Spring 2011

f

the university o

new mexico

beststudentessays

anible costanza davidson lavasek miranda occhino-kehoe ruth vander gailen

The University

of

New Mexico

Best Student Essays Vol. 23, No. I

This issue of Best Student Essays was printed by: Starline Printing 7111 Pan American Highway NE Albuquerque, NM 87109

EDITOR John Erin Reidy

EDITOR DESI G N

and

P HO T O G RA P HY

George Richardson

EDITOR SCIENCE

Kieran Gallagher-Gonzales

EDITORS CO P Y In memory of Scott Frank, BSE editor, 2005–2007

and

RESEARCH

Griffin Arellano Megan E. O’Connor Graeme Prentice-Mott

B U S I N E S S M A N AG E R Jim Fisher Best Student Essays is published biannually by the University of New Mexico Student Publications Board. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the UNM Student Publications Board.

Correspondence may be addressed to: Best Student Essays UNM Student Publications Marron Hall 107, University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131-0001 (505) 277-5656 www.beststudentessays.org This magazine was designed in Adobe InDesign CS5.

Copyright 2011 by The University of New Mexico Student Publications Board.

SPECIAL THANKS Leslie Donovan Daven Quelle Carolyn Souther Chris Quintana, Conceptions Southwest Pat Lohman, The Daily Lobo

C OV E R A R T “Thought Lines” ©2011 By Monique Belitz.

All Rights Reserved.

Word From the Editor

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Word.

Welcome to the New Mexico issue: sparseness, expanses, turquoise.

We love this, our rainless home. This is the nearly impossible task of capturing it with a magazine.

Thanks to the unsung heroes of any magazine, and especially this magazine: its copyeditors. Griffin, Graeme, and Megan, I am honored to call you my staff. Thanks to Dean of University Libraries, Martha Bedard, for her suggestions and generous accommodation. Thanks to Don George for the support. Thanks to all who have accommodated my scarce presence in social settings during the production of this magazine. I intend to make up for it.

On behalf of all BSE editors, past and future and the one writing this now, a big thank you to Jim Fisher. Jim, thank you for all of your advice and ideas. I hope this magazine makes you proud.

In this, our age of digital distraction, literary endeavors often suffer. To all professors and graduate instructors, keep on fighting the good fight of teaching students how to write.

John Reidy, Editor

CONTENTS

VO L . 2 3 N O . I

The Idea of the Primal Conflict in the Work of Art:…………………7 Extraneous or Not? R U S S DAV I D S O N

Nominated by Prof. Iain Thomson (PHIL 480, Philosophy and Literature): “Russ Davidson’s essay is by far the most professional and polished essay I had the pleasure to read last year. A deeply insightful and genuinely impressive piece of work.”

Progressions of Time and Space Photography…………………6|12|20|53|54|55 J O RY VA N D E R G A L I E N

Nominated by Prof. Patrick Manning: “Jory’s work is a powerful examination of the experience of the New Mexico landscape. It uses time and light to embed the viewer in the peculiar spaces of New Mexico and argues for the preservation of beauty.”

Women’s Toolkits:.…………………………………………………….13 Engendering Paleoindian Technology SUSAN RUTH

Nominated by Prof. Bruce B. Huckell (ANTH 699, Disertation): “Sue has created an outstanding investigation of the relationship of women’s roles in organizationally simple hunter-gatherer societies, and stone tools that were highly likely used by women in performing aspects of those roles. She used detailed ethnographic data to provide a foundation for extending her study to late Pleistocene societies by careful analysis of stone tools from several archaeological sites. Her study is innovative and original, and provides an outstanding example of how archaeologists can broaden their inferential base by objectively engendering the prehistoric record of these ancient hunter-gatherers.”

Walking Flowers:...……………………………………………………21 An Insight to the Andean Agrarian Calendar S O N YA L U Z H I N T O N C O S TA N Z A

Nominated by Prof. Andrea Heckman (ANTH 497, Independent Study): “Sonya’s work is outstanding. She is uniquely qualified to work and research further in Pisaq, Peru. She is well-connected to the community and speaks Spanish. She understands Andean culture, Quechua people, and the deeper concepts of Andean life.”

“Finally, a Woman on Paper”...…………………………………………29 1916: A Chapter in the Life of Georgia O’Keeffe L O R I L AVA S E K

Nominated by Prof. David Dunaway (ENG 416, Biography and Autobiography): “New Mexicans know and claim Georgia O’Keeffe as one of our greatest artists; but what forces propelled her here? Few know the back story, and Ms. Lavasek’s essay will fill in needed information about an artist who saw fire in the sky and soul in nature.”

What’s Happening with HAPPEN?………………………………….. 37 A Grammaticalization of HAPPEN in ASL B E N JA M I N A N I B L E a n d C O R R I N E O C C H I N O - K E H O E

Nominated by Prof. Catherine Travis (LING 523, Functional Syntax): “This essay presents an original analysis of the verb HAPPEN in American Sign Language (ASL). This verb is particularly interesting because it has been extended in use to function as a conjunction, to link one usually surprising event to another (something like ‘and so it happens that…’). The findings are based on careful analysis of the use of HAPPEN in spontaneous ASL, a significant departure from most work in ASL linguistics which is based on constructed examples.

Furthermore, the authors draw from several fields (including grammaticalization, pragmatics, and semantic change) to present an insightful and innovative account of the development of this form. This is a truly outstanding piece of work that makes a major contribution to ASL linguistics.”

Superhuman:…………………………………………………………. 45 Cultivating Transcendence on the Bodhisattva Path, and Nietzschean Considerations Thereof K R I S M I R A N DA

Nominated by Prof. Richard Hayes (PHIL 645, Madhyamaka Buddhism): “Kris Miranda’s essay was prepared to be read aloud in a graduate seminar in Indian Buddhist philosophy. Students who study Indian philosophy are encouraged to relate the thinking in ancient and medieval philosophy in India to contemporary western philosophers. This essay accomplishes that task admirably well, presenting a genuine philosophical dialogue between two great traditions.”

Jory Vander Gailen Snow Shower Over Bear Mouth

Progressions

of

Photoessay by Jory Vander Gailen

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Time

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S pa c e

The Idea of Primal Conflict in the Work of Art:

Extraneous or Not? Russ Davidson

“There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

—Leonard Cohen, “Anthem” In his essay on Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Julian Young claims that “the motif of the primal conflict is really extraneous to, and a disfigurement of, the important things ‘The Origin’ has to say about truth and art.”1 He links this motif, and others like it, to Heidegger’s early embrace of Nazi-era rhetoric and highlights that, in 1960, Heidegger himself permanently jettisons it in favor of the more measured Ereignis, or the “primal event.” According to Young, Heidegger made this shift because he realized that as a governing principle, primal conflict was both too overpowering and too restrictive; it over-dramatized the earth-world duality and failed to accommodate, or at least made more problematic, his belated appreciation of artists like Paul Klee and Paul Cézanne.

While Young’s critical reading of Heidegger’s “philosophy” of art is otherwise persuasive, I intend to argue that he is wrong on this point and that the notion of a primal conflict, or struggle between earth and world, goes to the very heart of Heidegger’s views on art (and to his larger call for a poetic openness to reality in all its dimensions). Although in later writings, Heidegger may have expanded his definition of a work of art as his thinking evolved, this move does not undermine or negate his earlier emphasis on the element of the primal conflict. On the contrary, as we will see, he returns to it again and again, perhaps phrasing it differently but always coming back to the fundamental point: at its core, art, or at least great art, is this contained struggle, this interplay of opposite or contradictory forces held with a constant tension.2 What, then, is the “primal conflict”? How does it declare and manifest itself? Why and how does a work of art—be it poem, painting, musical composition, or the product of any genuine artistic medium—give expression to it and bring it out? What lessons does it hold for us? In Heideggerian terms, what does it tell us about the being of our being, that is, about our relation to nature and to all that surrounds us?

In “The Origin,” Heidegger begins by giving us a very broad conception of art, one that comes out of the more primordial world of the pre-Socratic Greeks. Art is whatever brings forth

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truth, whatever discloses and brings us into a communion with the truth of Being. As—in this inclusive Greek sense—the “happening of truth,” the artwork is something which “opens up a world,” and opens it in such a way that we grasp its abiding presence in the “earth.”3 What does Heidegger mean by these terms and how do they interrelate? World is what surrounds us, what “shows up” for us, reveals itself to us.

It is all that we encounter, in all the ways we encounter it, in an active, willing, directional sense. The “opening up of world” is a disclosing to us of what is already there, but not as mere form and matter. As Heidegger writes, “World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being.”4 The artwork brings our world before us, heightening our awareness of and sensitivity to that world.

Yet the artwork does not only open or “set up” a world, it also “sets forth” the earth.5 To understand earth and the role that it plays, and, along with it, the primal conflict, one must first understand how Heidegger defines and employs “truth.” His n great idea of truth is the Greek alètheia, or the “unconcealedness of beings.”6 works of art Unconcealedness, however, implies the earth its opposite, and so, as Heidegger puts it, “truth, in its nature, is normally untruth.”7 As he further explains, hidden from this condition does not mean that truth is ultimately falsehood, but us shines that—viewed phenomenologically— forth it is always also concealment. This dialectic undergirds and envelops earth, for earth is that part, or side, of Being that is closed to us, that lies outside intelligibility and thus eludes all our attempts to dominate it, to bend it to our will and master it conceptually. Nonetheless, in great works of art, the earth—normally hidden from us—shines forth. As Heidegger phrases it in his evocation of Van Gogh’s painting of the pair of peasant shoes, “earth juts through the world.”8 In doing so, however, it preserves its secrets, allowing

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us to glimpse it, if we glimpse it at all, only momentarily, imperfectly, because in its nature, earth is “self-secluding.” Its effect on us is to make us aware that we can never fully capture all there is in nature. In its very unfathomability, out of the veil that it continually draws over itself, earth, for Heidegger, becomes the holy—a kind of deep, poetic understanding of the oneness of Being. In its connection to truth and world, the earth might be thought of as both an unfolding and an enfolding.

