The Main Stalk: A Synthesis of Navajo Philosophy

By John R. Farella

"Although they are among the most studied people on earth, the Navajo possess a complex philosophy. . . . A valuable source for those deeply interested in the structure of the Navajo universe, its mythology, and its central concept of long life and happiness." —Masterkey

"This is a stimulating book. Essentially, it criticizes previous discussions of Navajo religion and philosophy for greatly underestimating their complexity and sophistication. . . . What the author discovers in Navajo thought is that the key concepts are interrelated in a grand, moral, ethical, philosophic, and cosmic unity." —American Anthropologist

"Discredits dualists, both non-Indian and Indian, who see simplistic oppositions of Good and Evil in Navajo culture and philosophy. The concept of walking in beauty, as related to the proper growth of the corn plant, unifies the book, and Farella does some impressive cross-cultural linguistic analysis to derive practical and ceremonial applications of these central Navajo metaphors. . . . This is one of the better books on Indian religion." —Choice

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 1985
• ISBN: 9780816545827

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PREFACE

THIS BOOK IS a rather radical departure from the study I initially set out to do. At first, I was going to investigate a fairly limited domain (psychosocial aspects of illness etiology) with a rather rigorous and restrictive methodology. Two things happened. The first was the obviousness of psychosomatics to the Navajos. They knew that all illness had a psychosocial etiology and, further, they found it trivial. I ended up doing the study, but it was not particularly interesting or particularly time-consuming. In addition, it did not seem that there was anything to discover. And, being a young anthropologist and curious by nature, I wanted to discover something.

The second thing that happened was my growing general awareness of how little I understood about the native view and especially how the pieces fit together. I knew a lot of details, but I had no sense of the whole. At the same time, Navajos insisted that the world view fit together very nicely and that wholeness was an essential characteristic of that world view. The rather rigorous methodology I was using seemed to be of no help in discovering the pattern; in fact, it seemed to be getting in the way. The methodology was too restrictive; it excluded too much.

I then began to read more of the Navajo ethnography in an attempt to make sense out of things. This got me even more confused. For one thing, it seemed to be made up of bits and pieces with an attempt on the part of the ethnographer to make sense out of the data and put it all together. The Navajos I talked to found these attempts wrong or trivial: Yes, you could look at it that way, if you want to—which implied that that way of looking at things was not very interesting or very correct.

There were some exceptions to this. Most of them are mentioned in the text. Additionally, at about this time I was given a draft of James McNeley’s dissertation (which forms the basis of Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy, published by the University of Arizona Press in 1981). This seemed to be a part of some sort of synthesis of Navajo epistemology. It made sense out of many different pieces by describing one concept.

I had a fairly critical choice to make at this time. To overstate somewhat: I could keep trying harder at what I was doing and keep my restrictive strategy, or I could open up and fairly directly try to make sense out of the whole. This is not a particularly uncommon choice in research of this sort. The restrictive approach guarantees a product and, I think, is becoming more popular in this time when more and more researchers have to justify what they do with grants in terms of guaranteed outcomes. I think this unfortunate; ethnography has usually been a rather wasteful means of discovery, but it is an exceptionally valuable one.

At any rate, I chose to open up the research. My major professor, Oswald Werner, was in Window Rock at the time, so I drove down and talked to him. He was not exactly thrilled by my choice. But, as always, he backed me and, with it, he backed the decision. This is what makes Ossie such a great teacher. He insists on individual choice and responsibility from his students. And, with that, he allows for and respects opinions different from his own. He is very like the Navajos I had as teachers. He and his wife June have been very supportive of me in many ways.

Allen Manning was living on the reservation at this time. He knows a great deal about linguistics, the Navajo language, and Navajo things in general. He was of great help in my investigations, as well as being of help to me in other ways.

My three years of research on the Navajo Reservation (1972–75) were, in part, funded by a National Institute of Mental Health fellowship and a National Science Foundation predoctoral research grant. The Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff allowed me to spend time at their research center and gave me a place to study some of Haile’s manuscripts. Katherine Bartlett and Dorothy House were both of great help. Other people have helped with the general ideas: John Schwartzman in particular with the last chapter; Helen Schwartzman overall, and John Engel with the first chapter. Vasilika Zafer was very helpful in typing the final version. My thanks to MacNeal Memorial Hospital for the use of Ms. Zafer and for letting me use other resources. Kenneth Kessell has been very supportive in this endeavor.

