Ethnoautobiography kremer

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What happens between the Andean communities of humans, deities and nature is reciprocal dialogue, a relationship which does not assume any distancing and objectification between those dialoguing, but rather an attitude of tenderness and understanding towards the life of the other. Such dialogue does not lead one to a knowledge about the other, but rather to empathize and attune oneself with its mode of being, and in company with that other, to generate and regenerate life. It is a dialogue ... that leads [not to knowledge but] to wisdom. (Rengifo 1993, 168, translation by Apffel-Marglin; also Apffel-Marglin with PRATEC 1998) conceives transpersonal phenomena as (1) events, in contrast to intrasubjective experiences; (2) multilocal, in that they can arise in different loci, such as an individual, a relationship, a community, a collective identity, or a place; and (3) participatory, in that they can invite the generative power and dynamism of all dimensions of human nature to interact with a spiritual power in the cocreation of spiritual worlds. (2002, 117) That revenge may be seen in the way in which the Whites have been mysteriously made aware of the disarray of their own culture, the way in which they have been overwhelmed by an ancestral torpor and are now succumbing little by little to the grip of "dreamtime." This reversal is a worldwide phenomenon. It is now becoming clear that everything we once thought dead and buried, everything we thought left behind for ever by the ineluctable march of universal progress, is not dead at all, but on the contrary likely to return--not as some archaic or nostalgic vestige (all our indefatigable museumification notwithstanding), but with a vehemence and a virulence that are modern in every sense--and to reach the very heart of our ultra-sophisticated but ultra-vulnerable systems, which it will easily convulse from within without mounting a frontal attack. Such is the destiny of radical otherness--a destiny that no homily of reconciliation and no apologia for difference is going to alter. (138) Native American conceptions of the self tend toward integrative rather than oppositional relations with others. Whereas the modern West has tended to define personal identity as involving the successful mediation of an opposition between the individual and society, Native Americans have instead tended to define themselves as persons by successfully integrating themselves into the relevant social groupings--kin, clan, band, etc.--of their respective societies. On the Plains, to be sure, glory and honor were intensely sought out by male warriors who wanted, individually, to be "great men," but even on the Plains, any personal greatness was important primarily for the good of "the people." These conceptions may be viewed as "synecdochic" i.e., based on part-to-whole relations, rather than "metonymic," i.e., as in the part-to-part relations that most frequently dominate Euramerican autobiography. (Krupat 1994, 4) That egocentric individualism associated with the names of Byron or Rousseau, the cultivation of originality and differentness, was never legitimated by native cultures, to which celebration of the hero-as-solitary would have been incomprehensible. (Krupat 1985, 29) natives are not as communal as he might want them to be in theory ... The many ceremonies, shamanic visions, practices, and experiences in native communities are so highly individualistic, diverse, and unique, that romantic reductions of tradition and community are difficult to support, even in theory ... The vision is a separation and disassociation from ordinary time and space, and from traditions. And the recognition of native visions and nicknames must be earned in communities. That, the recognition of a native presence, is a continuous tease in stories. What is mistaken to be tradition is a visionary sovereignty. (Vizenor and Lee 1999, 62) The sovereignty of motion is mythic, material, and visionary, not mete territoriality, in the sense of colonialism and nationalism. Native transmotion is an original natural union in the stories of emergence and migration that relate humans to an environment and to the spiritual and political significance of animals and other creations. Monotheism is dominance over nature; transmotion is natural reason, and native creation with other creatures. (Vizenor 1998, 182-3) Adventurous twentieth-century autobiographers ... no longer believe that autobiography can offer a faithful and unmediated reconstruction of a historically verifiable past; instead, it expresses the play of the autobiographical act itself in which the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of present consciousness. Autobiography in our time is increasingly understood as both an art of memory and an art of imagination; indeed, memory and imagination become so intimately complementary in the autobiographical act that it is usually impossible to distinguish between them in practice. (1985, 5-6) Memory says: Want to do right? Don't count on me. The woodland creation stories are told from visual memories and ecstatic strategies, not from scriptures. In the oral tradition, the mythic origins of tribal people are creative expressions, original eruptions in time, not a mere recitation or a recorded narrative in grammatical time. The teller of stories is an artist, a person of wit and imagination, who relumes the diverse memories of the visual past into the experiences and metaphors of the present. The past is familiar enough in the circles of the seasons, woodland places, lake and rivers, to focus a listener on an environmental metaphor and an intersection where the earth started in mythic time, where a trickster or a little woodland person stopped to imagine the earth. The tribal creation takes place at the time of the telling in the oral tradition; the variations in mythic stories are the imaginative desires of tribal artists. (1984, 7) Identity is bloody business. Religion, nationality, or race may not be the primary causes of war and mass murder. These are more likely to be tyranny, or greed for territory, wealth, and power. But "identity" is what gets the blood boiling, what makes people do unspeakable things to their neighbors. It is the fuel used by agitators to set whole countries on tire. When the world is reduced to a battle between "us and them," Germans and Jews, Hindus and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants, Hutus and Tutsis, only mass murder will do, for "we" can only survive if "they" are slaughtered. Before we kill them, "they" must be stripped of our common humanity, by humiliating them, degrading them, and giving them numbers instead of names. (Buruma 2002, 12) I am on the tracks of my rights of domicile this geography of nocturnal countries where the arms opened for love hang crucified on the degrees of latitude groundless in expectation-- (Sachs 1970, 395; transl. Michael Hamburger)