Joyce, "Shaping of Amer. Ethnography: Wilkes Explor. Exped."

[Dave Robertson]

Hello,

Here's a book that will be of interest to some of you:

Joyce, Barry Alan.  "The Shaping of American Ethnography:  The Wilkes Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842."  [Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology, volume 2]  (Lincoln:  U. of Nebraska Press, 2001)

Several maps and numerous excellent reproductions of sketches and paintings executed by members of the Wilkes party make a lively compliment to the lucid interpretation Joyce gives of the progress of the Expedition.  I found the book a pretty quick read, at 196 pages of narrative commentary.  Especially chapter 4, "The World of the Feejee", held me spellbound with its sequence of unexpectedly dramatic and violent events, which were as Joyce shows both caused by and immediately an influence on the theoretical structure of nascent U.S. anthropology.

Following this section, chapter 5,  "Return to America", constitutes a really illuminating snapshot of the views held by the newly-arrived (in this case, both researchers and settlers) in the Northwest.  Well worth considering if you're one to mentally reconstruct the world in which Chinook Jargon first flourished are the Wilkes crew's frank disbelief of White settlers' claims of Indian savagery -- and this from a group of scholars whose anthropological ideas were a framework of what we might now call essentialist and racialist ideas of a hierarchy, from the worst savages to the best civilized nations, of humanity.  I'm interested also in the (casual) mention that the Wilkes ships, upon entering the Strait of Juan de Fuca, were met by [Salishan] Clallams who spoke broken English, who "immediately inquired ... whether _Vincennes_ was a 'King George ship' or 'Boston ship'.  When James Alden affirmed the latter, they 'appeared delighted, shook hands, and commenced abusing King Ge!
orge (ie. Victoria).'"  The words quoted are all, of course, perfectly good Chinook Jargon, and not necessarily "broken English" at all; one may wonder whether this was indeed the first CJ encountered by the Expedition, but (even if including words of Indian origin also) was not recognized as such.  Perhaps ironically, not long afterwards, Expedition philologist Horatio Hale recorded perhaps the first really good vocabulary and description of CJ, in the Columbia River estuary region.

[Digressing a moment, I suggest we may ponder whether a trading center in the Nootka Sound area in fur-trade days may have included not just "Nootkans" and "Whites", but also the Clallams and other tribes residing outside that small area.  A linguistic stimulus for this thought: if memory serves, the only Nuu-chah-nulth dialect having a word for "halibut" that is recognizable from the Chinook Jargon dictionaries we know is ?Toquaht, with a form approximately /p'oo7i7/, while across the Strait, unrelated Clallam Salishan has the nearly identical /p'Ewi7/.  Perhaps the research currently being conducted by some scholars on a possible Nootka Jargon will provide a list of such correspondences with neighboring languages, and possibly such a list could tend to show that NJ words were borrowed into e.g. Clallam, much as CJ terms were (later?) freely borrowed into nearly all Northwest languages.]

In order to avoid the obligations that attend writing an actual book review, I'll just end this note abruptly with part of a poem written by one of the crew members of the Expedition, William Briscoe, during the Northwest portion of the voyage:

     "A problem, a problem, oh! hear great and small
     The true owners of the country are still on the soil
     Whilst Jonathan and John Bull are growling together
     For land which by right belongs not to either..."

Dave
--
"Asking a linguist how many languages she knows is like asking a doctor how many diseases he has!" -- anonymous



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