particularly at weddings where a splash of foreign prestige added to the festivities,
I was incontrovertibly stated to be “from America… she came all the way from there
for this function, yes, with her camera and her tape recorder!” In the same household
at different times, I was forced to answer questions about whether all Americans were

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ESSAYS 675

savages (jangli log) because television revealed that they didn’t wear many clothes, and
to listen as a member of a spellbound local audience when a dignified Rajput matron
from another village came by to tell tales about how she had visited her emigrant son
in NewJersey. In the local language, she held forth on how, in America, people just ate
“round breads” of three sizes with vegetables and masalas smeared on top (pizza); how
shops were enormous, with everything you could imagine in them, and plastic bags you
could rip off like leaves from a tree; how you put food in a “trolley” and then a woman
would press buttons, giving you a bill for hundreds and hundreds of rupees! Bonded
with other entranced listeners, my own claims to authoritative experience in this faraway
land of wonders seemed to have temporarily dropped out of sight.

Now it might be assumed that I had experienced these shifting identifications simply
because of my peculiar background, and that someone who was “fully” Indian by birth
and upbringing might have a more stable identity in the field. For a comparison, I could
turn to Nita Kumar’s lively and insightful Friends, Brothers, Informants: A Memoir of
Fieldwork inBanaras (1992), which makes many of the same points. Instead, I look further
back (to pre-postmodern times) and draw out some of the implications about identity
from M. N. Srinivas’s compelling ethnography, The Remembered Village (1976). Srinivas is
one of India’s most respected anthropologists, although given the division of labor
between anthropologists as those who focus on the Other (tribal groups) and sociolo-
gists who research the Self (village and urban dwellers), in India he is known as a
sociologist. Srinivas was educated in Oxford in the 1940s. On Radcliffe-Brown’s advice,
he planned to do fieldwork in a multi-caste village called Rampura in Mysore (Karnataka
State). Srinivas’s ancestors had moved several generations before from neighboring
Tamil Nadu to rural Mysore; his father had left his village for the city so that his children
could be educated. In returning from Oxford to live in a village, Srinivas stated his hope
that “my study… would enable me better to understand my personal cultural and social
roots” (1976:5).

But did the presence of these roots mean that he was regarded as a “native” returning
home to blend smoothly with other “natives”? No, he was an educated urbanite and
Brahman male, and the power of this narrative ethnography lies very much in Srinivas’s
sensitivity to the various ways in which he interacted with members of the community:
sometimes aligned with particular groups, sometimes set apart. As he confesses, “It was
only in the village that I realized how far I (and my family) had travelled away from
tradition” (1976:18). From his account, one gets the impression that villagers found him
a very entertaining oddity. He struggled regularly with villagers’ expectations that he
behave as a Brahman should (1976:33-40). Growing up in the city, he had not internal-
ized rules of purity and pollution to the extent that they bound local Brahmans, and he
found himself reprimanded by the headman for shaving himself after rather than before
a ritual bath. On the other hand, a political activist criticized him for his involvement
with the headman, rather than with all sections and factions of the village (1976:22).
When he did move throughout the village, he found himself received with affection:
“word must have gone round that I did not consider myself too high to mix with poor
villagers” (1976:24). Yet, as he was a respected guest and outsider, villagers as a group
also colluded in keeping details of unpleasant “incidents” regarding sex, money, and
vendettas from him (1976:40-47). In a lighter vein, many villagers knew him by the
exotic object he sported, a camera that fulfilled notjust their ends (such as the use of
photographs in arranging marriages) but also his anthropological responsibilities of
recording for a foreign audience. He became “the camera man–only they transformed
‘camera’ into ‘chamara’ which in Kannada means the fly-whisk made from the long hair
of yak tails” (1976:20). Villagers plied him with questions about the English, and the
headman even planned a tour of England in which Srinivas was to be adopted as guide
(1976:29). In short, his relationships were complex and shifting: in different settings,
his caste, urban background, unintended affiliations with a local faction, class privilege,

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676 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [95, 1993]

attempts to bridge all sectors of the community, or alliance with a faraway land could
be highlighted.

Even as insiders or partial insiders, in some contexts we are drawn closer, in others
we are thrust apart. Multiple planes of identification may be most painfully highlighted
among anthropologists who have identities spanning racial or cultural groups (Abu-
Lughod 1988, 1991; Kondo 1986, 1990; Lavie 1990). Yet, in that we all belong to several
communities simultaneously (not least of all, the community we were born into and the
community of professional academics), I would argue that every anthropologist exhibits
what Rosaldo has termed a “multiplex subjectivity” with many crosscutting identifica-
tions (1989:168-195). Which facet of our subjectivity we choose or are forced to accept
as a defining identity can change, depending on the context and the prevailing vectors
of power. What Stuart Hall has written about cultural identity holds also for personal
identity:

Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical,
they [identities] undergo constant trans-formation. Far from being eternally fixed in some
essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture, and power. Far
from being grounded in a mere “recovery” of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which,
when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give
to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the
past. [Hall 1989:70]

Rethinking Connections through Fieldwork

We are instructed as anthropologists to “grasp the native’s point of view, his relation
to life, to realize his vision of his world” (Malinowski 1961[1922]:25). Yet who is this
generic subject, “the native”? To use a clump term is to assume that all natives are the
same native, mutually substitutable in presenting the same (male) point of view. Yet even
received anthropological wisdom tells us that in the simplest societies, gender and age
provide factors for social differentiation. To extend conceptual tools forged for the study
of heuristically bounded, simple societies to a world in which many societies and
subgroups interact amid shifting fields of power, these very tools must be reexamined.
We would most certainly be better off looking for the natives’ points of view to realize
their visions of their worlds while at the same time acknowledging that “we” do not speak
from a position outside “their” worlds, but are implicated in them too (cf. Mani 1990;
Mohanty 1989; Said 1989): through fieldwork, political relations, and a variety of global
flows.

Arjun Appadurai (1988) has persuasively teased out some of the underlying assump-
tions in anthropological use of the term native for groups who belong to parts of the
world distant and distinct from the metropolitan West. As he argues, the concept is
associated with an ideology of authenticity: “Proper natives are somehow assumed to
represent their selves and their history, without distortion or residue” (1988:37). Those
in the position to observe “natives,” however, exempt themselves from being authentic
and instead represent themselves in terms of complexity, diversity, and ambiguity.
Furthermore, the term is linked to place. “Natives” are incarcerated in bounded geo-
graphical spaces, immobile and untouched yet paradoxically available to the mobile
outsider. Appadurai goes on to show how in anthropological discourse, “natives” tied to
particular places are also associated with particular ideas: one goes to India to study
hierarchy, the circum-Mediterranean region for honor and shame, China for ancestor
worship, and so on, forgetting that anthropological preoccupations represent “the
temporary localization of ideas from many places” (1988:46, emphasis in original).

The critique that Appadurai levels at the term native can also be extended to native
anthropologist. A “native” anthropologist is assumed to be an insider who will forward an
authentic point of view to the anthropological community. The fact that the profession
remains intrigued by the notion of the “native” anthropologist as carrying a stamp of

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ESSAYS 677

authenticity is particularly obvious in the ways in which identities are doled out to
non-Western, minority, or mixed anthropologists so that exotic difference overshadows
commonalities or complexities. That my mother is German-American seems as irrele-
vant to others’ portrayal of me as “Indian” as the American mothers of the “Tewa”
Alphonso Ortiz, the “Chicano” Renato Rosaldo, or “Arab” Lila Abu-Lughod. For those
of us who are mixed, the darker element in our ancestry serves to define us with or
without our own complicity. The fact that we are often distanced-by factors as varied
as education, class, or emigration-from the societies we are supposed to represent
tends to be underplayed. Furthermore, it is only appropriate (and this may be the result
of our own identity quests) that sooner or later we will study the exotic societies with
which we are associated. Finally, while it is hoped that we will contribute to the existing
anthropological pool of knowledge, we are not really expected to diverge from prevail-
ing forms of discourse to frame what Delmos Jones has called a genuinely “native”
anthropology as “a set of theories based on non-Western precepts and assumptions”
(1970:251).

“Native” anthropologists, then, are perceived as insiders regardless of their complex
backgrounds. The differences between kinds of “native” anthropologists are also oblivi-
ously passed over. Can a person from an impoverished American minority background
who, despite all prejudices, manages to get an education and study her own community
be equated with a member of a Third World elite group who, backed by excellent
schooling and parental funds, studies anthropology abroad yet returns home for
fieldwork among the less privileged? Is it not insensitive to suppress the issue of location,
acknowledging that a scholar who chooses an institutional base in the Third World
might have a different engagement with Western-based theories, books, political
stances, and technologies of written production? Is a middle-class white professional
researching aspects of her own society also a “native” anthropologist?

