| The World's Rim: Great Mysteries of the North American Indians |
||
The World's Rim: Great Mysteries of the North American Indians. Foreword by Clyde Kluckhohn. With a new Introduction and Bibliography by Thomas M. Alexander. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1999. Pp. xxxiv + 261. Index, selected bibliography. $8.95 paper. An unabridged reprint of the edition published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1953, this Dover paperback of Alexander's The World's Rim comes as a timely reminder of the sheer scope and energy that characterized Americanist folklore more than half a century ago. Very much of his time and his place, the Nebraskan Alexander (1882-1939) contrived to write luminously about Native American ritual and its deeper symbology and significance, an endeavor assisted both by tireless fieldwork and by extensive reading of, and respect for, native texts. For all the undoubted passion he showed for the idea of American Indian philosophy and its moral lessons for humankind, Alexander was also well versed in the Classical European tradition, as Kluckholm's Foreword reminds us. While at Columbia, Alexander produced a dissertation that dealt with nothing less than The Problem of Metaphysics and the Meaning of Metaphysical Explanation (and he meant "problem" as something that should properly be avoided). His view of Greek culture, of the immediate physical impact of such early rites as those of Eleusis, is definitely post-Nietzschean, and his perception of certain recurrent motifs in the rituals of agricultural societies the world over coincides closely with that expressed in Frazer's classic The Golden Bough. As Alexander neatly observes, "Indian and Ionian meet" in the implicitly Pythagorean understanding of numbers that he detected, for example, in the Sun Dance. Over its eight chapters, The World's Rim takes its reader though an experience and a geography that is chiefly North American. The first four chapters focus respectively on the pan-Indian concepts and functions of the peace-pipe or calumet; the Tree of Life manifest initially as the four posts that sustain the Arikara world; the "Abiding Rock" that first emerged from the Flood of cosmogony; and the Corn Maidens who establish and gender the norms of social intercourse. The second four chapters tend rather to trace the story of a human life, from the "Many children" of the Hako ceremony lovingly recorded by Alice Fletcher, through the ordeals and vigils of such initiations as the Sun Dance and the Mide Wiwin, to the eschatology of the "Last Trail" and the whole question of this and another life, which ends in the songs of the Ghost Dance. Within this framework, The World's Rim is striking for the way that it reveals coherence between diverse languages and cultures, ever striving after the facts of deeper American history---saliently on the question of maize, which "scientific" anthropology would take so long fully to recognize as a millennial triumph of New World intelligence. In this, he takes his cue from Daniel G. Brinton, a predecessor who had founded the Library of Aboriginal American Literature in Philadelphia in 1880 and whose work now languishes in no less a neglect than that of Alexander himself. Hence the genuinely continental scope of his work, and the repeated and telling references to such American classics as the Popol vuh of the Maya-QuichÈ (at that date yet to be translated into English) and to images that he had scrutinized in the Mexican codices (those pre-European books that offer an unrivaled window on what, in his Edwardian way, he called the "great mysteries" of America). In practice, thanks to his close and sensitive reading of Meso-American texts in general, Alexander became far better able than most of his contemporaries to trace and assess the evolutionary strands in Native American thinking and in a theory of creation that the West still has not matched intellectually. Gordon Brotherston |