I have a personal debt to two women who, in various ways, shared the fieldwork with me. The first is Leanne Hinton. Thank you, Leanne. The second is my daughter, Lisa Farella, who is my link to the future generations that are so important to the Navajo.

My Navajo teachers are mentioned throughout the text although, for a variety of reasons, I have not used the names by which I knew them. Many other Navajos also deserve my gratitude, but again, not by name.

Finally, thanks to my wife Linda for tolerating my less than charming company while I finished this and for being so generally supportive of me.

I am not sure whether or not this monograph will make sense to the reader totally unfamiliar with the Navajo ethnography. If assistance is needed, the relevant concordance headings in Gladys Reichard’s book Navaho Religion may be helpful.

I also expect that most readers will find my use of Navajo words bothersome or annoying. At one level, my sole intent in this work is to teach the reader the meaning of these terms, and, I know of no other way to do it. Brief translations are certainly not the answer. Nor are temporizing definitions, as for example when a writer says, I will translate X to mean Y, but the reader should keep in mind that it doesn’t really mean Y, or, . . . that it means Y only in a very limited sense. When I read something like this, I certainly do not edit every time I see the word, and I really don’t think anyone else does.

I hope that the reader gets three things out of what follows. First, I would hope that he would come to know something about Navajo philosophy. Second, I would hope that he would come to think that Navajos have some pretty good ideas, rather than just viewing these concepts as one views exhibits in a case. And third, I would hope that the reader will accept the possibility that other peoples in general may have something in the way of philosophy and ideas to teach him.

JOHN R. FARELLA

CHAPTER 1

NAVAJO RELIGION

THE NAVAJOS ARE PROBABLY the most studied group of people in the world. There are hundreds of volumes devoted exclusively to their religion. Included are books on all of the major ceremonials. Some of these are in English; some are published in both Navajo and English. There are published behavioral analyses on everything from what happens in a ceremony to relatively minor aspects of ritual technology. In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts, thousands of hours of audiotapes, films, and photographs, as well as many artifiacts in museums and in private collections.

The two major architects of this ethnography are Father Berard Haile and Gladys Reichard. Reichard’s work emphasized the rather formal presentation of the religion. She was especially interested in the ceremonials and focused her attention on subtleties of ritual symbolism. With this information as a data base, she extrapolated a more general statement on the Navajo philosophical system. In contemporary studies, Victor Turner’s approach is similar to Reichard’s.

Haile was a Franciscan Father who spent over fifty years on the Navajo Reservation. His approach was rather different from Reichard’s. I think he would have seen himself as something of a Boasian empiricist. He was primarily, if not totally, an ethnographer, and he is the ethnographer par excellence. His work is very detailed. He elicited stories (sacred texts) which he would first transcribe in Navajo, then translate literally and finally do a free translation. When there was a cultural or linguistic question or point to be made, he would include a footnote. These footnotes are an ethnography in themselves. Haile’s production is immense; the total runs to hundreds of thousands of pages. Some of his work is published, but most of his texts are used as the basis for other people’s works.

With (or perhaps, because of) the volume, detail, and intricacy of this ethnography, there is a void. There seems to be little sense of central or key symbols and, with that, an absence of how it all fits together. One has the sense of standing too close to a pointillist painting.

The emphasis on detail and concommitant absence of synthesis are not just features of the ethnography of Navajo religion, but are characteristic of the way non-Western, non-major religions have been viewed in general. This stance derives from two basic presuppositions inherent in how we have viewed the philosophy of others. We have, first of all, presumed these religions or philosophical systems to be of a different order of reality than what we call trutha and instead viewed them as systems of belief or even as superstition. The second basic issue is related. It concerns the question of the level of abstraction in an ethnography. That is, are we to take what natives say literally or metaphorically? Related to this is the level at which the native intends his statement to apply. Ultimately, these are both questions about what is to be contained in an ethnography.

TRUTH AND BELIEF

As observers who make commentaries on what we see in the world, we usually distinguish between ourselves and our object of study. As Von Foerster (1970) has pointed out, this is rather more difficult when it is man observing man than it is when men are observing atoms. This level of self-reflection necessarily limits what we can know in the study of man.

A rather different sort of self-reference question is asked in epistemology. Stated simply, a statement about knowledge must be true for itself since the statement itself is knowledge. The simplest example is the statement, All statements are relative. If I accept the truth of the statement, I must take the claim itself as relative; if it is taken to be true it would mean, It is relative that ‘All statements are relative.’ If we deny the statement or if we state Some statements are absolute, we do not have a similar self-reference problem.