And what about non-“native” anthropologists who have dedicated themselves to
long-term fieldwork, returning year after year to sustain ties in a particular community?
Should we not grant them some recognition for the different texture this brings to their
work? It is generally considered more savvy in terms of professional advancement to do
fieldwork in several different cultures rather than returning to deepen understandings
in one. Yet to use people one has lived with for articles and monographs, and not
maintain ties through time, generates a sort of “hit-and-run” anthropology in which
engagement with vibrant individuals is flattened by the demands of a scholarly career.
Having a safe footing to return to outside the field situation promotes “a contemplative
stance … [that] pervades anthropology, disguising the confrontation between Self and
Other and rendering the discipline powerless to address the vulnerability of the Self”
(Dwyer 1982:269). Regular returns to a field site, on the other hand, can nourish the
growth of responsible human ties and the subsuming of cultural difference within the
fellowship of a “We-relation” (Schutz 1973:16-17). As George Foster and the other
editors of the book Long-Term Field Research in Social Anthropology point out in their
concluding comments, an ongoing personal involvement with people in the communi-
ties studied often makes for an interest in “action” or “advocacy” work (Foster et al.
1979:344). Looking beyond the human rewards to the professional ones, long-term
fieldwork leads to the stripping away of formal self-presentations and the granting of
access to cultural domains generally reserved for insiders, thus making better scholar-
ship. Returns to the field allow for a better understanding of how individuals creatively
shape themselves and their societies through time. Finally, repeated returns to the field
force an anthropologist to reconsider herself and her work notjust from the perspective
of the academy but also from that of the people she purports to represent. As Paul Stoller
has written about his long-term fieldwork among the Songhay in Niger:

Besides giving me the perspective to assess social change, long-term study of Songhay has
plunged me into the Songhay worlds of sorcery and possession, worlds the wisdom of which

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678 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [95, 1993]

are closed to outsiders-even Songhay outsiders. My insistence on long-term study forced me
to confront the interpretive errors of earlier visits. Restudying Songhay also enabled me to get
a bit closer to “getting it right.” But I have just begun to walk my path. As AdamuJenitongo
once told me, “Today you are learning about us, but to understand us, you will have to grow
old with us.” [Stoller 1989:6]
While Stoller was not born Songhay, his ongoing engagement has given him a niche

in the society, a place from which he is invited to “grow old” with his teacher. Like all
long-term relationships, his encounters in the field have had exhilarating ups and
cataclysmic downs, yet persevering has brought the reward of greater insight. Do not
anthropologists who engage sensitively in long-term fieldwork also deserve respect from
their professional colleagues as partial insiders who have through time become bicultu-
ral (cf. Tedlock 1991)? Need a “native” anthropologist be so very different?

It might be argued that the condescending colonial connotations of a generic identity
that cling to the term native could be lessened by using alternative words: indigenous or
insider for example. Yet the same conceptual underpinnings apply to these terms too:
they all imply that an authentic insider’s perspective is possible, and that this can
unproblematically represent the associated group. This leads us to underplay the ways
in which people born within a society can be simultaneously both insiders and outsiders,
just as those born elsewhere can be outsiders and, if they are lucky, insiders too. Also,
as Elizabeth Colson has bluntly stated, ” ‘Indigenous’ is a misnomer, for all of us are
indigenous somewhere and the majority of anthropologists at some time deal with their
own communities” (Fahim et al. 1980:650). We are all “native” or “indigenous” anthro-
pologists in this scheme, even if we do not appear so in every fieldwork context. Rather
than try to sort out who is authentically a “native” anthropologist and who is not, surely
it is more rewarding to examine the ways in which each one of us is situated in relation
to the people we study.

Situated Knowledges

Visiting Nasik as a child, I knew better than to touch Maharaj, the chubby Brahman
cook, as he bent over to fill our shining steel thalis on the floor; yet, if asked, I would
never have been able to explain this in terms of “purity and pollution.” I knew that
servants were frequently shouted at and that they wore ill-fitting, cast-off clothes, but I
did not call this “social inequality.” I observed that my girl cousins were fed after the
boys and that although they excelled in school they were not expected to have careers,
but I did not call it “gender hierarchy.” I listened raptly when the Harveys, a British
couple who had stayed on after 1947, told us stories about viceroys and collectors, but
I did not know the words “colonization” or “decolonization.” When, amid the volley of
British authors who shaped our minds in school, we finally came across poems by
Rabindranath Tagore, I noticed that these were different but could not call them
“nationalist.” Reflecting on India with the vocabulary of a social analyst, I find that new
light is shed on many of the experiences that have shaped me into the person-and
professional-I am today.

In some ways, the study of one’s own society involves an inverse process from the study
of an alien one. Instead of learning conceptual categories and then, through fieldwork,
finding the contexts in which to apply them, those of us who study societies in which we
have preexisting experience absorb analytic categories that rename and reframe what
is already known. The reframing essentially involves locating vivid particulars within
larger cultural patterns, sociological relations, and historical shifts. At one further
remove, anthropological categories also rephrase these particulars as evidence of
theoretical issues that cross cultures and are the special province of trained academics.

Yet, given the diversity within cultural domains and across groups, even the most
experienced of “native” anthropologists cannot know everything about his or her own
society (Aguilar 1981). In fact, by opening up access to hidden stores of research

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ESSAYS 679

materials, the study of anthropology can also lead to the discovery of many strange and
unfamiliar aspects of one’s own society (cf. Stewart 1989:14). I have learned, for
example, a good deal more about village life, regional differences, and tribal groups
than what my urban upbringing supplied. Institutions and belief systems that I took for
granted as immutable reality-such as caste or Hinduism-have been dismantled as
historical and discursive constructions. Even for a purported insider, it is clearly
impossible to be omniscient: one knows about a society from particular locations within
it (cf. Srinivas 1966:154).

As anthropologists, we do fieldwork whether or not we were raised close to the people
whom we study. Whatever the methodologies used, the process of doing fieldwork
involves getting to know a range of people and listening closely to what they say. Even
if one should already be acquainted with some of these people before one starts
fieldwork, the intense and sustained engagements of fieldwork will inevitably transmute
these relationships. Fieldwork is a common plane binding professional anthropologists,
but the process and outcome vary so widely that it is difficult to make a clear-cut
distinction between the experiences of those with prior exposure and those who arrive
as novices. As Nita Kumar writes in her memoir of fieldwork in Banaras (which she had
only visited before as the sheltered, Anglicized daughter of a highly placed Indian
government official): “Fieldwork consists of experiences shared by all anthropologists;
the personal and the peculiar are significant as qualities that always but differently
characterize each individual experience” (1992:6, emphasis in original).

To acknowledge particular and personal locations is to admit the limits of one’s
purview from these positions. It is also to undermine the notion of objectivity, because
from particular locations all understanding becomes subjectively based and forged
through interactions within fields of power relations. Positioned knowledges and partial
perspectives are part of the lingo that has risen to common usage in the 1980s (Clifford
1986, 1988; Haraway 1988; Kondo 1986; Rosaldo 1989). Yet, let us not forget the
prescient words ofJacques Maquet from an article in which he argued that decoloniza-
tion laid bare the “perspectivist” character of anthropology in Africa, showing anthro-
pology’s claim to objectivity as entwined with power relations in which one group could
claim to represent another. Arguing against objectivity in a polemic at least 20 years
ahead of its time, he writes:

A perspectivist knowledge is not as such non-objective: it is partial. It reflects an external reality
but only an aspect of it, the one visible from the particular spot, social and individual, where
the anthropologist was placed. Non-objectivity creeps in when the partial aspect is considered
as the global one. [Maquet 1964:54]

Enacting Hybridity

“Suppose you and I are walking on the road,” said Swamiji, the holy man whose storytelling
I was researching in 1985. ‘You’ve gone to University. I haven’t studied anything. We’re
walking. Some child has shit on the road. We both step in it. ‘That’s shit!’ I say. I scrape
my foot; it’s gone. But educated people have doubts about everything. You say,
‘What’s this?!’ and you rub your foot against the other.” Swamiji shot up from his prone
position in the deck chair, and placing his feet on the linoleum, stared at them with intensity.
He rubbed the right sole against the left ankle. “Then you reach down to feel what it could
be,” his fingers now explored the ankle. A grin was breaking over his face. “Something sticky!
You lift some up and sniff it. Then you say, ‘Oh! This is shit.’ “The hand that had vigorously
rubbed his nose was flung out in a gesture of disgust.

Swamiji turned back toward me, cheeks lifted under their white stubble in a toothless
and delighted grin. Everyone present in the room was laughing uncontrollably. I
managed an uncomfortable smile.

“See how many places it touched in the meantime,” Swamiji continued. “Educated
people always doubt everything. They lie awake at night thinking, ‘What was that? Why

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680 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [95, 1993]

did it happen? What is the meaning and the cause of it?’ Uneducated people pass
judgment and walk on. They get a good night’s sleep.”

I looked up at Swamiji from my position on the floor and tried to avoid the eyes of
the others, who watched me with broad smiles on their faces. “What was that? Why did
it happen? What is the meaning and the cause of it?” rang in my ears as a parody of my
own relentless questioning as an anthropologist interviewing both Swamiji and his
listeners. I had to agree that among the academics I represented analysis could often
become obsessive. But I also felt awkward, even a little hurt. This parable seemed to
dismiss all the years that education had dominated my life. It ridiculed my very presence
in this room. In his peculiar mixture of sternness and empathy, Swamiji must have read
the discomfort on my face. When he settled back into his deck chair, he turned to me
again. “It’s not that you shouldn’t study,” he said, voice low and kind. “You should gain
wisdom. But you should realize that in the end this means nothing.”