Now, if the artwork is the happening of truth, and truth is both unconcealment and concealment, then this opposition must itself reside within the artwork. But in what sense and how? Heidegger states, “It is the opposition of the primal conflict. The nature of truth is… the primal conflict.”9 Art is the quintessential expression of this conflict, because in the artwork, the relationship between world and earth, the counter-play of disclosureconcealment, emergence and withdrawal, are dynamically at work. The conflict, the “essential strife” between earth and world, is the point of contact between the two. Heidegger also refers to this space, wherein earth “juts through world” and “world grounds itself on the earth,” as the “nothing.”10 But this space, the nothing, is an active force, or power. It binds earth and world into a higher unity, bringing the “concentrated agitation” of their conflict into rest or “repose.”11 In Heidegger’s words, “In the strife the unity of world and earth is won.”12 Moreover, the earthworld tension is not just true for the work of art; it permeates all intelligibility. When we understand this, we attain a fuller, richer, deeper grasp of being, a keener sense of the many-sided reality of which we are a part.

Heidegger’s use of words such as “strife,” “agitation,” and “battle” to characterize the relationship between earth and world, and of truth as being “won,” brings us back to Julian Young’s claim that the primal conflict is a kind of inflamed, distorting addendum to the many compelling points which Heidegger makes about truth and art. It is not the earth-world duality per se with which Young finds fault, but rather Heidegger’s view that in all great

art the two necessarily come to presence in conflict. That they do so in some works of art he does not deny, and he agrees with Heidegger that the Greek Temple at Paestum provides such an example. Young, however, cites a great Renaissance painting, Raphael’s “Sixtina” (which, he notes, Heidegger also discusses some two decades after his completion of “The Origin”) as a counter-example. Earth and world, he claims, come to presence in this painting not in conflict but in “a serene harmony with each other.”13 Here, I believe, we have arrived at the crux of the matter—it lies in the way the word “conflict” is to be interpreted. The harmony in Raphael’s painting, the harmony in any work of art, comes about, as Heidegger sees it, because earth and world—those two conflicting forces— achieve a balance, resolve themselves into a unity. In the same way that “truth is untruth,” so agitation is “repose,” that is, it settles itself into repose. Thus earth and world are not, as Young makes them out to be, “hostile forces,” warring against each other as nations do.14 Rather, the universe, or Being-as-such, is born and exists in dialectic. On this score, Young also argues that Heidegger considers Heraclitus’ polěmos—taken as metaphor for the earth-world conflict—to be “warfare,” as though such a designation or interpretation would be further grounds for dismissing the veracity of the primal conflict.

Yet despite his emphasis on strife, on things coming together and breaking apart, Heraclitus is one with Heidegger in seeing a deep structure, a logos, to the cosmos. On the basis of cases like Raphael’s “Sixtina,” however, Young wants to collapse conflict, opposition, into mere difference or contrast.

As I noted, Young ties Heidegger’s motif of the primal conflict to the over-heated militaristic rhetoric of the early Nazi period. While it is entirely possible that on some level a connection existed between the two, the more salient point is that Heidegger, though couching the primal conflict in different terms, continued to give it resonance in his writings well after the mid1930s. Consider, for example, the introductory lines to poem eight of Heiddegger’s “The Thinker as Poet”:

When the mountain brook in night’s Stillness tells of its plunging Over the boulders…15 This poetic image, so stark in its simplicity, is emblematic of the earth-world tension. The water plunges over the boulders in the stillness of the night, but as it falls, as it cascades over the rocks, it does not violate the hushed stillness of the night. On the contrary, it completes it; it makes the stillness stand out. The two elements, night stillness and plunging water, earth and world, are brought into a unity.

Two extremes are harmonized espite his into a single whole.16 Time and again, in other writings, emphasis on strife Heidegger traverses this same eraclitus is one ground. Reality is everywhere marked by the earth-world with eidegger tension. The language may in seeing a deep be softened, made even more poetic, but it still expresses the structure a logos same thought. We can observe this variation in Heidegger’s to the cosmos reading of the German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin, where the primal conflict has not been abandoned, but only renamed. For example, in the essay “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Heidegger writes, referring to man’s existence insofar as he “belongs” to the earth: “But things, of course, stand in opposition. What keeps things apart in opposition and at the same time joins them together, Hölderlin calls ‘intimacy.’”17 Hölderlin’s “intimacy” is a kind of signpost denoting the space in which competing forces, or powers (light and darkness, decay and regeneration, earth and world) battle back and forth in an endlessly repeating cycle. The cycle— the universe—is only maintained because each needs the other as a condition of its own selffulfillment. Heidegger further develops this idea in his essay on Hölderlin’s hymn, “As When On a Holiday,” with reference to its treatment of nature. Nature, the “all-present,” is traced back

by Heidegger to the earlier Greek word phusis.18 Nature, in this sense, is far richer and more encompassing than our later conception of it.

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As Heidegger writes, “[It] is an emerging and an arising, a self-opening, which, while rising, at the same time turns back into what has emerged, and so shrouds within itself that which on each occasion gives presence to what is present.”19 What Heidegger here describes harkens back to truth as alètheia, truth as simultaneous unconcealment and concealment, nature’s truth, its essence, conceived as the embodiment of the ature is far earth-world tension. The richer and more primal conflict has hardly disappeared, because it is encompassing than still present as the space our conception of it around which earth and world encounter and scrape against each other—the space in which, though they occupy different spheres, different regions of being, they are also interlinked.20 Across his many years as a philosopher, as poet-thinker par excellence, Heidegger carried on a long love affair with language, and he typically replaced one pivotal word with another, without, however, altering the sense or meaning they shared in common.

Nature, phusis, earth, Being-as-such—all figure prominently in Heidegger’s lexicon and are used interchangeably, since they stand for the same thing. In similar fashion, Ereignis may have replaced the primal conflict, but the earth-world tension still animates it, still lives and breathes within it. In his poetic vision of the great artwork, Heidegger sought to go beyond aesthetics. Aesthetics was the province of beauty. Yet the word beauty, too—depending on the meaning put on it—can equally express Heidegger’s idea of the essence of art: “Beauty is a matter of pressure, within it, you have to feel thrusts and strains, and yet be at rest.”21

Notes 1

Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 64.

2

Midway through “The Origin,” Heidegger makes it clear that he is concerned only with “great” art, for example, with art that is significant for a people as a whole. Great art must be interwoven with life, be expressive of how we act upon the world and how the world in turn acts upon us. Only in this way will it possess wide-ranging culturalhistorical importance. With the advent of the modern age, art fell under the sway of aesthetics. Decoupled from the world and reduced to the status of a mere object, the artwork became nothing more than a museum piece. See Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971): 19, 29, 39, and passim.

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Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 33, 43–45.

4

Ibid, 43.

5

Ibid, 45.

6

Ibid, 49.

7

Ibid, 53.

8

Ibid, 47.

9

Ibid, 53.

10

Ibid, 33, 47.

11

Ibid, 56.

12

Ibid, 61.

13

Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 62.

14

See note 60, in Ibid, 63.

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Martin Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 10. The ten poems in this slim collection were evidently composed in 1947, two years after the trauma of Germany’s catastrophic defeat.

16

A parallel image, and thought, is subtly suggested in the last stanza of poem two: To think is to confine yourself to a Single thought that one day stands Still like a star in the world’s sky.

In addition to expressing Heidegger’s belief that the thinker, if he wants his thoughts to endure, must fend off the noise of the world and devote himself to one abiding idea, the lines tell us that if we think long enough and deeply enough, we will enter into Being in the way that a star is balanced in the sky— though it seems to be standing at a fixed point, it is really moving, but is at rest in its movement, its agitation. The star, like the jostling of earth and world, is suspended in a unified field of motion. See Ibid, 4.

17

Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000): 54.

18

Martin Heidegger, “As When On a Holiday,” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 79.

19

Ibid.

20

This space, also identified above as the “nothing,” is like the “phenomenological bridge” which, as Thomson explains, Heidegger is trying to construct between a particular work of art, like Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes, and the “ontological” truth of art as a whole. See Iain Thomson, “Heidegger’s Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/heidegger-aesthetics/, pp. 43–50. Accessed 10/25/2010.

21

The words are Norman Maclean’s, from The Norman Maclean Reader. Ed. O. Alan Weltzien (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008): 215.

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Jory Vander Gailen Train Rock

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Women’s Toolkits: Engendering Paleoindian Technology

Susan Ruth

Abstract North American Paleoindian archaeology has focused largely on big-game hunting and weapons manufacture during the late Pleistocene–early Holocene transition, approximately ten thousand years ago. While weapons manufacture and big-game hunting are assumed to have been performed

by Paleoindian men, far less is known about Paleoindian women’s activities and the tools they used.

Part of the reason for this bias toward males stems from the spectacular fluted Clovis and Folsom spear points unique to this time period. Other scholars assert that women’s activities are simply not visible in the archaeological record because women used mainly organic rather than stone implements, leaving few archaeological residues (e.g., Thomas 1983:439). Adovasio et al. (2007) propose that the problem lies not with archaeological invisibility, but with a failure to recognize the material traces of women’s activities. The ethnographic and historic records provide a means of recognizing women’s prehistoric labor and determining whether, and to what degree, women participated in the stone tool technologies. Drawing on cultural examples from around the world, I demonstrate that Paleoindian women could have used stone tools and may have produced stone implements. This possibility— compelling and largely unexamined—sheds new light on the role of Paleoindian women in North America’s past.

Women and Stone Tools: A Cross-Cultural Review Technological organization is defined as the set of strategies for procuring, designing, manufacturing, using, transporting, maintaining, storing, recycling, and discarding tools. In this essay, I present a cross-cultural review of the ethnographic, historic, and modern literature on women’s tool use, revealing that women participated in all aspects of technological organization. The results indicate that women employed a variety of production techniques to produce expedient flakes, choppers, and unifacial tools (worked on one face), for use in hide working, wood working, butchering, tattooing, scarification, and other tasks. The following detailed review of women’s quarrying, transport, stone tool manufacture, use, and maintenance, suggest that Paleoindian women could have been active participants in technological organization.