When we have studied the religion or world view of others, we have operated on the assumption that the religion is of a different and lesser order of knowledge than the level of analysis we are employing to study it. If, for example, we set out to study the beliefs of another people, we are presupposing that the object of study is not factual. Since belief is of a lesser order of knowledge than is fact, the statement This is what the Navajos believe presupposes, first, that these people are very likely mistaken and, second, that I as an outside observer can in some sense distinguish what is fact from what is questionable.

In this regard we can look at one of the better definitions or formulations of what a religion is:

A system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (Geertz 1973:90)

I take this to be a statement that is not all that provocative and one that most of us who look at the religion of others would generally accept. We may have a few quibbles, but nothing of major consequence.

The latter part of the definition, . . . clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic, has two implications. The first is obvious: the statements in a religion are not true (or for that matter false), but they seem true (to the believers) and are therefore, I should think, unquestioned. The second point is that the definition is presumed (by Geertz) to be of a different sort, or on a different level, than that part of reality to which it refers. One can call it analysis, a definition, interpretation,b or whatever. The definition of religion is assumed not to be a religious statement.

The validity of this assumption, however, is far from obvious. Geertz is more likely saying what a religion seems to him to be. But in stating it, he states it so as to seem to the reader to be uniquely realistic. So it may be that we have a self-reference problem here. If so, we have the same difficulty that we have with All statements are relative. Geertz’s definition makes no sense when applied to itself. Finally, note that the epistemology of others is always labeled by outsiders as world view, religion, or belief.

The only arena in Western society to which Geertz’s statement applies is the domain of science. That is, science seems uniquely realistic to us; and it is perhaps the only world view that does so at a societal level. But Geertz, in the broadest sense, is speaking as a scientist. Is he, therefore, speaking religiously or scientifically or, for that matter, are these areas different?

One could argue that the stance of skepticism that I am applying to Geertz’s statement is characteristically analytical or interpretative; or, in other words, that the skepticism is itself of a higher logical type than the statement itself is. But to this statement we can readily apply the self-reference test. This would amount to nothing more than the absolute acceptance of skepticism as a part of, say, our religion of analysis or of science or whatever. It makes no sense to argue for such absolute acceptance, for I would need to be skeptical of such a statement.

We can go on with this ad infinitum. The process is the same each time. An epistemological claim must, of necessity, be true for itself, as the domain that the statement is claiming to describe includes the statement. A statement of or about philosophy, world view, epistemology, or religion is almost by definition a statement that excludes nothing. It may be (it seems certain to me) that we cannot make a statement of a higher logical type than the religion we are claiming to describe. In the language of anthropology, there may be no such thing as an ethnologic statement; there may be only ethnography. Further, the ethnography becomes a part of the philosophy it claims to describe.¹ It is more exegesis.

I currently teach physicians and medical students. On occasion I talk to them as if what they regard as knowledge (i.e., disease concepts, the efficacy of medical and surgical treatment) were beliefs. For example, I may say something like, You believe that there is such a thing as disease. With some exceptions, this approach upsets them.

The scientist, the Western epistemologist, and the Navajo philosopher are all saying, This is the way the universe is; they are presenting facts and truth, not opinions or beliefs. If we want to do an ethnography of Navajo Religion, we of necessity fail if we at the outset only attempt to catalog beliefs.

Facts or truth are debated, accepted, denied, or modified. They require active participation in the form of judgment on the part of the observer. Beliefs, on the other hand, can be passively collected, but, in doing so, the entire basis of the philosophy (that is, that it is empirical and true) is denied. It is the difference between knowledge as artifact and knowledge as interaction.

If we begin by treating native statements as philosophy or fact rather than belief, we initially create something of a dilemma. For in reading through the literature we find that most of the Navajo statements are unbelievable. They talk about spirits, a variety of gods, monsters, and many other things that we as Westerners trained in a materialistic and scientific epistemology would have difficulty accepting.

This problem presents itself only when we give up on labeling native philosophy as beliefc and, with that labeling, remove it from the critical realm a priori. What we have in the literature on Navajo religion are statements that have been taken very literally. The level of analysis is very akin to the fundamentalist Christians in our own society, who place great emphasis on literal meaning in the Bible.