Once again, Swamiji was needling any possible self-importance that might be balloon-
ing inside me as self-appointed documenter and analyst of what to others was everyday
life. While others enjoyed his stories and learned from them, I brought the weightiness
of perpetual enquiry to the enterprise. Every action was evaluated (at least partially) in
terms of my project on folk narrative as a form of religious teaching. Now Swamiji had
turned his technique of instruction through stories on me. Through a parable, he
dramatized how we both coexisted in shared time and space, “walking the same road,”
yet each with a different awareness. The power relations of “structured inequality”
(Dwyer 1982; Rabinow 1977) that allow anthropologists to subsume their subjects in
representation had been turned upside down with such a critique.

This uncomfortable scene dramatizes how the issue of who is an insider and who is
an outsider is secondary to the need for dismantling objective distance to acknowledge
our shared presence in the cultural worlds that we describe. Pioneering works on
“native” anthropology emphasized the need for such anthropologists to achieve dis-
tance. Yet, distance, as Dorinne Kondo (1986) has observed, is both a stance and a
cognitive-emotional orientation that makes for cold, generalized, purportedly objective
and yet inevitably prejudiced forms of representation. As Kondo argues, it can be
replaced with the acceptance of “more experiential and affective modes of knowing”
(1986:75) in which the ethnographer’s identity and location are made explicit and
informants are given a greater role in texts. This is what Michael Jackson (1989) more
recently called “radical empiricism”: a methodology and discursive style that emphasizes
the subject’s experience and involvement with others in the construction of knowledge
(cf. Stoller 1992).

To question the discipline’s canonical modes of objective distance is not, however, to
forfeit subjective distance and pretend that all fieldwork is a celebration of communitas.
Given the multiplex nature of identity, there will inevitably be certain facets of self that
join us up with the people we study, other facets that emphasize our difference. In even
the closest of relationships, disjunctures can swell into distance; ruptures in communi-
cation can occur that must be bridged. To acknowledge such shifts in relationships
rather than present them as purely distant or purely close is to enrich the textures of
our texts so they more closely approximate the complexities of lived interaction. At the
same time, frankness about actual interactions means that an anthropologist cannot
hide superficial understandings behind sweeping statements and is forced to present
the grounds of understanding. Further, as Lila Abu-Lughod has argued in regard to
what she calls “ethnographies of the particular,” by writing in terms of “particular
individuals and their changing relationships, one would necessarily subvert the most
problematic connotations of culture: homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness”
(1991:154).

These insights hold radical implications for anthropological modes of representation.
As I see it, there are currently two poles to anthropological writing: at one end stand
accessible ethnographies laden with stories, and at the other end stand refereedjournal

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ESSAYS 681

articles, dense with theoretical analyses. We routinely assign narrative ethnographies in
“Intro to Anthro” classes (even if these are written not by professional anthropologists,
but by their wives [Fernea 1965; Shostak 1981]) because it is through narratives lively
with people, places, and events that we know recalcitrant undergraduates are likely to
be seduced by the discipline. Reading these ethnographies, we ourselves may forget we
are judgmental professionals, so swept along are we in the evocative flow of other
people’s experiences. Narrative ethnography is one arena in which the literary critic
Mary Louise Pratt’s blunt diagnosis that ethnographic writing is boring (1986:33) simply
does not apply. Journal articles, on the other hand, tend to be exclusively of interest to
academics initiated into the fellowship of professional discourse, and subscribing
members of a particular, academically formed society. Journal articles are written
according to formulas that include a thesis introduced in the beginning and returned
to at the end, and the convention that theoretical frameworks and generalized state-
ments should be emphasized, suppressing vivid particulars. We read these articles with
our minds more than our hearts, extorting ideas and references from their pages.

Need the two categories, compelling narrative and rigorous analysis, be impermeable?
Increasingly, they seep into each other, and here I want to argue for an emerging style
in anthropological writing that I call the enactment of hybridity (cf. Abu-Lughod 1992;
Behar 1993; Jackson 1989; Kondo 1990; Lavie 1990; Rose 1987; Stoller 1989; Rosaldo
1989, Tedlock 1992). In using the word “enactment,” I am drawing on Dorinne Kondo’s
view that “the specificity of… experience… is not opposed to theory; it enacts and
embodies theory” (1990, emphasis in original): any writing, then, represents an enact-
ment of some sort of theory. By “hybridity,” I do not mean only a condition of people
who are mixed from birth, but also a state that all anthropologists partake of but may
not consciously include in our texts. As Edward Bruner (1993) has elegantly phrased it,
every anthropologist carries both a personal and an ethnographic self. In this scheme,
we are all incipiently bi- (or multi-) cultural in that we belong to worlds both personal
and professional, whether in the field or at home. While people with Third World
allegiances, minorities, or women may experience the tensions of this dual identity the
most strongly, it is a condition of everyone, even of that conglomerate category termed
“white men.” Whether we are disempowered or empowered by prevailing power rela-
tions, we must all take responsibility for how our personal locations feed not just into
our fieldwork interactions but also our scholarly texts. When professional personas
altogether efface situated and experiencing selves, this makes for misleading scholarship
even as it does violence to the range of hybrid personal and professional identities that
we negotiate in our daily lives.

Adopting a narrative voice involves an ethical stance that neither effaces ourselves as
hybrid nor defaces the vivid humanity of the people with whom we work. Narrative
transforms “informants” whose chief role is to spew cultural data for the anthropologist
into subjects with complex lives and a range of opinions (that may even subsume the
anthropological enterprise). At a moment in which scholarship has a “multinational
reception” (cf. Mani 1990), it seems more urgent than ever that anthropologists
acknowledge that it is people and not theoretical puppets who populate our texts, and
that we allow these people to speak out from our writings. Also, narratives are not
transparent representations of what actually happened, but are told for particular
purposes, from particular points of view: they are thus incipiently analytical, enacting
theory. Analysis itself is most effective when it builds directly from cases evoked through
narrative, so providing a chance to step away, reflect on, and reframe the riveting
particulars of the story at hand. In including the perspective of the social analyst along
with narratives from or about people studied, a stereoscopic “double vision” can be
achieved (Rosaldo 1989:127-143). Some skillfully constructed analyses are as gripping
as good mystery stories, starting from a conundrum, then assembling clues that finally
piece together. Narrative and analysis are categories we tend to set up as opposites, yet

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682 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [95, 1993]

a second look reveals that they are contiguous, with a border open even to the most
full-scale of crossovers.

Calling for a greater integration of narrative into written texts does not mean that
analysis is to be abandoned, but rather that it moves over, giving vivid experience an
honored place beside it. By translating professional jargon into “the language of
everyday life” (cf. Abu-Lughod 1991:151), analysis can also be made intriguing to
audiences who would otherwise be compelled only by narrative. Admittedly, writing
cannot singlehandedly change the inequalities in today’s world; yet, in bearing the
potential to change the attitudes of readers, ethical and accessible writing unquestion-
ably takes a step in the right direction. As companions clothed in nontechnical language,
narrative and analysis join to push open the doors of anthropological understanding
and welcome in outsiders.

Conclusions

I have argued for a reorientation in the ways that we perceive anthropologists as
“outside” or “inside” a society. The traditional view has been to polarize “real” anthro-
pologists from “native” anthropologists, with the underlying assumption that a “native”
anthropologist would forward an authentic insider’s view to the profession. This view
sprang from a colonial era in which inegalitarian power relations were relatively well
defined: there was little question about the “civilized” outsider’s ability to represent
“primitive” peoples, and so it was worthy of note when a person excluded from dominant
white culture was allowed to describe his or her own society. With changing times,
however, the scope of anthropology has shifted to include industrialized societies, even
as it is also practiced in “Third World” countries and by minority and “Third World”
scholars. Identity, always multiplex, has become even more culturally complex at this
historical moment in which global flows in trade, politics, and the media stimulate
greater interpenetration between cultures.

In this changed setting, it is more profitable to focus on shifting identities in
relationship with the people and issues an anthropologist seeks to represent. Even if
one can blend into a particular social group without the quest of fieldwork, the very
nature of researching what to others is taken-for-granted reality creates an uneasy
distance. However, even if one starts out as a stranger, sympathies and ties developed
through engaged coexistence may subsume difference within relationships of reciproc-
ity. “Objectivity” must be replaced by an involvement that is unabashedly subjective as
it interacts with and invites other subjectivities to take a place in anthropological
productions. Knowledge, in this scheme, is not transcendental, but situated, negotiated,
and part of an ongoing process. This process spans personal, professional, and cultural
domains.

As we rethink “insiders” and “outsiders” in anthropology, I have argued that we should
also work to melt down other, related divides. One wall stands between ourselves as
interested readers of stories and as theory-driven professionals; another wall stands
between narrative (associated with subjective knowledge) and analysis (associated with
objective truths). By situating ourselves as subjects simultaneously touched by life-expe-
rience and swayed by professional concerns, we can acknowledge the hybrid and
positioned nature of our identities. Writing texts that mix lively narrative and rigorous
analysis involves enacting hybridity, regardless of our origins.