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Women’s Stone Quarrying and Transport Ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts indicate that women quarried stone using a variety of techniques. Today, among the Konso of Ethiopia, women procure toolstone and manufacture their own scrapers for working hides (Weedman 2002). Khoi women of southern Africa also manufacture hide processing tools and travel five to ten kilometers to ungei men of collect toolstone (Webley 1990). At quarries, Khoi highland ew women excavate stone uinea quarry using an iron digging stick and determine suitability alone for raw by throwing stones against material to boulders to expose the interior. Women then use make stone axes smaller stone to remove fearing female sharp edges that could tear the animal skin. Ling contamination (1899:151) describes a group quarrying hornfels in nineteenth-century Tasmania: “There were twenty or thirty of them; men, women, and children. They were breaking the stones into fragments, either by dashing them on the rock or by striking them with other stones, and picking up the sharp edged ones for use.” In her autobiography (1990), Mourning Dove, the Salishan novelist, writes, “The granite around the falls had many uses. Women gathered the slabs on the east to make knives, scrapers, and other tools for turning deer hide into buckskin.

The women made these scrapers by hitting the edges of a granite slab against a flat rock.” In British Columbia, Tahltan women also collected their own pebbles for producing hide-softening tools (Albright 1984).

In addition to quarrying, women are known to have transported toolstone. Historically, Australian aboriginal women transported stone from which men manufactured waddies or hunting sticks (Plomley 1966). In the 1980s, Jones and White (1988:61, 83) observed that Australian aboriginal men flaked and prepared lithic material at stone quarries, and women transported the rock away from the quarries in

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bark paper bundles. Among the modern Dani of highland western New Guinea, women never quarry, but provision men with food at quarry sites and transport biface blanks (unfinished implements) made at the quarry back to the residences (Hampton 1999:235). Tungei men of highland New Guinea quarry alone for raw material to make stone axes, fearing female contamination. After the quarrying is complete, men escape the quarry in a “ritual flight,” after which women burn down the male huts, beat the men, and transport the unfinished axes back to the main camp in net bags (Burton 1984:235, 242).

Women’s Stone Tool Manufacture, Use, and Maintenance Examples of women’s stone tool manufacture, use, and maintenance come from Australia, New Guinea, North America, South America, Africa, and island contexts. The woman’s knife (yilugwa) from central Australia was a coarsely flaked quartzite blade hafted onto a mass of porcupine grass resin (Allchin 1957:125).

A similar tool, the Australian woman’s knife from the Warramunga and Kaitish tribes, was a quartzite flake set in a spinifex gum similar in form to the Upper Paleolithic grattoir, or endscraper (Noone 1949:146). Australian women’s knives were used for a variety of purposes. In addition to the yilugwa, Australian women made extensive use of expedient stone flakes, sharp stone fragments removed from a core or cobble. These implements were used in the recent past by aboriginal women for a variety of tasks such as butchering game and finishing wooden bowls.

In western Australia, sharp stone flakes were used by women in the manufacture of kangaroo garments and bags (Bird 1993), and in Tasmania, flakes were used by women for cutting hair and cicatrisation (Ling 1899:124, 126). Central Australian women used flakes for severing umbilical cords (Mountford and Harvey 1941:158), and in Queensland, women used them for bloodletting (Moore 1979:107).

In aboriginal women’s wood working, hatchets or blocks of stone were traditionally

used, especially in the manufacture of digging sticks. Women continue to work wood today, but the traditional implements have been replaced by metal tools. In nineteenth-century Tasmania, women used stone chopping implements for hunting small game and climbing (Ling 1899:148–149). Remarking on Tasmanian early stone tool manufacture, Tylor (1894:142) writes, “I learnt that Tasmanian women carry a quoit-like stone, four to six inches across, chipped about two-thirds round the edge, for notch-climbing trees; women would carry good ones.” More recently, Hayden (1979:29–34, 39– 41, 110–120) describes Australian women of the southern Victoria Desert using and retouching chopping implements to manufacture wooden tools. Stone hatchets used in plant and animal procurement were both made and used by women in the Kimberly region of western Australia and among Tiwi women of northern Australia (Dickson 1981:3).

Australian women are also known to have used, modified, and transported digging stones.

An interesting reduction technique used by nineteenth-century Tasmanian women to manufacture digging stones was reported by Plomley (1966:897): “Their method of working stone to this shape appeared to me ingenious.

The women I saw made a wet mark with their finger with a little spittle in the direction they wanted it broken. They then put the edge of the stone in a small fire of charcoal, and when sufficiently warm tapped it with a small stone and it broke in the direction required.” Another account of Australian women’s stone tool use was written by Love (1942), an early missionary at Ernabella, in the Musgrave Ranges. Six women, led by a skilled fifty-year-old woman, cooperated in making a bowl from a felled tree.

The women collected large and small stones to act as axes in the initial shaping of the wood.

One of the women worked at chopping the wood with an infant under her arm.

Among the modern-day Bimin-Kuskusmin of highland Papua New Guinea, adult women use small stone axes for hunting, though this occurs only occasionally (Poole 1981:122).

In the case of the modern-day Dani, women

use stone axes or adzes for splitting firewood.

In the Arawe Islands, off the coast of New Britain, men and women flaked stone, with women using simple flaking techniques to produce thin, sharp blades for bloodletting and tattooing (Bird 1993:26). Stone tools were also used by women to process sago in the Papuan Gulf (Rhoads 1980:27).

Historically, stone scrapers were used by women to prepare skins in Patagonia, southcentral Chile, and southwestern Argentina. The stone scrapers were sometimes hafted onto a bent branch or fitted transversely into a block of wood and secured with resin. Patagonian women also used sharp knives to cut animal skins to produce fur robes (Lothrop 1929:11).

Hafted stone tools used by Alaskan and northern Canadian women are well known.

Historically, the woman’s knife or ulu, now made of steel, was typically made of ground slate or flaked flint (Murdoch 1892:161–164). The ulu, used for general purposes, was considered the property of a woman. Another well-known implement of Alaska and northern Canada is the stone skin scraper or ikuun. Historically, the ikuun consisted of a blunt stone blade socketed in a haft of ivory or wood. This tool was used for multiple steps in the hide-working process, he women including removing flesh and fat from a skin, breaking the collected large grain, and hide softening. and small stones Murdoch noted that women “appear to do most if not all to act as axes in of this work” (1892:294).

Tahltan women of northern the initial shaping British Colombia and Dene of the wood women of the Mackenzie Basin manufactured stone tools that were hafted onto long pole handles and used to soften moose, deer, and caribou skins (Pokotylo and Hanks 1984:58). Hafted stone hide-softening tools were passed down from generation to generation as heirlooms, with some reputed to be 100 years old (Albright 1984:58).

Examples of chipped-stone tool use have been documented in temperate North America as well. The numerous stone end-scrapers

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found on late prehistoric sites on the Great Plains have been interpreted as hide-working tools and are thought to have been used by women. In historic times, at the height of the American bison fur trade, hide working was an important economic activity and was predominantly performed by women (Weltfish 1965). The elkhorn scraper was used by Plains women to process bison hides, and consisted of an L-shaped elk antler with a stone scraper or metal bit hafted to the working end (Weltfish 1965:369). Hans efore the (1907:161), the frontier scout introduction of and gunslinger, described the Sioux woman’s implement for metal women scraping bison hides: “She used may have carved a small implement made of flint of the general shape of an adze, these objects but much smaller. It has a short handle of elk-horn firmly tied with stone on with a rawhide string, and is implements used in one hand.” Ethnographic descriptions indicate Cheyenne (Grinnell 1923), Blackfoot (Ewers 1945:10), and Sioux (1907:161) women used chippedstone bits in elkhorn scraper handles to process bison hides.

Other instances of women’s stone tool use in North America have been documented as well.

Like Australian women, Pawnee, Blackfeet, Assiniboine, Cheyenne, and Hidatsa women made wooden bowls (Grinnell 1923:212).

Pawnee women made all the wooden implements they needed, including ladles, spoons, hiku sticks (multipurpose implements), wooden brackets, and pestles (Weltfish 1965:382–383). Before the introduction of metal, women may have carved these objects with stone implements. Cheyenne midwives used and preserved flint knives to cut a newborn’s umbilical cord (Grinnell 1902:15), and women often trimmed children’s hair with a stone flake (Mason 1895:45). Sioux women would sometimes cut themselves with flint knives as a sign of mourning (Mason 1924:252). Among the Huron, women used stone hoes shaped by percussion flaking in preparing maize fields (Fowler 1946). Holmes (1919:170) cites an

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instance on an early expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the 1800s in which native women were observed pressure flaking arrow points.

Women continue to use chipped-stone tools today. South African women make stone tools called //khom in Nama, used to remove fat from animal skins (Webley 1990). Among the Konso and Wolyata of Ethiopia, women procure toolstone and manufacture their own stone scrapers for processing the skins of goats, sheep, and cattle (Weedman 2002). Konso hide workers use scrapers made of stone, glass, and iron fixed onto a shaft with resin mastic.

Implications for Paleoindian Studies The preceding examples of women’s chippedstone tool use make it clear that women in traditional societies quarried for stone, as well as manufactured, used, maintained, and transported stone tools. In historic and modern contexts, women have been reported making and using expedient stone flakes, choppers, simple axes, and unifacial scrapers using bipolar, anvil, and direct percussion reduction techniques. The literature does not include many examples of women making bifaces, very thin implements, or tools with complex outlines, which Bamforth and Finlay (2008) suggest are indicative of a high degree of flint-working skill. Despite the relative simplicity of the forms that women are known to produce, the review does suggest that women are knowledgeable about toolstone characteristics and reduction techniques, and are skilled in producing and using the forms that were required. The review also suggests that early stone technologies might not have been exclusive to men, and that women could have been active participants in technological organization.