But, of course, there are other approaches. Some Christians would take the Bible as a metaphorical statement. The references to Satan, for example, can be viewed as a story of an angel who fell from grace and who is physically present in our world or they can be viewed as a metaphorical description of good versus evil.

Natives have been assumed to be fundamentalists. Along with this has gone the assumption that they are cognitively operating at a very literal level. Metaphor, or interpretation, has been the job of the ethnographer and, I think, presumed to be either an entirely different sort of thing than what the native does, or a different level of abstraction than how the native conceptualizes.²

I have a favorite Navajo example of this. Naayéé’ is a rather important concept in Navajo philosophy. In English it is always translated as monster. Further, many of the beings labeled naayéé’ in the stories seem very like monsters. The most common and most correct translation would be something like anything that gets in the way of one’s life. This would include things like depression, poverty, physical illness, worry, or a bad marital relationship. The monsters for some native practitioners are merely the objectification of these relatively intangible entities so as to make them manageable or exorcisable. This is not to imply that there are not fundamentalist Navajos. It is to say that the metaphorical interpretation of the term (although it is really an interpretation of the gloss) is perfectly appropriate in the Navajo context. Furthermore, as already noted, it is the most common usage.

This is an important example, but it is by no means an isolated one. The question, of course, is why has this not been noted? It is not because the knowledge is esoteric or especially secret. On the contrary, it is the most obvious and superficial explanation available.

What has happened is that the basic premise underlying our research on the religion of others—that we must respect their beliefs—has produced unquestioned literal interpretations that can be treated only as if they were beliefs, for from our perspective, they cannot be fact. It creates the native in the image that we presupposed that he would fit.

This emphasis on a literal or concrete level of analysis has a much more troublesome side effect. The questions that philosophy or religion struggles with are important ones. People question birth and death, good and evil, joy and sorrow—in short, the meaning of it all. An emphasis on detail produces reports of ideas that are really not very interesting philosophically, although they are of interest to those who care about pantheons of exotic gods or the itemizing of a religion as another datum for cross-cultural comparisons.

I accept some sort of qualitative measure of, or even evolutionary basis for, epistemology. At a minimum this means that some ideas are better than others. Further, the questions that matter to human beings are shared. We need not just catalog and keep separate the philosophies of peoples x, y, and z; we can question these people on the same issues and see who has the most interesting answer.

The essential point is that we have disqualified much of what others have to offer by taking it too literally. We have treated Navajo philosophy as if its adherents were all fundamentalists. Much of what is offered is less concrete and more in the realm of metaphor.

Beginning with a fact- rather than a belief-based premise in evaluating philosophy forces us to examine different levels of meaning in an attempt to make sense out of what is being said. Treating something as belief can result in a rather passive acceptance and recording of anything that is reported. Examining something as fact requires an active participation in understanding and discovering meaning. To reiterate a previous point: it treats knowledge as interactional rather than artifactual.

LEVELS OF KNOWLEDGE

Related to this is the conception of knowledge as hierarchical and differentiated according to degree or level of abstraction. On a continuum, this view would have concrete ideas at one extreme and synthetic or abstract concepts at the other. Ethnographies have generally focused on very limited aspects of this spectrum. Specifically, they have looked at the very concrete, and they have described ritual.

The concrete end of the continuum used to be referred to as taboo knowledge by anthropologists. For the native with this perspective, mastery of the environment is limited to an awareness of things that are safe and things that are dangerous—that is, things to approach and things to avoid. Such knowledge is always incomplete. A world view based solely on concrete knowledge is too uneconomical to be effective. There are simply too many details to remember, and consequently one must violate one or more of the rules fairly frequently. The emotions that are a part of this way of looking at things are fear and, especially and predominantly, anxiety. Reichard (1970:80) comments on the first of these characteristics, the lack of economy:

If a person knew and heeded them all [the restrictive taboos] he could exist only as a hidebound ascetic, hardly free to do much required by his daily life, or most of his time would be occupied in removing the harmful effects of broken taboos.

One of Reichard’s informants also touches on the uncertainty inherent in such a view:

Causes and mistakes you know about are not bad because you know what to do about them [this anticipates my second level of knowledge], but those you don’t know—they are the ones that are dangerous. (Reichard 1970:82–83)

The world views that Westerners label psychotic seem often to be based on the premise that there is only taboo knowledge. At the level of a culture, there are always a certain number of people who behave on basic premises of taboo in certain areas of their lives. One example is the way that middle-class parents instruct and supervise their children in avoiding the evil things called