Notes

Acknowledgments. This essay emerged from fieldwork in Nasik between June and September
1983, and July and October 1985, as well as an association with the place since birth. Formal
fieldwork in Kangra took place between September 1991 and August 1992, although I have visited
there since 1975. I am extremely grateful for an array of grants and fellowships through the years.
In building on insights garnered collectively from research enabled by these different funding

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ESSAYS 683

sources, I lump them together here: a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, a
University of California at Berkeley Graduate Humanities Research Grant, a Robert H. Lowie
Fellowship, a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Writing Fellowship, support from the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Graduate School, an American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Fellowship,
and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. My deep thanks to Eytan Bercovitch,
Ruth Behar, Ed Bruner, Janet Dixon-Keller, Ann Gold, Smadar Lavie, Maria Lepowsky, Renato
Rosaldo, Janis Shough, Paul Stoller, Barbara Tedlock, Anna Tsing, and Kamala Visweswaran for
conversations about and comments on issues raised in this essay.

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686 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [95, 1993]

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BREATH ON THE
DENI 30 0KTraslao o h POPOL U

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-Michael D.

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than I should a
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Article Contents

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Issue Table of Contents

American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 545-816
Front Matter [pp. 545-550]
Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Beyond Criticizing New Archeology [pp. 551-573]
Blessings of the Virgin in Capitalist Society: The Transformation of a Rural Bolivian Fiesta [pp. 574-596]
A Reexamination of Rendille Population Regulation [pp. 597-611]
Human Genetics, Paleoenvironments, and Malaria: Relationships and Implications for the Settlement of Oceania [pp. 612-630]
Shellfish, Gender, and Status on the Northwest Coast: Reconciling Archeological, Ethnographic, and Ethnohistorical Records of the Tlingit [pp. 631-652]
Essays
Indigenous Knowledge of Biological Resources and Intellectual Property Rights: The Role of Anthropology [pp. 653-671]
How Native Is a “Native” Anthropologist? [pp. 671-686]
Research Report
Pastoral Transhumance in the Southern Balkans as a Social Ideology: Ethnoarcheological Research in Northern Greece [pp. 687-703]
Commentaries
Contested Pasts and the Practice of Anthropology
A Japanese Anthropologist’s Response to “Contested Pasts and the Practice of Anthropology” [pp. 704-706]
How Much Can We Privilege “Native” Accounts? [pp. 706-707]
Response to Comments by E. N. Anderson and Takami Kuwayama on the Contemporary Issues Forum [pp. 707-710]
O’Shea on Hodder’s Domestication [pp. 711-714]
On Gibbon on O’Shea on Hodder’s Domestication [pp. 714-715]
Fact and Fiction in Amazonia: The Case of the Apêtê [pp. 715-723]
Off the Grid: Response to Blakely and Blakely [pp. 723-724]
Response to Larson [pp. 724-725]
Response to Allen [p. 726]
Book Reviews
General/Theoretical Anthropology
Review: untitled [pp. 727-728]
Review: untitled [pp. 728-729]
Review: untitled [p. 729]
Review: untitled [pp. 729-730]
Review: untitled [pp. 730-731]
Review: untitled [pp. 731-733]
Review: untitled [p. 733]
Review: untitled [pp. 733-734]
Review: untitled [pp. 735-736]
Review: untitled [pp. 736-737]
Review: untitled [pp. 737-738]
Review: untitled [pp. 738-739]
Review: untitled [pp. 739-740]
Review: untitled [p. 740]
Review: untitled [pp. 741-742]
Review: untitled [pp. 742-743]
Review: untitled [pp. 743-744]
Review: untitled [pp. 744-745]
Review: untitled [pp. 745-746]
Review: untitled [pp. 746-747]
Review: untitled [pp. 747-748]
Archeology
Review: untitled [pp. 748-749]
Review: untitled [pp. 749-750]
Review: untitled [pp. 750-751]
Review: untitled [pp. 751-752]
Review: untitled [pp. 752-753]
Review: untitled [pp. 753-754]
Review: untitled [pp. 754-755]
Review: untitled [p. 755]
Review: untitled [p. 756]
Linguistic Anthropology
Review: untitled [pp. 756-757]
Review: untitled [pp. 757-758]
Review: untitled [pp. 758-759]
Review: untitled [pp. 759-760]
Review: untitled [pp. 760-761]
Social/Cultural Anthropology
Review: untitled [pp. 761-762]
Review: untitled [pp. 762-763]
Review: untitled [pp. 763-764]
Review: untitled [pp. 764-766]
Review: untitled [p. 766]
Review: untitled [pp. 766-767]
Review: untitled [pp. 767-768]
Review: untitled [pp. 768-769]
Review: untitled [pp. 769-770]
Review: untitled [pp. 770-771]
Review: untitled [pp. 771-772]
Review: untitled [pp. 772-773]
Review: untitled [pp. 773-774]
Review: untitled [pp. 774-775]
Review: untitled [pp. 775-776]
Review: untitled [pp. 776-777]
Biological Anthropology
Review: untitled [pp. 777-778]
Review: untitled [pp. 778-779]
Review: untitled [pp. 779-780]
Applied Anthropology
Review: untitled [pp. 780-781]
Review: untitled [pp. 781-782]
Review: untitled [pp. 782-783]
Review: untitled [pp. 783-784]
Review: untitled [pp. 784-785]
Review: untitled [pp. 785-786]

Film Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 787-788]
Review: untitled [pp. 788-789]
Review: untitled [pp. 789-790]
Review: untitled [pp. 790-792]
Museum Exhibit and Photographic Book Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 793-795]
Review: untitled [pp. 795-797]
Back Matter [pp. 798-816]

Ethnohistory 57:2 (Spring 2010) DOI 10.1215/00141801-2009-060
Copyright 2010 by American Society for Ethnohistory

Outpost Gardening in Interior Alaska:
Food System Innovation and the Alaska Native
Gardens of the 1930s through the 1970s

Philip A. Loring, University of Alaska Fairbanks
S. Craig Gerlach, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Abstract. For over a century, various forms of crop cultivation, including family,
community, and school gardens were a component of the foodways of many Alaska
Native communities. This paper describes the history of these cropping practices
in Athabascan communities of the Tanana and Yukon Flats regions of Alaska, and
reveals a distinct agricultural tradition with roots that reach back as far as the late
1800s. Though American colonists, bureaucrats, and missionaries to the state saw
agriculture as a mechanism for the economic development of the territory, garden-
ing instead fulfilled a niche within local foodways that was perhaps best character-
ized by Karl E. Francis (1967) as “outpost agriculture,” valued not for its role as an
exclusive means of subsistence, but as one of many equally important components in
a flexible and diversified subsistence strategy. Nevertheless, these cropping activities
are not widely considered to be either customary or traditional to Alaska Native
communities, nor have they been incorporated into the historical and ethnographic
literature about Alaska and about high-latitude agriculture at large. Because the
use of and access to land and natural resources as practiced by Alaska Natives is
heavily regulated by a state and federal legal framework based upon definitions of
what is and is not “customary and traditional,” failure to recognize the long history
of farming and gardening in rural Alaska has consequences for communities that
are experimenting with new community gardens and other innovative responses to
rapid ecological, climatic, and socioeconomic change.

The proliferation of agricultural practices across Alaska has followed a quite
different trajectory than it did in the pioneer era of the lower forty-eight
states. The process was not driven by a common vision of pioneer expan-
sion, transformation and Americanization of the last frontier,1 nor was it
dominated by New Deal or contemporary Farm Bureau policy and agenda.2
With a few exceptions, the rural agricultural boom anticipated by bureau-

184 Philip A. Loring and S. Craig Gerlach

crats and other speculators in the continental United States never material-
ized, in part because of Alaska’s remote geography and ecological charac-
ter.3 Instead, agricultural practices developed a uniquely Alaskan character.
While the Department of Agriculture did pursue an agenda of industrial-
agricultural development in the state, largely through experiment stations,
“outpost agriculture”—informal family and community gardens planted
for the purposes of local economic diversity and food security—became a
prevalent and successful strategy for coping with the natural variability and
uncertainty of living in the remote territory.4 Produce from these outpost
gardens filled in the gaps created by variation in the harvest of wild game
and by the unpredictable food supply chain from the lower states.5
Many Alaska Native communities also experimented with gardening,
complementing their wild food harvests with gardens of vegetables such
as potatoes, rutabagas, and turnips. There is an extensive, and relatively
well-known cropping tradition by the Haida and Tlingit peoples of the
southeastern region of the state, but less known, however, are the early gar-
dens of the Alaska Interior. As we describe in detail in the sections that
follow, many of the communities in the Yukon Circle, a vast wetlands basin
bounded roughly by the Yukon and Tanana rivers (figure 1), were experi-
menting with integrating some form of outpost-style gardening into their
seasonal round of subsistence activities as early as the beginning of the twen-
tieth century.6 In cooperation with agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
(BIA), the Alaska Native Service (ANS), and later the University of Alaska
Cooperative Extension Service, these communities planted school, family,
and community gardens and attempted to develop strategies for planting
and garden management that could complement the timing of the spring
trapping season, the summer fishing season, and the fall hunt.
However, BIA and ANS officials were in general frustrated by the lack
of a progressive transition in these communities toward agriculture as a
primary subsistence activity, and as such they considered their garden out-
reach programs to be a failure. Thus, this gardening history has been labeled
“failed development” by many of its contemporaries and has either been
ignored or described as little more than “culture change” by social scientists
since.7 This paper provides a different perspective on this history.
Though these gardens never quite lived up to the narrative of economic
development pursued by the BIA, there is extensive evidence that they were
effectively used to fill an important niche in local foodways, contributing
an additional measure of economic diversity and therefore resilience to
these communities. True, neither these communities nor their gardens fit
the archetype of agriculturalists, but records for the region indicate that
communities had been consistently cultivating gardens off and on since

Outpost Gardening in Interior Alaska 185

the turn of the century. When asked about life during the early to middle
1900s, many elders speak fondly about their gardens, recalling time spent
with their elders tending to planting and harvesting activities. Indeed pota-
toes, turnips, and rutabagas, none of which are native to Alaska, are all
considered “traditional” foods in the recipes and menus of the Athabascan
potlatch ceremony and favorite home dishes.8 Understanding the histori-
cal importance of these gardens helps us to come to terms with the notion
that flexibility and diversity are perhaps far more appropriate bench-
marks of what is truly “customary and traditional” for these communities,
which unfortunately remain locked in to old definitions and stereotypes of
hunter-gatherers.