More specifically, many of the stone tools that have been produced and used by women are hide-working implements. Paleoindian stone end-scrapers, often exhibiting hide working wear, could have been an important component of women’s toolkits, with Paleoindian women quarrying, producing, using, and maintaining these tools. In addition, women might have

used differing strategies for quarrying and producing stone tools than men, potentially affecting patterns in the archaeological record.

The results of this review indicate that Paleoindian women’s activities are not necessarily invisible, and that women could have played a much greater role in technological organization than previously recognized. Further investigation of Paleoindian women’s activities has the potential to enrich understanding of Paleoindian lifeways and illuminate future avenues of research into technological organization.

References Adovasio, J. M., O. Soffer and J. Page 2007 The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory. Harper Collins, New York.

Albright, S. L. 1984 Tahltan Ethnoarchaeology Publication 15. Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia.

Allchin, B. 1957 Australian Stone Industries, Past and Present. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 87(1):115–136.

Bamforth, D. B. and N. Finlay 2008 Introduction: Archaeological Approaches to Lithic Production Skill and Craft Learning. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 15(1):1–27.

Bird, C. F. M. 1993 Woman the Toolmaker: Evidence for Women’s Use and Manufacture of Flaked Stone Tools in Australia and New Guinea. In Women in Archaeology: A Feminist Critique, pp.

22–30, Canberra, Australia.

Burton, J. 1984 Quarrying in a Tribal Society. World Archaeology 16(2):234–247.

Dickson, F. P. 1981 Australian Stone Hatchets: A Study in Design and Dynamics. Academic Press, Sydney.

Ewers, J. C. 1945 Blackfeet Crafts. In Indian Handicraft Pamphlet No. 9. United States Indian Service.

Fowler, W. S. 1946 The Hoe Complex of the Connecticut Valley. American Antiquity 12(1):29–34.

Grinnell, G. B. 1902 Cheyenne Woman Customs.

American Anthropologist 4(1):13–16.

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1923 The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.

Hampton, O. W. 1999 Culture of Stone. Texas A & M University Press, College Station.

Hans, F. M. 1907 The Great Sioux Nation: A Complete History of Indian Life and Warfare in America.

Ross and Haines, Minneapolis.

Hayden, B. 1979 Palaeolithic Reflections. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.

Holmes, W. H. 1919 Handbook of Aboriginal American Antiquities: Part I. In The Lithic Industries, edited by J. W. Powell. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 60., Washington D.C. Jones, R. and N. White 1988 Point Blank: Stone Tool Manufacture at the Ngilipitji Quarry, Arnham Land 1981.

In Archaeology with Ethnography: An Australian Perspective, edited by B. Meehan and R. Jones, pp. 51–87. Occasional Papers in Prehistory, No. 15. Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, the Australian National University, Canberra.

Hampton, O. W. 1999 Culture of Stone. Texas A & M University Press, College Station.

Ling, R. H. 1899 The Aboriginees of Tasmania. second ed. F. King and Sons, Halifax.

Love, J. R. B. 1942 Primitive Method of Making a Wooden Dish by Women of the Margaret Range. Transactions of the Royal Society South Australia 66(2):215–217.

Lothrop, S. K. 1929 The Indians of Tierra del Fuego.

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Contributions from the Museum of the American Indian, Vol. 10, New York.

Mason, O. T. 1895 The Origins of Invention: A Study of Industry Among Primitive Peoples. Walter Scott, London.

1924 Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture.

D. Appleton, New York.

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Mountford, C. and A. Harvey 1941 Women of the Adnjamatara Tribe of the Northern Flinders Ranges, South Australia.

Oceana 12(2):155–162.

Mourning Dove 1990 Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography. Edited by Jay Miller. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Murdoch, J. 1892 Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. Noone, H. V. V. 1949 Some Implements of the Australian Aboriginees with European Parallels. Man 49(October):111–114.

Plomley, N. J. B. 1966 Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829–1834. Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart.

Pokotylo, D. L. and C. C. Hanks 1989 Variability in Curated Lithic Technologies: An Ethnoarchaeological Case Study from the Mackenzie Basin, Northwest Territories, Canada. In Experiments in Lithic Technology, edited by D. S. Amick and R. P.

Mauldin, vol. 528. BAR International Series, Cambridge.

Poole, F. J. P. 1981 Transforming “Natural” Woman: Female Ritual Leaders and Gender Ideology among Bimin-Kuskusmin. In Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, edited by S. B. Ortner and H. Whitehead, pp. 116–165. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Rhoads, J. W. 1980 Through a Glass Darkly: Present and Past Land-Use Systems of Papuan Sago-palm Users. Unpublished P.D. Dissertation, The Australian National University.

Thomas, D. 1983 Gatecliff Shelter. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 59, Part 1. American Museum of Natural History, New York.

Tylor, E. B. 1894 On the Tasmanians as Representatives of Paleolithic Man. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 23:141–152.

Webley, L. 1990 The Use of Stone Scrapers by Semisedentary Pastoralist Groups in Namaqualand, South Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin 45:28–32.

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Weltfish, G. 1965 The Lost Universe. Basic Books, New York.

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Jory Vander Gailen

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The Departing Winter Storm

Walking Flowers: An Insight to the

Andean Agrarian Calendar

Sonya Luz Hinton Costanza

Their language is Quechua, they live in what we now know as Peru, and these indigenous people of the Andes call themselves Runas—human beings. Their history runs deep and has made significant contributions to the world as we know it today. They implemented astronomy as a tool for hunting migratory animals, and to develop a relationship with weather patterns. When agriculture came about, astronomy became an even more important tool for human beings to interconnect with nature. From astronomy came math, and in Andean cosmology Pi was developed 2000 years before the Greeks knew of this concept (Milla Villena 134–40). Science is rational and verifiable; it can also be filled with tenderness and poetry, as is demonstrated in Andean cosmology, architecture, agriculture, and weaving patterns, which require significant mathematical equations. The Andean agrarian calendar includes all of these in the rituals and ceremonies woven into a relationship with the land, plants, animals, and cosmos.

Andean spirituality is based on common sense and reciprocity. Humans, animals, and nature spirits are all part of an equal, interconnected, and interdependent family. There are three worlds, or levels in which this interconnected family lives: the underworld ucu pacha, the physical world kai pacha, and the world above, or spirit world hanan pacha. All connect to form Pacha—reality.

Pachakama is pure, potent energy, the male aspect of divinity, while Pachamama is the female aspect of divinity, manifested in all things including rocks and stones, rivers, lakes and oceans, plants, animals, human beings, and the planets and stars. In Andean life, fertility is a necessary component of survival, and the female is traditionally respected as equal to the male. Apus, or mountains, and bodies of water are revered as sacred entities; the life force energy of these nature spirits is recognized as having a powerful presence. However, there is not a hierarchal system of worship; it is out of respect and gratitude that these entities are paid homage to, just as in a healthy family dynamic the grandparents are revered.

The primary role of Andean spirituality and ritual is to keep the universe in balance and harmony.

This harmony depends on reciprocity between people, animals, and nature on all levels of reality, or Pacha.

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The Andean people are not a romantic culture of days gone by. Evolution has occurred throughout their history, but the descendants of the Inca, Chimu, Tiwanaku, Wari, and Chavin cultures live today with the same basic philosophy of the interrelationship between human, animal, and nature as they have for millennia. This overview of the Andean agrarian cycle is an attempt to demonstrate just that.

Much of the information I have had the fortune to collect over several months spent in Pisac and the Sacred Valley near Cusco, Peru, combining personal observations, conversations with Fielding Wood and Roman Vizcarra, who have dedicated their lives to reviving and preserving armony traditional Andean practices, depends on and notes from Roman’s lectures during cultural tours. reciprocity As a guideline, I have followed between people chapter eleven of the months of the year of Guamán Poma animals and de Ayala’s New Chronicle for a nature on all Good Government, written in 1615 as an explanation and levels of reality protest to the king of Spain. or acha Although this chronicle never reached Spain, it has been a valuable resource as it is one of the few historical accounts recorded from an indigenous perspective. Additional resources are as noted.

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June In the Qoyllur Rit’i Snow Star (a meteorite that fell in the snowy peaks) Pilgrimage, a weeklong ritual that takes place in early June, ice blocks from the glacier of the highest and most sacred peak in Peru, Apu Ausangate, are sacrificially taken and brought down to the fields below to ensure the survival of the crops for the season to come. Some of this water is also reserved for ritual purposes throughout the year. Due to the climatic temperature increase in the past few decades, the glacier has receded to such an extent without regenerating that pilgrims have to take smaller and smaller pieces of ice each year. This ritual notes the return of the Pleiades constellation after its absence of about forty-five 22 | Best Student Essays

days each year, and is a festival of renewal just before the most important day in the Andean calendar, June 21, the winter solstice and New Year (Randall 1987a; Zuidema 1981:3 as cited in Heckman 117).

In the southern hemisphere the winter solstice marks the return of the sun and is a time of welcoming Inti, the father sun. It is a time for reciprocating with the sun at its smallest stage by lighting bon fires in the night as an offering.

We are sacred when we give, so this is an act of giving back what has been received from the sun—warmth and light.

Although June 21 is the date of the winter solstice (when the time between sunrise and sunset is the shortest of the year and subsequently begins to lengthen until the equinox in September) for the southern hemisphere, the actual date varies because the Gregorian calendar is not correlated to astronomical phenomena and cycles of nature.

The pre-Columbian peoples of the Andes had precise ways of determining the exact day of the return of the sun. All sacred archeological Inca monuments are landmarks built as observatories that make use of sunlight and shadows to measure celestial movements for the sake of timing agricultural practices and the rituals that accompany them. In these numerous observatories shadow or light will fall in an exact way, passing across targets and designs to complete or create an image with the stones or natural landscape aligned with solstices and equinox sunrise or sunset. In Pisac, the light from the June solstice sunrise hits a rock carved in the shape of half a chakana (related to the Southern Cross constellation) so that its shadow creates the other half on the ground, completing the shape on this special day.

