Keith H. Basso – författare

This is a remarkable series of personal narrations from Western Apaches before and just after the various agencies and sub-agencies were established. It also includes extensive commentary on weapons and traditions, with Apache words and phrases translated and complete annotation.

'The Whiteman' is one of the most powerful and pervasive symbols in contemporary American Indian cultures. Portraits of 'the Whiteman': linguistic play and cultural symbols among the Western Apache investigates a complex form of joking in which Apaches stage carefully crafted imitations of Anglo-Americans and, by means of these characterizations, give audible voice and visible substance to their conceptions of this most pressing of social 'problems'. Keith Basso's essay, based on linguistic and ethnographic materials collected in Cibecue, a Western Apache community, provides interpretations of selected joking encounters to demonstrate how Apaches go about making sense of the behaviour of Anglo-Americans. This study draws on theory in symbolic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and the dramaturgical model of human communication developed by Erving Goffman. Although the assumptions and premises that shape these areas of inquiry are held by some to be quite disparate, this analysis shows them to be fully compatible and mutually complementary.

Seven essays, collected here for the first time, define some of the central concerns of linguistic anthropology through the close study of Western Apache, a language of astonishing complexity. All of the essays have been revised for this anthology. Basso, a major authority in the field of linguistic anthropology, has drawn on fieldwork at the village of Cibecue, whose residents speak a dialect of Western Apache that is spoken nowhere else. He shows how intricacies of language—place names, metaphor, uses of silence—help a people define their very existence, so that, in the words of one Apache woman, "If we lose our language, we will lose our breath; then we will die and blow away like leaves." His essays amply demonstrate that, while Apache language and culture are changing in response to modernization, they remain intricate, vital and unique. These essays illustrate not only the complexity of a particular cultural world as it has emerged to one observer over a protracted period of intensive fieldwork, but also the natural movement from the study of grammatical categories to that of language use and on to the study of the conceptual system underlying it. Each essay addresses a significant theoretical problem; taken together they constitute a microcosm of the anthropological understanding of language.