Alaska’s Agricultural Beginnings

Alaska has a surprisingly rich and unique agricultural history. Like other
indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, Natives of southeastern
Alaska are widely known to have a long tradition of cultivating potatoes

Figure 1. Map the Yukon Flats area with some of the villages of the “Yukon Circle”
identified. Map courtesy of Nicole Dufour.

186 Philip A. Loring and S. Craig Gerlach

and a variety of other vegetables in coastal gardens, mentioned as early as
1765 through oral and written histories of Tlingit and Haida peoples as
well as documents from Russian, Spanish, and American ships.9 The first
Russian settlers to Alaska were likely the first non-Natives to try their hand
at cropping in the territory, beginning perhaps with the establishment of a
colony at Kodiak in 1783.10 Explorer and writer Kiriil Khlebnikov, in his
travel notes on Russian America, claims observing great success with pota-
toes in Alaska’s Southeast around the turn of the nineteenth century.11 Most
accounts, however, suggest that the early Russian attempts failed rather
miserably, in part because the pioneer landowners lacked significant agri-
cultural expertise, and because they had been unable to enlist the support
of a sizable number of serfs, the only Russian people with a background in
agriculture.12 Early Russian contact is often linked to the cropping practices
of the Native peoples; the Haida, for instance, are known to have grown
potatoes as an export crop for both the Russian American Company as well
as the Hudson’s Bay Company.13 Recent ethnographic and genetic research,
however, suggests that the Native gardens have roots that predate even the
earliest-recorded Russian interaction.14
Less known is that cropping had also been practiced for some time in
Interior Alaska, possibly introduced by the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort
Yukon in 1847, where the Athabascan people of the region grew potatoes,
vegetables, and even some cereal grains for food and trade.15 Later corre-
spondence between BIA agents and their administrative office in Juneau
confirms this, with reports that Yukon Circle communities planted small
gardens whenever visitors offered seeds to trade, albeit in a fashion that
would not necessarily have been recognized by outsiders as organized gar-
dening. One ANS schoolteacher reported with some surprise in 1937 that
“the Indians already have a taste for potatoes and turnips.”16
The U.S. purchase of the territory of Alaska from Russia brought a
short-lived wave of stateside agricultural speculation. By the 1890s nearly
all of the major areas of fertile, drought-free lands in the continental United
States had been claimed, and it seemed that the only remaining option was
Alaska. It was not until the turn of the twentieth century, however, that
boosters including Presbyterian minister turned state educational agent
Sheldon Jackson and high-latitude farming specialist Charles Christian
Georgeson were able to convince skeptics that Alaska possessed any signifi-
cant agricultural potential.17 Together, the two spurred a pioneer agricul-
ture movement to populate this new frontier with aspiring Euro-American
farmers from the continental United States. The migration made a strong
start, and by 1929 there were five hundred farms in Alaska according to the
U.S. Census.18 But as transportation into and through the state improved

Outpost Gardening in Interior Alaska 187

with the building of rail lines, the cost of shipping came down, bringing with
it the cost of lightweight packaged goods such as dry milk. Together with
food-shipment innovations such as pasteurization, local farms and dairies
were handily out-competed by these low-priced imported foods.19 Already
plagued by the inherent difficulties of cropping in the north such as poor
soils, unpredictable frosts, and a short growing season, many began to lose
faith in Alaskan agriculture and abandoned the business in favor of fishing,
mining, or military work.20 Most start-up farms went defunct in a matter of
years; by 1948 only sixty-three of the original families who were part of the
experimental agricultural colony in the Matanuska Valley remained, sub-
sidized by the Alaska Rural Rehabilitation Corporation. There was soon a
general understanding among bureaucrats that agriculture could only make
up a small part of Alaska’s long-term economic growth.21
Nevertheless, agricultural development in the territory was generally
considered necessary for “making Alaska American,” so despite these hard-
ships, agrarian idealism persisted.22 Attention was shifted, however, from
pursuing new agricultural settlements to bringing agricultural practices to
Alaska Native communities. The BIA had assumed broad governmental
responsibility for the education and well-being of Alaska Natives.23 Bureau-
crats and missionaries to the territory generally believed that Alaska Natives
were apathetic toward their tenuous lack of social and economic security,
and what some called the “obvious comforts” of the American lifestyle.24
In response to famine in northwestern Alaska in the late 1800s, both
perceived and real, Sheldon Jackson launched a venture to import reindeer
herding to the imperiled Eskimo communities as a mechanism of economic
aid and industrial education.25 His boosting gave rise to what would evolve
into an all-Alaska agricultural office of the BIA—the Reindeer Service.26
Its mission, to develop social and economic security for Alaska Natives
through the outreach programs that aided communities in the conversion
from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on a cash economy and sub-
sistence agriculture.27
In addition to the reindeer program, a series of village garden projects
emerged under the Reindeer Service’s jurisdiction. By the 1930s, garden pro-
grams managed by ANS schoolteachers were active in many Native commu-
nities, including some in the harshest, farthest-north settlements. Cropping
configurations ranged from informal family gardens (often unfenced bits
of land that went mostly unweeded, in some cases just randomly planted
potato plants) to more structured community and 4-H school garden pro-
grams. In some communities, the ANS schoolteachers would use gardening
to supplement their science curriculum, and whatever starts were grown in
class were then planted in either a family or community patch.28 In general,

188 Philip A. Loring and S. Craig Gerlach

these village gardens were dominated by root crops, especially potato, but a
wide variety of produce was grown as well, including beans, beets, cabbage,
carrots, celery, chard, kale, lettuce, peas, radishes, rutabagas, and turnips.
ANS garden programs were formalized as a program of Native educa-
tion by the BIA in 1941. Each year, ANS teachers were required to fill out
“Native Food” and “Garden Activity” surveys.29 A circular letter sent from
V. R. Farrell, director of education for the BIA, comments on the dual pur-
pose for these garden programs, in terms of meeting both educational and
food security needs:

It is important that we have a survey of the quantity of garden vege-
tables and other locally available foods produced and stored during the
current season. Garden seeds supplied by the Government should be
regarded as educational supplies in the same sense as home economics,
and shop supplies, and it is desirable that some measure be made of
the extent to which they are utilized. . . . Too much emphasis cannot
be placed on the desirability of having native people collect and store
maximum quantities of fish, berries, meat and other locally available
food products.30

Teachers recorded detailed information about the country food harvest and
garden production for each of the villages in the circle; capturing quantities
of wild foods, including caribou, moose, berries, fish, waterfowl, and small
mammals, as well as the quantities of garden produce harvested. School-
teachers also used these forms to record colorful personal commentary,
including views about the community, environment, even politics. One
teacher in the village of Minto remarked in 1944 that the village’s food
supply for winter that year was “inadequate because too many boys entered
the war for [the] big wages. Increase supply by stopping the war.”31 Often
teachers would also cause alarm at the BIA, by incorrectly assessing food
levels as dramatically insufficient, leading to a general perception at the BIA
of chronic famine in the villages. Charles Hawkesworth, also of the BIA
Juneau office, wrote to his teachers, “It is clear with us that gardens will
gradually be increased in size and the people will have a [necessary] third
food resource. Heretofore the native people have secured their food from
the water and from land animals. Now they should get the value of garden
crops, and thus have a varied diet.”32
The reported levels of Native participation and total crop yields varied
greatly from year to year. All of the circle villages would produce thousands
of pounds of produce for a few years, and then seemingly abandon the prac-
tice the next (table 1). The village gardens of Venetie, for example, yielded a
recorded twenty-four thousand pounds of potatoes (and another four thou-

Outpost Gardening in Interior Alaska 189

sand pounds of a variety of other produce) in 1961, and several Native gar-
deners won awards for their produce at the state fair in Palmer. Between
1961 and 1967, Venetie’s gardens consistently produced at this level. How-
ever in 1970 the gardens were abandoned, reporting little more than two
hundred pounds of potatoes. ANS administrators, apparently completely
unaware of the past years’ gardening success, explained the fall in produc-
tion by saying “most people here prefer using their time in hunting and
fishing.”33
ANS teachers and BIA officials both were frustrated by this extreme
year-to-year variation in garden participation, taking it to represent a fail-
ure, not necessarily of the program but of the communities themselves.
They regularly commented on lack of participation being a matter of lazi-
ness, apathy, or lack of ambition.34 One teacher quipped, “The Native
people think the garden should weed itself, apparently.”35 Nearly all ANS
teachers continued to assert that gardening prospects in the region were
far better than had been realized thus far, and that Natives must continue
to be “pressed” and “encouraged.”36 Still, achievements like the twenty-
five thousand pounds of potatoes grown in Venetie in 1961 were margin-
alized by the perception that no long-term developmental progress was

Table 1. Summary data for BIA records

Village

Years
Reporting

(n)*

Earliest
mention of
gardening

Average
population

Avg. # of
families
eating
from

garden

Productivity
range (lbs,

min.–max.)