In Guamán Poma’s chronicle (248), his drawing depicts the Inca saluting the sun while drinking chicha, ritual corn beer. A winged creature with the body of a cat and a human’s face flies up to offer chicha to the sun. As Guamán Poma states, this is the time of resting from the harvest. June is the end of the potato harvest and one of the coldest and driest months of the year.

July Because of the proximity to the equator, the temperature in the Andes stays relatively moderate throughout the year, except in the highest elevations where glaciers form and remain all year round. In the mid elevations, 11–16,000 feet, a light frost covers the ground at night in June and July. This makes for the perfect climate to freeze-dry the potatoes, called chuño, to store for use throughout the year. The people of the Andes were the first to develop the technique of freeze-drying, and the word jerky comes from the Quechua charki, sun-dried llama meat. July is the time to store food and make chuño and charki, as well as the time of the animals’ birthday (Heckman 181).

Andean people have a deep relationship with their animals. Their lives depend on them and the animals in turn depend on humans to take care of them. Llamas are decorated with tassels on their ears and revered as family. On the day for the animals, flutes are played in the corral and everybody dances among the llamas and alpacas, showering them with flowers.

“An atmosphere of happiness and love prevails between people and animals in hope that the bond between them and the spirit world will continue to be strong, that the animals will remain healthy and multiply under divine protection” (Bolin 65).

Llamas have been employed as beasts of burden in Andean life for centuries. There are pictographs of llamas on the rocks near Chahuaytiri in the Altura de Pisac that date back to 5,000 BCE, and the first evidence of llama domestication is dated between 4,500 and 3,100 BCE (Bolin 69). They are still an integral part of life. Their wool is spun and woven into rope, carrying cloths, and clothing (alpaca wool is softer, so better for clothing, but they are smaller so not useful as pack animals), the dung is used to fertilize the fields and as fuel for fires, pelts are used as beds, their bones are carved into weaving tools, and their meat is eaten fresh, or made into charki. When a llama dies every part of the animal is used. The dried fetuses of miscarried llamas are also used in ceremonial ways, such as burying one in the foundation of

a house under construction to ensure blessings on the home.

According to the chronicle of Guamán Poma (250), July is the month when the land is inspected and distributed. In traditional Andean communities, the ownership of land is as it has been for centuries: the people own the land and the title belongs to the community. If s traditional one family does not practices fall away cultivate the land and leaves it fallow for under the influence of more than a few years, it will be taken back modern agribusiness by the community farmers are being and given to another family. Each family is pressured to use responsible for their crops, but the whole fertilizers for greater community helps one crop yields and another in communal continuous land use work days called faena.

When one person needs help working on their house, harvesting their crop, tilling the soil, or any other activity, others in the community will come to his or her aid and the favor will be returned. This act of reciprocity, on which the basis of Andean life depends, is called ayni, or minka.

Crops are rotated, and every three years fields are left empty for a season to rest and regenerate to ensure the soil is never depleted.

Thus, no chemical fertilizers are needed.

However, as these traditional practices fall away under the influence of modern agribusiness, farmers are being pressured to use fertilizers for greater crop yields and continuous land use.

Many of the tubers, maize, and chilies much of the world uses today originated in these lands from these ingenious farmers. They did not use chemicals to enhance their crops then, and do not need them now, as long as they are left to their methods of agro-biodiversity.

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August Guamán Poma (252) depicts four men working together to turn the soil with woodenhandled, metal digging tools. A woman in the Best Student Essays | 23

background brings them chicha. August is the month for preparing the soil for planting. The tools in the drawings are much like the tools still used today. The men use these to penetrate the earth and loosen the soil and the women use a smaller pick-like tool to break up the clumps and remove old roots and rocks.

Part of preparing the earth for planting is physical work, but spiritual work must also be done, in the form of offering ceremonies.

Despachos are ritual offerings made to the earth for the thirst and hunger that Pachamama is experiencing (Heckman 181) at the height of the dry ue to the war season. The Andean peoples on drugs and the are very practical in their beliefs; everything they do misunderstanding can be traced back to the of or total lack simple need for survival in an unstable climate. What of regard for may seem to an outsider to be superstition is sincere to them, the traditional since the spirituality of the Andes is based on reciprocity use of coca it is and mutual aid. They see becoming scarce the “world as a ‘living’ and interrelated whole of which man is only a part” (Salazar, Salazar 86).

Despachos are ways of communicating with the various Apus, and to Pachamama with special requests for health, abundance, or other needs.

Every ritual specialist who conducts a despacho will have his or her own style and ingredients for preparing the offering, but one element will almost always be consistent throughout all the regions: the sacred coca leaf (Erythroxylum coca).

Coca has been used since pre-Incan times and is still used by the Quechua and Aymara peoples of the Andes as a ritual tool and practical food source in everyday life. Dried coca leaves are chewed during tiring work to alleviate fatigue and hunger. They are high in nutritional value, and help to assimilate carbohydrates, which are the mainstay of the Andean diet (Salazar, Salazar 7). Coca also brings ritual to daily activity: when two or more people meet to discuss a matter of importance, perform a task or ceremony together, or even a day of

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work in the fields, the very first thing they do is exchange coca leaves while whispering offerings to Pachamama and Pachakama, and best intentions for the person to whom the leaves are offered. This may take several minutes or hours to complete, depending on how many people are present, but nothing of importance can begin until this ritual exchange takes place. Due to the war on drugs and the misunderstanding of, or total lack of regard for the traditional use of coca, it is becoming scarce “and subject to more stringent control, [so] this ritual frame is increasingly difficult...to maintain” (Allen 213).

September The female principle and fertility are thought to go underground as the Pleiades disappear from the night sky in April. As mentioned, the Pleiades returns in mid-June, but the male principle is dominant all through the dry season until September, when the female principle returns. Guamán Poma’s Chronicle (254) calls September “Quya Raymi Killa, month of the feast of the queen, or quya.” Killa is the moon, the female principle of the cosmos. September is the beginning of the planting season and “the only month dedicated exclusively to women” (Zuidema 1990; Randall 1990, as quoted in Heckman 181). September 22 is the spring equinox when the sun crosses the equator moving southward, and the first day of the season of spring.

In Qenko, the temple of the moon, just outside Cusco, a stone cat face, representing a puma, lies on the ground. The eyes of the puma protrude, and on the June solstice the sunlight comes through in such a way that only these protruding eyes are illuminated. The rest of the face remains in shadow. On the September equinox exactly half of the puma face is illuminated; equinox means equal, half and half (Milla Villena 289).

October The drawing in Guamán Poma’s Chronicle (256) shows the people crying and looking toward the sky and moon as they approach a

llama. October is the month to ask the black llama to bring water as rain for the crops, and tears to help humans cry. The black llama is a constellation in the sky formed by a large dark streak in the Milky Way with two bright stars as its eyes. The great black llama is believed to be “instrumental in the actual control and stabilization of the cosmological cycle of water” (Bolin 57). In the rainy season the llama appears to be drinking the water from the lakes and oceans to prevent flooding, and when it is time for it to rain again, she urinates to sustain the crops. The common crops typically planted in the Andes include many varieties of potatoes and corn, tarwi (Lupinus mutabilis), kiwicha (Amaranthus caudatus), barley, and quinoa.

Planting continues and early rains are possible in October (Heckman 181–2).

November November is the time of honoring the ancestors.

A dance called Machulas wakes up the ancestors to bring the rain, and honors the first people: giants in charge of populating the area and forming the geography by hurling rocks with sling shots to create a mesa or valley. When the sun first came into the world it blinded them and they retreated underground into lakes and caves. The first ancestors are considered spirits of the lakes. The dancers wear masks of animal hair and appear to have hunched backs under their ponchos in the image of the elders. They carry canes or walking sticks which are used to pound on the earth, as well as create loud thundering sounds when two dancers hit their sticks together. The ancestors are woken up by these sounds, and honored as the dancers emulate the wisdom, strength, and power achieved only through experience of living a long time. The Machulas dance celebrates death as part of life, not the end, but a continuation of the cycle.

The ancestors are the seeds to the future; life will come again from the ancient ones. The elders and ancestors are revered through dances to this day by those who preserve and revive traditional interconnection to the cycles. The rains begin.

Guamán Poma’s illustration (258) demonstrates the actual parading of mummies

through the streets as a way to honor the ancestors and the connection of this world, kai pacha, to the underworld, ucu pacha, and the world above, hanan pacha.

December Recognition of the ancestors continues into December as well. The sun, as depicted in Guamán Poma’s illustration (258), dons whiskers of an old man. He is at his fullest and dominates the sky. His maturity and wisdom are revered as he shines the brightest on and around December 21, the summer solstice, when the sun is farthest north and the time between sunrise and sunset is the longest of the year. The astronomical observatories were used throughout the year to monitor the movement of the stars, but the solstices and equinoxes were the most dramatic celestial events. Like the winter solstice in June, December is a time to note the exact moment of the solstice by capturing sunlight precisely as the sun rises to illuminate a specific design in a rock, or cast a shadow on another. Employing archaeoastronomy is the most effective method of timing agricultural events and identifying espite our the cycles of nature, on which Andean peoples technical advances of old depended for we have much to survival. These days, clocks and written learn from forgotten calendars have replaced ways of the past our dependence on measuring the stars in this way. However, our dependence on nature remains; it is in our best interest to maintain a close and reciprocal relationship with the earth and cosmos. Despite our technical advances, we have much to learn from forgotten ways of the past.

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January January is a fertile time when the earth opens up to the rain, and the flowers bloom. The crops have all been planted, so it is a month of rest. Guamán Poma’s illustration (238) shows the people sitting together with little activity

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among them, perhaps contemplating their efforts, hoping for sufficient rain to sustain the crops, but not enough to bring a flood.

February Guamán Poma (240) describes February as the month of abundant flowers in which to wear ornamental dress. The Andean people are known for their exemplary weaving techniques and bright colors. Traditional people of the highlands wear intricately patterned bright clothing on here are a daily basis. An outsider may ask why, if they are living so approximately remotely and in such a humble types of flutes in way, they dress so elaborately.

The answer Gregorio, of the ndes the highland community of Amaru, gave is simply, “We are walking flowers.” The beautiful clothing is a way to reciprocate with Pachamama for all she provides.