Arctic Village 1959–62 (4) 1959 86 0 0–13.5
Beaver 1940–67 (13) 1936 92 11 0–6,300
Birch Creek 1963–67 (2) 1962 32 3 1,863–2,400
Canyon Village 1964–67 (2) 1964 37 2 0–285
Chalkyitsik 1946–66 (5) 1946 77 7 0–5,600
Circle 1944–57 (8) 1944 66 6 345–1,900
Fort Yukon 1941–56 (4) 1898 382 25 3,000–29,700
Minto 1941–63 (13) 1933 140 8 180–8,750
Stevens Village 1941–67 (15) 1941 72 8 0–3,900
Venetie 1941–71 (15) 1931 81 10 0–28,095
*(n) represents the number of reports present in records for that year range. Summary of data available
for village gardening projects in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Reindeer Service Records at the U.S.
National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region. Earliest mention of gardening does not reflect earlier refer-
ences found in other sources. Average population calculated from “Number of people dependent on
this supply” on Native Food Survey within the date range. Total number of families is unknown.

190 Philip A. Loring and S. Craig Gerlach

being made among Native communities toward a more consistent life as
agriculturalists.

Development, Overinnovation, and Outpost Agricutlure

We now know that the aboriginal diets and subsistence patterns of Athabas-
can and Eskimo communities were in fact far more diverse, in both content
and nutrition, and historically far more reliable than they appeared to the
educators, administrators, and bureaucrats, many of whom had short ten-
ures and rarely saw the villages for which they made policy.37 Nevertheless,
the general perception was that garden projects, as a matter of rural devel-
opment, were expected to eventually represent a major component of the
local economy and diet. They were pursued as the centerpiece to “a [com-
plete] community development plan . . . to promote social, economic, health
and technological innovation.”38 That these goals of dramatic, broad eco-
nomic development and social transformation were not met by the village
gardening initiatives is hardly surprising given that such years of extremely
successful garden production were marginalized or dismissed altogether,
eclipsed by the perception that no long-term developmental progress was
being made toward transforming rural Alaskan economies into the rural
American agricultural model.
The BIA approach was a prototypical case of “overinnovation,” where
top-down prescriptions for development are made, often by those with a
colonialist mind-set, which are negligent to local social and cultural struc-
tures.39 Overinnovation is part of a development narrative that incorporates
“planners’ values,” e.g., progress, efficiency, and modernization, and oper-
ates under the assumption that it can and should happen along a very spe-
cific timeline.40 For Alaska, perceptions of food insecurity and need in rural
communities were in some cases real, in others only perceived from the
outside. Regardless, the BIA pursued a rigorous program of rural educa-
tion and development that was rooted in and fueled by a long-held belief in
agriculture as a mechanism of economic development and civil progress.41
This single-mindedness, coupled with ignorance of the complexities and
nuances of local lifeways, made BIA agents unable to see the extent to
which gardening actually had been integrated into the communities’ subsis-
tence strategies.
Indeed, the Alaska Native communities of the Yukon Circle saw great
potential in crop cultivation, and experimented with new and different ways
to incorporate the practice into their subsistence strategies and general food
system. Though it could not, in either the short or the long term, follow the
same developmental path that agriculture had in the lower forty-eight, it

Outpost Gardening in Interior Alaska 191

could and did meet more “down-to-earth and specific objectives” as a flex-
ible, supplementary, stabilizing activity that could be easily and informally
integrated with the existing local economies (see figure 2).42 The variability
of participation in gardening was not an indicator of failure but character-
istic of a process of experimentation that happened outside the dominant
narrative of economic development. Cropping was part of a larger picture,
incorporated within a set of strategies that valued diversity over economic
growth and followed not just a yearly set of activities but also multiyear and
in some cases multidecadal ecological and climatic cycles.43
Only within the past two decades have scholars and bureaucrats come
to recognize the complex nature of Alaska Native subsistence strategies,
in particular how they follow not just a yearly seasonal round of activities
but are flexible and responsive to multiyear and in some cases multidecadal
ecological and climatic cycles.44 Though the gardening programs did not
initiate a radical transformation of lifestyle for these Native communities,
gardens were indeed being integrated into the communities’ subsistence
strategies (figure 2) in a way that reflected local knowledge, awareness, and
responsiveness to these ecosystem patterns. With this new information,
such year-to-year variation of garden production can be better contextu-
alized. For instance, many officials shared the opinion that gardens were
not a viable strategy for Athabascans because the time needed to garden
conflicted with traditional subsistence activities.45 Were there in fact such a
hard-and-fast conflict, however, it would be impossible to account for the
years when both the subsistence foods harvest and garden production were
high. More plausible is the explanation given by the community members
themselves: that because of year-to-year differences in weather, as well as
moose and other animal populations, subsistence activities conflicted with
gardening in some years but not others.
One example of this was the muskrat hunt, or “ratting” season: “We
are told that the reason gardens are not cultivated is because of the ratting
season. The season usually is from March 1st to May 31st. After ratting
season the Natives return to town and stay long enough to get supplies
then go to fish camp. This coming spring is the peak of the ratting season;
the following years will show a decrease. Families will then stay in town;
some will then make gardens as in previous years.”46 Historically, the rat-
ting season ranged from a three-week to three-month segment of the sea-
sonal round of subsistence activities for many Interior Athabascan commu-
nities, immediately following winter trapping.47 Each family had its own
“rat camp,” and entire families were involved in the hunting and trapping
of muskrat and other small mammals, which were used for their fur and
as dog food.48 Yearly emphasis on the activity was not constant, however,

192 Philip A. Loring and S. Craig Gerlach

but was dependent on observations and knowledge of muskrat populations.
The population ecologies of furbearers like muskrats, mink, and snowshoe
hares each follow a marked decadal cycle of expansion and contraction.49
As reflected in fur records of the Hudson’s Bay Company, that cycle was
on a downswing for the Alaska-Yukon region during the late 1940s and
early 1950s, confirmed also by frequent mention of dog starvation during
the same period.50 Not surprisingly, the emphasis on ratting declined, and
more spring activities were centered in the village; more people (especially
women) were able to return, as the preceding quote implies, to gardening
as a springtime component of their subsistence calendar.

Discussion: Customary and Traditional?

We’ve got to make a living, you know? But some people worry that if we stop
looking or acting like hunters and fishers we’ll lose what rights we have left on
this land. Using a motorboat, you know, out on the flats doesn’t make us less
traditional, but digging for potatoes when we could be fishing, to some people,
does. If we ask the department of game for more moose tags or longer hunting

Figure 2. The seasonal subsistence round of Alaska natives of the Yukon Circle.
Note the diversity of secondary options available throughout the year that allow
people alternatives when one or more food sources is less abundant. Note how
well the activity fits in as a secondary pursuit, should weather or population cycles
cause the muskrat and hare trapping/hunting to be less viable. Figure based on
information as described in Caulfield, “Subsistence Land Use in Upper Yukon
Porcupine Communities.”

Outpost Gardening in Interior Alaska 193

seasons, or to hunt out of season, because we need to eat, they’ll tell us to eat
our potatoes.
—Anonymous, 2006

When viewed without this rural development bias, this Native garden-
ing can be better understood as an activity that many communities suc-
cessfully incorporated into their round of traditional and customary prac-
tices. To understand why this distinction is important to Alaska Native
communities today, brief mention is necessary of the context within which
rural Alaskan community subsistence activities are regulated and managed
by federal and state authorities. According to the current State of Alaska
resource management regime, the subsistence harvest of “country foods”—
such as salmon, whitefish, moose, caribou, beaver, ptarmigan, and water-
fowl, and botanical resources such as berries, wild rhubarb, and rosehips—
is regulated within a context of resource uses and harvesting practices that
are “customary and traditional.”51 Though this does provide a measure of
protection with respect to hunting activities and access to land, it comes
with some troubling ramifications.
Whether or not particular technologies as well as harvest and resource-
use patterns are identified by state and federal regulators is often determined
by whether or not they were used or practiced before 1971—the year of the
passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) when thir-
teen regional and local Native corporations were created with an economic
and entitlement approach that differed significantly from the reservation
and tribal model of the lower forty-eight states and parts of Canada.52 But
Alaskan Natives did not in the past divide their daily activities along lines
that are clearly defined as modern or traditional, “for subsistence” or other-
wise; they simply did what was necessary to make a living for themselves
and their families, working on landscapes in and around their local commu-
nities. Today, as the quote that introduced this section suggests, these etic
definitions of Alaska Native culture have come to provide a source of power
and legitimacy for these communities, but their static nature betrays the
reality: that it is the strategy of flexibility, and spatial and temporal patterns
of land use, that is most traditional to these peoples, far more so than the
specific harvest technologies and even the particular harvested animals.53

Conclusion

There is no officially recorded correspondence that marks a definitive end
to the ANS garden program. Many village gardens in the state, like those of
Arctic Village and Venetie in the Yukon Circle, were discontinued because

194 Philip A. Loring and S. Craig Gerlach

of multiple consecutive years of low production. In 1965, the Alaska State
Department of Education established the Division of State-Operated
Schools to help focus on unique rural needs, and over the next twenty years
the ANS schools transitioned to state control.54 Thus school gardens, as the
primary mechanism of BIA agricultural outreach, were discontinued one
by one and agricultural outreach in Native communities became solely the
purview of the Cooperative Extension Service at the University of Alaska.
Still, it would be incorrect to say that experimentation with village garden-
ing has ended. In fact, the practices have entered a period of revival; some
public and private schools are developing new gardening curricula, and
the Cooperative Extension Service reports that it supports over forty rural
community initiatives to integrate community gardens within the econo-
mies and cultures of rural Alaska.55
Today, the foodstuffs on the shelves of the local store are viewed as pro-
viding an important measure of food security, especially by elders who lived
during what they sometimes call the “skin tent days” and experienced their
fair share of periodic food scarcity and hunger.56 But as our understand-
ing of the caveats of the nutritional and political economies of cheap food
increases, outpost agriculture is finding a renewed niche in emerging indige-
nous movements away from this system and the vulnerabilities embedded
within it.57 Many Native communities are trying to recover and redevelop
local gardening expertise in an attempt to break the cheap-food addiction
that has brought with it plagues such as type 2 diabetes and obesity.58 Vil-
lages like Minto, Fort Yukon, and others are renewing these village garden-
ing initiatives to complement their other traditional subsistence activities,
with clear implications for increasing the quality and quantity of food that
is produced locally, for reducing vulnerability to external economic forces,
and for contributing to better individual and community health.
Unfortunately, despite the history of gardening by Natives described
here, agriculture is still considered by many to be a non-Native activity. The
1998 review of one hundred years of agriculture in Alaska published by the
University of Alaska, Fairbanks, School of Agricultural Sciences and Natu-
ral Resource Management, for instance, makes no mention whatsoever of
the long history of Alaska Native subsistence gardening described here.
Cropping is mentioned in only one of over twenty subsistence reports for
the region authored by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game,59 and is
also omitted from the 2002 National Park Services historical review Alaska
Subsistence.60 Though it is not necessarily the intent of this paper to embark
on a debate regarding legal or anthropological definitions of what quali-
fies as customary and traditional for Athabascan communities of the Yukon
Circle, the outpost gardening described here gives a clear pattern of behav-

Outpost Gardening in Interior Alaska 195

ior and land use that provides historical precedent for contemporary Native
gardening practices. Alaska Native subsistence is a dynamic and innovative
enterprise and is changing today to meet the needs of the present just as it
did in the past, in spite of the way that regulatory regimes continue to con-
strain subsistence practice with a web of legal definitions and policies that
are not especially sympathetic to innovation and change.

Notes

1 As described in general by Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American
History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), and in specific regard to
Alaska by Roxanne Rae Willis, “Making Alaska American: Environment and
Development in a Foreign Land,” PhD diss., Yale University, 2006.

2 James Shortridge, “American Perceptions of the Agricultural Potential of Alaska,
1867–1953,” PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1972.

3 Ibid.
4 Jan Hanscom, “100 Years of Agricultural Research in Alaska” Agroborealis 30

(1998): 38–45.
5 Ibid.
6 Herman Turner, agricultural agent-at-large, University of Alaska Cooperative

Extension Service (UA CES), letter to Mr. Vern V. Hirch, Assistant Director of
the Division of Resources, ANS (Alaska Native Services), 18 May 1956, File 916,
Garden Subsistence (GS), General Subject Correspondence 1933–1963 (GSC),
Alaska Reindeer Service (RR), Record Group (RG) 75, National Archives
Pacific Alaska Region (NAPA). Mr. Turner lists Fort Yukon, Circle, Venetie,
Arctic Village, Beaver, Stevens Village, and Minto as the places visited on a tour
of the “Yukon Circle.” Though not referenced in this letter, Rampart, Chalkyi-
tsik, and Canyon Village are found regularly in other documents grouped with
these villages.

7 Wallace M. Olson, “Minto, Alaska: Cultural and Historical Influences on
Group Identity,” PhD diss., University of Alaska, 1968; W. E. Simeone, Rifles,
Blankets, and Beads: Identity, History and the Northern Athapaskan Potlatch. vol.
216, Civilization of the American Indian (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
2002).

8 Linda Janine Reed, “Diet and Subsistence in Transition: Traditional and West-
ern Practices in an Alaskan Athapaskan Village,” PhD diss., University of Ore-
gon, 1995.

9 Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner, Keeping It Living (University of Washington
Press, 2007).

10 Elizabeth Kunibe, “The Origin of Alaska’s First Potato,” in Conference Abstracts.
(Fairbanks, AK: American Association of the Advancement of Science, Arctic,
2008). See also Julie Coburn, “Seed Potatoes and Foxgloves,” in Alaska Native
Writers, Storytellers, and Orators: The Expanded Edition, Ronald Spatz, Patricia
Partnow, and Jeane Breinig, eds., (Anchorage: University of Alaska, Alaska
Quarterly Review, 1999), available online at www.litsite.org/index.cfm?section=
History%20and%20Culture&page=Art%20of%20Storytelling&Content
Id=885&viewpost=2&pg=116&crt=1. For early mentions of this practice, see

196 Philip A. Loring and S. Craig Gerlach

Hanscom, “Agroborealis”; Wayne Suttles, “The Early Diffusion of the Potato
among the Coast Salish,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 7(3) (1951).

11 K. T. Khlebnikov, The Khlebnikov Archive: Unpublished Journal (1800–37) and
Travel Notes (1820, 1822, and 1824) (Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska Press,
1990). Also H. H. Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, vol. 28: Alaska 1730–
1855 (San Francisco: 1886).

12 Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, vol. 28; Shortridge, “American
Perceptions.”

13 Jonathan R. Dean, “‘Uses of the Past’ on the Northwest Coast: The Russian
American Company and Tlingit Nobility, 1825–1867,” Ethnohistory 42 (1995):
265–302; Jay Ellis Ransom, “Aleut Natural-Food Economy,” American Anthro-
pologist 48 (1946): 607–23; Shortridge, “American Perceptions.”

14 Kunibe, “The Origin of Alaska’s First Potato.”
15 Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, vol. 28; Shortridge, “American

Perceptions.”
16 G. S. Wilson, ANS Schoolteacher, to Mr. Claude M. Hirst, General Superinten-

dent, Office of Indian Affairs, Juneau, AK, 3 September 1937, File 916, GS, GSC,
RR, RG75, NAPA.

17 C. C. Georgeson, “The Possibilities of Alaska,” National Geographic Magazine,
Vol. 13, 1902, 81–85; Ted C. Hinckley, “The Presbyterian Leadership in Pioneer
Alaska,” The Journal of American History 52 (1966): 742–56; Willis, “Making
Alaska American.”

18 Shortridge, “American Perceptions.”
19 C. E. Logsdon, L. J. Klebesadl, and J. A. Smith, Alaska Resource Development

Council (ARDC), “Alaska’s Agricultural Potential” (Fairbanks, AK: The Alaska
Rural Development Council, 1974); Karl Francis, “Outpost Agriculture: The
Case of Alaska,” Geographical Review, LVII:4 (1967): 496–505.

20 Kirk H. Stone, “Alaskan Group Settlement: The Matanuska Valley Colony,”
(Anchorage, AK: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management,
1949); Willis, “Making Alaska American.”

21 Francis, “Outpost Agriculture”; Shortridge, “American Perceptions”; Stone,
“Alaskan Group Settlement”; Willis, “Making Alaska American.”

22 Willis, “Making Alaska American.”
23 U.S. Archives, RG 75: BIA Fact Finder: Reindeer Records, (Anchorage, AK: U.S.

National Archives, 1975); Carol Barnhardt, “A History of Schooling for Alaska
Native People,” Journal of American Indian Education 40 (2001): 1–30.

24 Sister Mary of the Angels Agatha, “Social Adaptation of the Alaska Native to
White Culture,” PhD diss., Gonzaga University, 1965; U. S. Archives, RG 75: BIA
Fact Finder: Reindeer Records; Katherine M. Cook, “Education among Native
and Minority Groups in Alaska, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands and Hawaii,” Jour-
nal of Negro Education 3 (1934): 20–41; Alice Postell, Where Did the Reindeer
Come From? (Portland, OR: Amanak Press, 1990).

25 S. C. Gerlach, “Historical Archaeology and the Early Twentieth Century Rein-
deer Herding Frontier on the Northern Seward Peninsula, Alaska,” in Ublasaun:
First Light, eds. Jeanne Schaaf and Thetus Smith (Fairbanks, AK: U.S. Depart-
ment of the Interior, National Park Service, 1996); Hinckley, “The Presbyte-
rian Leadership in Pioneer Alaska”; Roxanne Rae Willis, “A New Game in the
North: Alaska Native Reindeer Herding, 1890–1940,” Western Historical Quar-
terly 37 (2006): 277–301.

Outpost Gardening in Interior Alaska 197

26 James Johnson Koffroth Simon, “Twentieth Century Iñupiaq Eskimo Rein-
deer Herding on Northern Seward Peninsula, Alaska,” PhD diss., University of
Alaska, Fairbanks, 1998; Willis, “A New Game in the North”

27 For example Henry A. Benson, Office of the Commissioner of Labor, letter to
Ernest Patty, President, University of Alaska, 27 August 1954, File 917, GS, GSC,
RR, RG75, NAPA.