Although ornamental dress is part of daily life, specially woven clothing is donned for the Pukllay festival in February. The Pukllay festivities consist of four days of music, dancing, and singing to honor and celebrate healthy relationships between and among humans, plants, and animals. Pukllay means “the game.”

It is a playful and flirtatious festivity and time of year. It is an opportunity for young people from different communities to meet and potentially fall in love.

In cities and towns that have been influenced by popular culture and outside religions, a version of Carnival is practiced instead of the Andean tradition, but those dedicated to the preservation of their inherent culture and the continuity of their relationship with nature still observe Pukllay as it has been practiced by their ancestors since pre-Incan times. “Pukllay is a celebration of life, love, fertility, procreation, and enqa, the very life force itself. The gods [nature spirits] are honored and appeased for giving life to the animals and providing nutrition on the pastures. They are implored to protect the herds and make them flourish” (Bolin 110–11).

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March In March the rains persist and the crops continue to grow. Because of the steep grade of the mountainsides, terraces have been in place to grow food on level ground so the plants can more efficiently absorb the water. The terraces also prevent erosion and mudslides, as well as beautify the hillsides. From a distance, the design of the condor can be seen in the terraces above Pisac. The condor flies so high it almost disappears, so it is thought to be an intermediary between this world and the upper world. It feeds on carrion, so it is also considered to be a connection between this life and the afterlife.

It is no coincidence that there is an ancient cemetery adjacent to the condor of Pisac.

Despite the terracing in place, mudslides do occur on undeveloped land. In March 2010 the rain was so persistent, combined with hail which loosened the earth, that major mudslides and flooding devastated much of the Sacred Valley. I witnessed the aftermath in a town called Taray.

It had become a raging torrent. Houses were destroyed and lives lost. Eighty percent of the town has since been condemned. Those who survived the floods are now slowly putting their lives back together.

As mentioned, the constellation of the black llama is thought to drink from the rivers and lakes in order to dispel the flooding, as her head disappears below the horizon each night. Perhaps it is the intensity of the rainy season that influences Guamán Poma’s March illustration (242). As Heckman describes, “the Inka is represented kneeling, about to sacrifice a black...llama” (182).

Llamas are of greater value alive than dead, so this makes them a generous sacrifice in offering rituals. Only when a llama is too old to carry loads, or if female, is no longer producing offspring, is it chosen for sacrifice. The throat is cut swiftly so the animal does not suffer. Every part of the animal, except the bones, is used or consumed. Not even the blood is wasted. The bones of a sacrificial animal are respectfully buried all together in the formation of the llama to ensure it is resurrected in the same form. As described by anthropologist Inge Bolin:

In love and respect for the animal, it is not merely slaughtered. It deserves a ritual which will take its spirit to Apu Ausangate, who makes sure it will be reborn and reenter the same corral. Through its death, it also symbolically fulfills the need to feed the gods [nature spirits]. As the life force flows toward the mountain and back in perfect reciprocity, the cosmic balance is maintained.

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April There are approximately 600 types of flutes in the Andes, and in April the pan pipes are played to call the winds and blow away the rain clouds.

The grains have been harvested, and the music of this period facilitates their drying for proper storage for the rest of the year. The corn is being harvested this month and into May. The pan pipes will be played throughout the dry season.

Guamán Poma (244) calls April the feast of the Inka, and shows men and women playing drums and dancing, perhaps celebrating the beginning of the harvest.

May The corn has been harvested and the potato harvest continues in May. Guamán Poma’s illustrations (246) show many people carrying sacks of grain and corn on their backs, presumably to the warehouses for storage.

An excerpt from artist Julia Meyerson’s journal of her year in ‘Tambo, Peru (1981– 1982) gives a glimpse of the potato harvest: The work is hard and satisfying... our bare feet in the earth warmed by the sun or cool and damp, freshly turned, the fierce winter sun on our backs. Each person has a kuti (the short handled hoe with a narrow blade) and a carrying cloth which he spreads between the rows ahead of him, onto which he tosses the potatoes

as they are scrabbled out of the soil. The earth is broken away from the sides of the ridges... and the plant with its roots and tubers is pulled out of the soil and shaken. The soil and heavier potatoes fall from the roots, and the broken earth is combed with hands and hoe to discover all of the tubers; children walk over the harvested section of the field, scuffing in the turned earth with their feet to find the potatoes inevitably left behind and delighting in proclaiming each one they find to the person who overlooked it. All the earth of the field is turned in search for potatoes...it will not support potatoes again for several years, but other crops, especially barley, can be planted here. (155–6) The cycle is complete, yet continuous. As resilient and vital as Andean culture is, it is constantly under pressure from modern western culture of consumerism; the agribusiness of export and monoculture, which is largely responsible for the environmental catastrophe we now face; and evangelism. Falsely identifying with dominant cultures has been a means of survival for the indigenous people of the Andes, as it has been for many marginalized peoples and societies. The colorful lives of traditional peoples across the globe have been whitewashed by the guise of productivity, for corporate profits at the expense of the stewards of the land.

The Andean people are not special, or unique. They are Runas—human beings like the rest of us. Although many have forgotten about our interconnection with all of reality, those who still maintain this relationship serve as reminders of what is necessary for a sustainable future. We, as human beings, must make wise choices in our interactions with nature, with each other, and with the plants and animals around us. When in the produce department of the local grocery store, ask, “Who was displaced from their land,

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how many chemicals were spilled into the river, and what form of transportation was used, so that I could have the option to buy this exotic fruit?” And if we choose to buy it, to whom do we owe our gratitude? If we remember, as the sun rises tomorrow, perhaps we will greet it with respect, like a family member we have not seen for a long time.

Works Cited Allen, Catherine J. The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community.

Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1988.

Bolin, Inge. Rituals of Respect: The Secret of Survival in the High Peruvian Andes.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Guamán Poma de Ayala, Felipe. New Chronicle for a Good Government 1615. Web. 12 December 2010. <http://www.kb.dk/ permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage. htm> Heckman, Andrea. Woven Stories: Andean Textiles and Rituals. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003.

Meyerson, Julia. ‘Tambo: Life in an Andean Village. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Milla Villena, Carlos. Genesis de la Cultura Andina. Lima, Peru, 2008.

Salazar, Edgar and Salazar, Fernando. Cusco and the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Cusco: Ausonia, SA, 2003.

28 | Best Student Essays

“Finally, a Woman on Paper” 1916: A Chapter in

the Life of

Georgia O’Keeffe

Lori Lavasek

It was mid-June 1916 and the long, bony hands of a woman held a letter. “Tell me all you will— There’s nothing I cannot understand and feel,” Alfred Stieglitz urged in this correspondence which traced its way from New York to Canyon, Texas. His letters were coming nearly every day now, and getting more and more passionate to the point that she was afraid to open them. “You yearn for someone to understand every heartbeat of yours—to take every heartbeat—every thought of conscious—and otherwise—for what they are—And you well know no one can understand you so fully.” These words O’Keeffe read from a married man who was the same age as her father.1 Her eyes leapt across the page, knowing they at once wanted to engulf his thoughts entirely, and would still be yearning for more when the words reached their end.

Alfred Stieglitz was suddenly more than a mentor and supporter. Through steady correspondence, they unraveled each other’s secrets to explain restlessness and hopes. He gladly sent her copy after copy of his quarterly magazine, Camera Works, a beautifully and simply-made collection of the most modern American and European work of the time. She read of the painter Matisse and the photographer Paul Strand, and reflected on the pioneering spirit that so many artists were stepping into. Her letters were spurred with feeling and intensity; his were calm and methodically thought out. Georgia wanted his direction and approval and eagerly absorbed the countless subscriptions and materials he sent her way. Stieglitz had given praise and commented on her work ever since it was hung at 291.2 It wasn’t as if O’Keeffe was ready to accept the magnitude of leaping. It wasn’t that she had chosen to no longer be afraid, but that she now trusted herself to know when the fear was worth it. She had climbed up to a mountain on a camping trip over the summer and had reaffirmed her own ability to overcome any fear. Her determination translated to a belief that an experience would inevitably involve risks, but it was the experience that was worthwhile.3 As O’Keeffe experienced the calm of fall in 1916 Texas, she filled her classroom with the textiles, artifacts, and fabrics that reflected the power in what was formerly considered mere décor. Her inspiration was taking form in the obscurity of the southwest. O’Keeffe’s primary biographer, Roxanna Robinson, writes of the “visual limitlessness” she was met with in Texas. O’Keeffe became

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hypersensitive to the sounds, smells, and light of the panhandle town. She took in pine trees, the rustling of cattle, and the bright sunsets, and wrote of it in her letters—rotating it through her thoughts as she continued to paint and draw.4 Her time there until 1918 further shaped her independence and reinforced the self-assurance she had known as a child.

She taught boldly in the distant and foreign atmosphere of Canyon, Texas, at West Texas Normal College. She loved the vastness she found there, and the freedom she had been given as head of the Art Department.5 Her er fixation decision to leave the would soon manifest bustle of New York, to separate herself from through her rich the grieving in her family after her mother chalked full of had died that May, emotion landscapes was now at a distance. inspired by the exas She could dissect the decision piece by piece plains as she lost herself in the strangeness of the ranching town.6 For an academic school year, she would move beyond the emphasis of the simple form to depict emotion, an approach originally taught to her by teacher Arthur Wesley Dow in 1912.

An admiration for Stieglitz allowed O’Keeffe to relinquish her self-inflicted barriers. She put down her mask of sure-footedness and began taking the risks to paint with abandon. They were joined over a passion for capturing their emotions. Though their boldness of desire had not yet crossed into realms of intimacy beyond the canvas, she wrote to him of her feelings of standing in front of him as a little girl who had just made the discovery of painting: “The sky like a wonderful jewel—darkest in the center— high around the edges.”7 Soon to be thrust into his world, O’Keeffe would one day have to face the difficulty in separating her sense of self from that of the world they had created together. This action was familiar to her. She was constantly working to find and clarify her place, never allowing the merging of selves to be seamless.