28 Magdalene Delehart, ANS Teacher, to the Office of Indian Affairs Field Ser-
vice, 2 February 1948, Juneau Area Office Correspondence (JOC), RR, RG75,
NAPA.

29 File 917, Agricultural Hunting & Fishing Statistics: Afognak—Fort Yukon
(AHF1), Kwinglillingok—Scammon Bay (AHF2), and Selawik-Yakutat (AHF3),
RR, RG75, NAPA.

30 V. E. Farrel, Director of Education, Office of Indian Affiars, Juneau, AK, to
“Teachers,” File 917, Ag. Statistics & Production: Beaver, AK1933–66, Agricul-
tural Hunting & Fishing Statistics: Afognak—Fort Yukon, RR, RG75, NAPA.

31 C.W. Holland, ANS Schoolteacher, “Annual Survey of Native Food 1943,” File
917, Ag. Statistics & Production: Minto 1941–63, AHF2, RR, RG75, NAPA.

32 Personal communication, Charles Hawkesworth, Assistant to the Director,
Bureau of Indian Affairs Juneau Area Office, letter to John Fredson, Govern-
ment Teacher, Venetie, Alaska, 20 October 1938, JOC, RR, RG75, NAPA.

33 William H. Barney, “Annual Survey of Garden Activity,” File 917, Ag. Statis-
tics & Production: Venetie, AK 1938–72, AHF2, RR, RG75, NAPA.

34 For example Jens Forshaug, ANS Schoolteacher, “Annual Survey of Native Food
1953,” File 917, Ag. Statistics & Production: Minto 1941–63, AHF2, RR, RG75,
NAPA.

35 Dorothy Johnson, ANS Schoolteacher, “Annual Survey of Native Food 1944,”
File 917, Ag. Statistics & Production: Circle 1944–57, AHF, RR, RG75,
NAPA.

36 C.W. Holland, ANS Schoolteacher, “Annual Survey of Native Food 1944,” File
917, Ag. Statistics & Production: Minto 1941–63, AHF2, RR, RG75, NAPA.

37 The longest number of consecutive years an ANS schoolteacher reported for a
village was five (Mr. Richard P. Birchill, 1960–1964), the most common, how-
ever, was just one. Many left the villages during the summer and did not partici-
pate in subsistence activities. See also P. Gadsby, “The Inuit Paradox,” Discover
25:10 (2004): 48–55; Louis E. Grivetti and B. M. Ogle, “The Value of Tradi-
tional Foods in Meeting Macro- and Micronutrient Needs: The Wild Plant Con-
nection,” Nutrition Research Reviews 13 (2000): 1–16; Patricia S. Holloway and
Ginny Alexander, “Ethnobotany of the Fort Yukon Region, Alaska,” Economic
Botany 44 (1990): 214–25; Richard K. Nelson, Hunters of the Northern Forest:
Designs for Survival among the Alaska Kutchin (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986).

38 Lydia Fohn-Hansen, UA CES, to Max Penrod, Educational Director, Bureau of
Indian Affairs, 18 April 1958, Folder 947, GS, GSC, RR, RG75, NAPA.

39 For discussion of overinnovation, see Henry Delcore, “Development and the
Life Story of a Thai Farmer Leader,” Ethnology 43 (2004): 33–50; Conrad Phillip
Kottak, “Culture and ‘Economic Development,’” American Anthropologist 92
(1990): 723–32; Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of
Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

40 Kottak, “Culture and Economic Development.”

198 Philip A. Loring and S. Craig Gerlach

41 For more on agriculture as an implement of civilization, see Daniel Quinn, Ish-
mael (New York: Bantam, 1991); Willis, “Making Alaska American.”

42 Kottak, “Culture and Economic Development.”
43 Igor Krupnik and Dyanna Jolly, eds., The Earth Is Faster Now: Indigenous Obser-

vations of Arctic Environmental Change (Fairbanks, AK: Arctic Research Con-
sortium of the United States, 2002); Nelson, Hunters of the Northern Forest.

44 See, for example, Nelson, Hunters of the Northern Forest, and more recently con-
tributors to Krupnik and Jolly, eds., The Earth Is Faster Now.

45 See Mr. Kashmir Bezich, ANS Special Assistant to Mr. Elmo Miller, Adminis-
trativie Asst., ANS—Nome, AK, 8 March 1948, JOC, RR, RG75, NAPA; or
William H. Barney, “Annual Survey of Garden Activity,” File 917, Ag. Statistics
& Production: Venetie, AK, 1938–72, AHF2, RR, RG75, NAPA.

46 Dorothy Henry, ANS Schoolteacher, “Annual Survey of Native Food 1941,”
File 917, Ag. Statistics & Production: Stevens Village, AK 1941–67, AHF2, RR,
RG75, NAPA.

47 Valerie A. Sumida, “Patterns of Fish and Wildlife Harvest and Use in Beaver,
AK,” (Fairbanks, AK: Alaska Department of Fish and Game, 1989).

48 Nelson, Hunters of the Northern Forest; William S. Schneider, “Beaver, Alaska:
The Story of a Multi-Ethnic Community,” Phd. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1976;
Sumida, “Patterns of Fish and Wildlife Harvest and Use in Beaver, Ak.”

49 John P. Bryant and Peggy J. Kuropat, “Selection of Winter Forage by Subarctic
Browsing Bertebrates: The Role of Plant Chemistry,” Annual Review of Ecology
Systematics 11 (1980): 261–85; Charles Elton, Animal Ecology (London: Sidg-
wick & Jackson, 1951); Robert Mcredie May, Stability and Complexity in Model
Ecosystems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973).

50 Hildegunn Viljugrein et al., “Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Mink and Muskrat in
Canada During a Quarter-Century,” Journal of Animal Ecology 70 (2001): 671–
82; Wm. C. Beach to General Superintendent, Alaska Indian Service, 7 Decem-
ber 1944, File 917, Ag. Statistics & Production: Fort Yukon, AK 1941–57, AHF2,
RR, RG75, NAPA; J. Ransom, community worker, to Claude M. Hirst, General
Superintendent, Office of Indian Affairs, 15 January 1949, File 917, Ag. Statis-
tics & Production: Stevens Village, AK 1941–67, AHF2, RR, RG75, NAPA.

51 Alaska Statute 16.05.940(33).
52 For example, the first chapter in Alaska Subsistence: A National Park Service Man-

agement History by Frank B. Norris (Anchorage, AK: Alaska Support Office,
National Park Service, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, 2002) is titled “Alaska Native
and Rural Lifeways Prior to 1971,” as if everything changed in terms of local
“lifeways” with the passage of ANCSA.

53 Edwin S. Hall, S. C. Gerlach, and Margaret B. Blackman, “In the National
Interest: A Geographically Based Study of Anaktuvik Pass Inupiat Subsis-
tence through Time,” (Barrow, AK: The North Slope Borough, 1985); Henry P.
Huntington, Wildlife Management and Subsistence Hunting in Alaska (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1992).

54 Barnhardt, “A History of Schooling for Alaska Native People.”
55 Michele Hebert, Land Resources Director, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Cooperative Extension Service, 2006.
56 T. O’Brien, “Athabaskan Implements from the Skin House Days as Related by

Reverend David Salmon,” PhD diss., University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1997.
57 Jack Kloppenburg, John Hendrickson, and George W. Stevenson, “Coming into

Outpost Gardening in Interior Alaska 199

the Foodshed,” Agriculture and Human Values 13 (1996): 33–42; H. V. Kuhn-
lein et al., “Arctic Indigenous Peoples Experience the Nutrition Transition with
Changing Dietary Patterns and Obesity,” Journal of Nutrition 134 (2004): 1447–
53; Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
(New York: The Penguin Press, 2006).

58 C. Ballew et al., The Alaska Traditional Diet Survey (Anchorage, AK: Alaska
Native Health Board, Alaska Native Epidemiology Center, 2004); Kuhnlein
et al., “Arctic Indigenous Peoples Experience the Nutrition Transition”; Eliza-
beth Nobmann et al., “The Diet of Alaska Native Adults: 1987–1988,” American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition 55 (1992): 1024–32.

59 Sumida, “Patterns of Fish and Wildlife Harvest and Use in Beaver, AK,” appears
to be the only Alaska Department of Fish and Game community subsistence
profile to include a (very short) note, under the heading “Plant Resources” (66),
about contemporary family gardens, though no mention is made of the role they
played prior to 1989.

60 Elizabeth F. Andrews, “The Harvest of Fish and Wildlife for Subsistence Use
by Residents of Minto, AK,” (Juneau, AK: Alaska Department of Fish and
Game, 1988); Richard Caulfield, “Subsistence Land Use in Upper Yukon Por-
cupine Communities, Alaska. Dinjii Nats’aa Nan Kak Adagwaandaii. Report
#16” (Fairbanks, AK: Alaska Department of Fish and Game, 1983); Frank
Norris, “Alaska Subsistence” (Anchorage, AK: U.S. Department of the Interior,
National Park Service, 2002); Sumida, “Patterns of Fish and Wildlife Harvest
and Use in Beaver, AK.”

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