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For now, as she dreamed of the vastness she found in the Texan sunsets, O’Keeffe wanted nothing more than to be encompassed and revered and cherished through the wisdom and light she had found in this peculiar man.8 Her fixation would soon manifest through her rich, chalked-full-of-emotion landscapes inspired by the Texas plains. The watercolors flowed ceaselessly across her paper, and encompassed shades of hope mixed with agony.

She worked them over and over again until she was satisfied, finding herself spending days in flurries of painting. Her images were full of expression, but her methods were always practical and well planned. Analysis of her work shows that she always sketched out each piece with pencil, and that her brush stuck to this decision as it filled in the swooping layers of color. Her care for her tools would later be her trademark, her paintbrushes carefully cut, cleaned rigorously, and stored in specific boxes.

The water color Black Lines stands on its own as an elicitor of the feelings of delicacy and tenderness she felt at this time. The two black lines flow in thickness and intermingle to convey a stark novelty in what one could rightly say were standard marks.9 The last time she had found herself isolated and overwhelmed in her own universe had been a short while ago, in another place so, so different from the flurry of New York.

In the previous winter, O’Keeffe lived in a small rented room in Columbia, South Carolina, bare and meager save its small red geranium pot. The teaching position at Columbia College occupied her time, but her afternoons were free.10 O’Keeffe had left the Art Students League after experiencing life as the subject rather than creator. She had modeled for several paintings, but with her most cardinal trait: the pragmatism of a farmer’s daughter.

She now had to begin anew—creating rather than sitting idly. Her decisions were now to be based around painting. She tells of her decision making routine, “so I got a notebook, and opened it up, and wrote ‘yes’ at the top of the left-hand page and ‘no’ at the top of the righthand page. And for every decision that came

up, I would write down ‘yes’ why I should do this thing and ‘no’ why I should not do this thing.”11 With each new decision, O’Keeffe now had to decide whether her ambitions were even possible.

Anita Pollitzer bound O’Keeffe to everything she had left behind in New York.

Pollitzer, like O’Keeffe, was part of the Art Students’ League, and their differences made them the least likely of friends. Anita was seven years younger than O’Keeffe, with a soft air and a family who had prominence in the world.

Pollitzer caught O’Keeffe’s attention as a “very lively, very interested little person.”12 The regal O’Keeffe, characterized by her determination and pragmatism, was leaning on someone whom she realized was unlike herself, and with unforeseen fate, they were able to form a deep closeness embodying each other’s most complex wishes and hesitations.

The Columbia College had offered her a teaching position and she had taken it reluctantly to escape the clamor of New York in favor of an isolated and unknown location where she could work, as she would phrase it once her decision was made. O’Keeffe was twenty-eight years old but was still somewhat obligated to heed advice from her mother—a revelation she was unwilling to admit. She found herself without a definite direction, and could only say what she did not want. She felt the coming wave of the cross-roads, and so she decided to take shelter in a place she considered “half-dead.”13 As O’Keeffe became encompassed by her tiny room in South Carolina, she silenced the distractions from the outside world. She attempted to put the feelings she had for the political science professor she had met during the spring, Arthur Macmahon, on the shelf.

She wrote to Anita that she was “nearer to being in love with him than I wanted to be.”14 She coolly rejected any other interests that came her way, and wrote Anita of clearing the little distractions in life to keep a “clear unprejudiced vision.”15 Her letters to Anita were often full of little bouts of laughter, as her ability to laugh at herself in even the most uncertain times was a tactic she employed often. It was time for her

to rediscover what her siblings had said of her since she was a little girl, that “Her power was innate.” She had always been the natural leader for all of the younger sisters, and she knew it.

“I had a sense of power, I always had it.” Yet as a hurricane was descending upon her aesthetic and conception of self, O’Keeffe had to find it once again. 16 O’Keeffe stood apart in a time when strict rules were laid down from the beginning for a young woman. From early childhood, she had managed to always embarrass her family with her oddities, often aloof and never the adorable child.17 Though she surprised even her own family with her strong willpower, they were a model for her belief that anything she wanted was within her reach. Her mother, grandmother, and aunts all controlled their distinct realms in the household without even a hint of frailty.18 As a teenager, the boarding school in Virginia had poignantly exposed O’Keeffe’s uniqueness, where the girls were raised to be “decorative dependents.”19 O’Keeffe was “dignified, haughty without meaning to be,” and “there was never an idle moment or gesture,” wrote eeffe stood Anita upon meeting her.20 She was careful to make each apart in a time step seem intentional, yet this when strict rules winter presented a personal struggle and a confusing bout were laid down of uncertainty. “Did you ever have something to say and feel from the beginning as if the whole side of the wall for a young wouldn’t be enough to say it woman on?” she wrote in the midst of this storm. She was enthralled with the power of non-representation in her art, yet didn’t know where to start and knew only her dissatisfaction with where she had already been.21 For the past ten years, O’Keeffe had painted what she had been instructed to create. She had worked in nearly all mediums and was able to make exact and vivid imitations of reality on paper. She was a well-liked student and had paid attention to detail, and her work was exceptionally neat and well thought-out. Still,

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she wanted more of life and her determination leapt out when writing to Anita over the summer.

“That nervous energy that makes people like you and I want and go after everything in the world—bump our heads on all the hard walls and scratch our hands on all the briars—but it makes living great—doesn’t it?—I’m glad I want everything tieglitz was and in the world—good and bad—bitter and embraced being the sweet—I want it all and a lot of it too.”22 Her man at the center timing was matched of the controversy to that of the push for American Modernism. of the merican The vanguard style, odernist movement which moved away from depicting reality, was gaining acceptance in galleries and New York was still reeling from the Armory Show of 1913, the most successful showcasing of Modernism of the time.23 In New York, women walked the streets with mink coats and ostrich feathers in their hair as part of the contemporary fashion. O’Keefe wore plain black and white attire, framed by her straight black hair; she was a puzzling and stark figure of simple lines and without lace.

Like the parallel life of writer Willa Cather, who also presented herself as a strong woman in the time of female flourish, O’Keeffe was molded mostly by her connection with the bare beauty of nature. Both would eventually reject their upbringing in the north and find themselves lingering to the west.24 Columbia College was a deadening silence compared to the rapid pace of life she had known in New York. Full of the Methodist tradition, the all-women’s school was resolute in their ways. The daily surmounting causalities in Britain and pressure for the US to join the ranks forecasted the coming of World War I, but this could not be felt inside O’Keeffe’s room of personal discovery. It was a situation not unlike the hours she could spend playing with her dollhouse as a child. In blissful isolation, she could control her world and shape it to her liking.25 Arthur visited her for Thanksgiving,

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and after he left, her longing for him spurred her creativity and kept her working until Christmas.

She wrote Arthur with fervor and spoke of her own determination to hurry through life before it passed her by. She was at this point working more and more from her own consciousness, a task that both frightened and exhilarated her.26 With a whim of bravery and a need for reassurance, O’Keeffe wrapped up the charcoal drawings. They were handed from South Carolina to New York, and finally arrived in the trusted hands of Anita Pollitzer on New Year’s Day, 1916. O’Keeffe wanted to show them solely to Pollitzer, but O’Keeffe underestimated Pollitzer’s cunning. They went straight to 291 Gallery and into the formidable fifty-two-yearold hands of Alfred Stieglitz.27 The Gallery was situated in the heart of Greenwich Village. This was when the Village was still an undiscovered, simmering concoction of Avant-garde, its residents from backgrounds of every sort, its foreign density felt by all who walked the streets.28 It was a place for “palpable change.”

Stieglitz was, and embraced being, the man at the center of the controversy of the American Modernist movement. His gallery, his periodical Camera Work, and his own reputation as a famed photographer pushed him as the authority.

There was no mistaking him as the defining presence of 291 as he spent his entire day talking to the visitors about his ideas and wishes for American art to take on Modernism.29 He insisted upon the exact placement of the works, creating an “air of reverence” coupled with his daily dress of a “black pancake felt hat and his flowing English-style black cape.” Pollitzer aptly describes him as “the shepherd of his strangelooking flock.”30 His marriage left him often depressed, as a distance grew between him and his wife Emmy. Though he was nothing but dutiful and impeccable in his care for her, his was a marriage that tried to mirror his parents’—built on trust and tradition. Despite this intention, he flirted with many of the young girls who wandered into the gallery. His sensitive mouth, dark and penetrating eyes— what O’Keeffe would later call, “easy to look at”—were as much part of 291 as were the

works on display.31 When Pollitzer walked in from the chilly Fifth Avenue and climbed the stairs to 291, she greeted him and presented what was in her hands.

Stieglitz said, “you say a woman did these— She’s an unusual woman—She’s broad minded, she’s bigger than most women, but she’s got the sensitive emotion—I’d know she was a woman, look at that line.”32 The timing of two lives intersecting was one of absolute perfection.

Georgia was a bold woman, unknown in the art world, and leaning towards abstraction.

Stieglitz jumped at the prospect of being the first to exhibit this discovery. “Finally, a woman on paper,” he told Anita.33 Anita recalled O’Keeffe’s desire of the past few months: “I would rather have Stieglitz like something I’d done than anyone else.”34 When Anita wrote to her, O’Keeffe responded with a timid gratitude. She worked all night, perhaps feeling satisfied in the way that only a woman can feel, a woman who has grown up never saying her own capabilities out loud but breathing them in her own private acknowledgement. She called it an “effeminate” satisfaction, gleaned from the joy of finally expressing what she had meant to say for so long.35 The reckless verge O’Keeffe felt in her isolation was documented best with her confidante, Anita. On January 12, 1916, she wrote Anita at 10:30 at night. Her letter revealed excitement with a breathless series of, “For heavens sake…” and “I swear…” followed by a stream of exclamations.36 Her letters were sporadic, full of wonder, and lyrical not only in concept but in her uniquely lavish handwriting.37 She seems to have taken the custom of beautiful handwriting, turned it inside out and given it a good shake. The crooked, curved letters were capable of conveying their own emotion.

If only she could have seen that her emotional upheaval was not merely the same confusion she felt previously. Then she might have noticed that her marks on paper were indeed something, and not just the scribblings of a twenty-eight-yearold incapable of sitting still. Was it intuition?

Or were the feelings she caught long enough to place on paper spontaneous, coming to her as

she knelt in her room, urging her to pick up a piece of charcoal?

In the spring, O’Keeffe’s work was featured along with two other relatively unknown artists at Gallery 291. It received little notice and publicity at the time, save one review in the American Art News on May 27, 1916, which read, “Miss O’Keeffe’s drawing of various curious inanimate objects—in one case a conflagration and in another a stalactite shape—are carefully presented and artistic in quality.” These charcoals were later considered to be extremely radical in their tendency towards German Expressionism, and were unlike the work of any other American artist.38 They were drawn from nature, but nature was by no means the subject. The emotion and spirit was given full presence.39 A review was written in Camera Work, which appeared in October, and read, “Three big, fine natures were represented: Miss O’Keeffe’s drawings besides their other value were of intense interest from a psychoanalytical point of view. 291 had never before seen a woman express herself so frankly on paper.”

O’Keeffe made an appearance at the studio to verify that it was indeed her work that was on exhibit. She saw the careful placement of her sketches that had been pinned up in the central room of the gallery. Having never given permission, she aving never demanded that her drawings be brought down. Stieglitz given permission argued that she didn’t know she demanded the magnitude of what she had done. O’Keeffe responded that her drawings defensively, “Certainly I know what I’ve done. Do you think be brought down I’m an idiot?”40 Stieglitz was unmoved by her fiery attitude, and they spoke until an agreement was made to keep the charcoals up. She found herself claiming that she knew her work was good.41 The viewers’ reactions reflected one of two extremes. Some felt deeply moved and others felt that this type of expression from a woman was too bold, too abstract.42 Stieglitz later wrote about his memory of her from that heated meeting: “A girl appeared—

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thin, in a simple black dress with a little white collar. She had a sort of Mona Lisa smile.”43 The significance of this feminine triumph can be found in her recollection of an irony from the Art League in 1915. As she was passing through the hall, a male student said with an utter sureness, “It doesn’t matter what you do, I’m going to be a great painter and you will probably end up teaching painting in some girls’ school.”44 Confrontation loomed around the corner as her relationship with Stieglitz grew in complexity. They lived in a world quite naïve to the preparation and rush to war that surrounded them. O’Keefe re-crafted her line images into Blue Lines that May. In these drawings, O’Keeffe demonstrated her ability to translate an esthetic concept into her own version of reality, creating work conceptually allied to another tradition but entirely hers.”45 In June of 1916, Stieglitz wrote of her drawings hung in the gallery. “[They] would not be so living for me did I not see you in them. Really see.”46 Her legacy would now finally be made on her terms. She would one day, twenty-four years from now, be known for the strange pelvis bones she would hold up and paint over and over, each illuminated by the endless bright blue. She would say that she had painted them “as one is apt to do when one seems to have more sky than earth in one’s world.”47 O’Keeffe most certainly would no longer hesitate to confront the sky.

34 | Best Student Essays

Notes 1

Haskell; with essays by Barbara Haskell [et al.]; and contributions by Sasha Nicholas.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction.” P. 11.

2

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 167.

3

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 166.

4

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 164.

5

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 135.

6

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 157.

7

Haskell; with essays by Barbara Haskell [et al.]; and contributions by Sasha Nicholas.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction.” P. 193.

8

O’Keeffe, Georgia. “Georgia O’Keeffe.” P. 2

9

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. “O’Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials” displayed piece.

10

Pollitzer, Anita. “A woman on paper: Georgia O’Keeffe.” P. 2.

11

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 61.

12

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 102.

13

Pollitzer, Anita. “A woman on paper: Georgia O’Keeffe.” P. 109.

14

Haskell; with essays by Barbara Haskell [et al.]; and contributions by Sasha Nicholas.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction.” P. 7.

15

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 120.

16

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 18.

17

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 23.

18

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 26

19

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 41.

20

Pollitzer, Anita. “A woman on paper: Georgia O’Keeffe.” P. 1

21

Pollitzer, Anita. “A woman on paper: Georgia O’Keeffe.” P. 2

22

Pollitzer, Anita. “A woman on paper: Georgia O’Keeffe.” P. 12

23

Haskell; with essays by Barbara Haskell [et al.]; and contributions by Sasha Nicholas.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction.” P. 210.

24

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 39.

25

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 29.

26

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 134.

27

Buhler Lynes, Barbara. “O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929.” P. 4.

28

Lanier, Henry Wysham. “Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday.” P. 5.

29

Pollitzer, Anita. “A woman on paper: Georgia O’Keeffe.” P. 117.

30

Pollitzer, Anita. “A woman on paper: Georgia O’Keeffe.” P. 116.

31

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 149.

32

Buhler Lynes, Barbara. “O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916–1929.” P. 6.

35

Giboire, ed. Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer. P. 117.

36

Giboire, ed. Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer. P. 121.

37

Giboire, ed. Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer. P. 93.

38

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 137–138.

39

Roxana Robinson. “O’Keeffe, Georgia”; American National Biography Online.

40

Pollitzer, Anita. “A woman on paper: Georgia O’Keeffe.” P. 134.

41

Buhler Lynes, Barbara. “O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916–1929.” P. 6.

42

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 137.

43

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 139.

44

O’Keeffe, Georgia. “Georgia O’Keeffe.” P. not available.

45

Robinson, Roxanna. “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” P. 156.

46

Pollitzer, Anita. “A woman on paper: Georgia O’Keeffe.” P. 140.

47

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. “O’Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials” displayed quote.

Works Cited

33

Giboire, ed. Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer. P. 115.

Buhler Lynes, Barbara. O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916–1929. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1989.

34

Giboire, ed. Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer. P. 116.

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. “O’Keeffiana: Art and Art Materials” Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Exhibit. September 29, 2010.

Best Student Essays | 35

Giboire, ed. Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer.

Haskell, Barbara ed.; Sasha Nicholas. Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Kuh, Katherine. The Artist’s Voice (1962).

O’Keeffe, Georgia. Georgia O’Keefe. Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1988.

Lanier, Henry Wysham. Greenwich Village: Today and Yesterday. New York: Harper Brothers, 1949.

Pollitzer, Anita. A Woman on Paper: Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Roxanna, Robinson. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.

New York: Harper and Row, 1989.

Roxana Robinson. “O’Keeffe, Georgia.”

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. 28 Sep. 2010. http://www.anb.org/ articles/17/17-00633.html.

“U.S. Census Bureau: Facts for Features News Release.” census.gov/newsroom. Census, August 9, 2006. Web. 22 October 2010.

36 | Best Student Essays

What’s Happening with HAPPEN? A Grammaticalization of HAPPEN in ASL

Benjamin Anible and Corrine Occhino-Kehoe

1.) Introduction Sign language linguistics has been traditionally dominated by a generativist approach to language study, and examined within a framework where grammar and lexicon are considered separate entities.

However elegant the linguistic model, it seems that this traditional framework cannot account for many phenomena which have been observed in these languages. The case of so-called conjunctions in American Sign Language (ASL) is one such instance. A subset of lexical items, from a grammatical grouping traditionally considered to be conjunctions (Fischer and Lillo-Martin 1990, Valli 2005), have been found to have alternating morphological forms (Janzen 2007, Fischer and Lillo-Martin 1990). These items, derived from verbs, and used in coordinate positions, include tokens such as: HAPPEN, UNDERSTAND, HIT, FIND, FINISH, and WRONG1 among others.

(1) PRO.1 WALK, WRONG RAIN “As I was walking, it suddenly started raining.”

(2) PRO.3 GO-AWAY VACATION, HIT LAID-UP SICK. “He went on vacation then unexpectedly became ill.”

(3) PRO.1 CHAT HAPPEN 3TELL1 PRO.3 FROM WASHINGTON. “I was talking with him and it happened he told me he was from Washington.”

(Humphries and Padden, 1980: 188) While we agree with the unique semantic interpretations of the examples above, we have found unique phonological, syntactic, and pragmatic characteristics not included in Humphries and Padden’s descriptions for HAPPEN. Specifically, we observe the distribution of HAPPEN to vary depending on whether the form is a noun, a verb or a conjunctive. We find this “conjunctive form” to function as a discourse marker not occurring in the canonical position for conjunctions, namely intra1

See, Appendix: Transcription Conventions, for a more complete explanation of ASL glossing.

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constituent position (such as between clauses, noun phrases, and verb phrases). Moreover, our data show that HAPPEN as a discourse marker has become grammaticalized from the verbal form and become phonologically and syntactically restricted, while also undergoing semantic modification.

2.) Background 2.1 Grammaticalization Though language change is inevitable, how we describe that change continues to be debated.

A shift in methodology that began only a few decades ago, namely a usagebased approach to grammar, hough has helped incorporate the language change previously extra-linguistic features in a language as not is inevitable how only linguistic, but central to we describe that our understanding of language. change continues Using large corpora of primary source data has allowed to be debated linguists to look at language as it naturally occurs, within a discourse context. Through such an approach, the study of grammaticalization has arisen.

Gramaticalization seeks to explain the nature of grammar through an examination of how grammar is created over time (Bybee 2006).

No longer treating grammar as a synchronous set of rules, research on grammaticalization has helped us to see grammar as dynamic and emergent (Hopper 1998).

Generally accepted tendencies of grammaticalization have been posited which help us to recognize this process of language change as it is happening, not just at its completion. In his 1991 paper, Hopper suggests five principles which are indicative of the early and medial stages of grammaticalization: layering, divergence, specialization, persistence and de-categorialization. We will briefly define the latter two principles, which will be central to our argument.2 Persistence is the idea that during grammaticalization, it can be expected that, â&#x20AC;&#x153;a form may be polysemous, and that one or more

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For a more in depth discussion of these five principles of grammaticalization see Hopper, 1991.

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of its meanings will reflect a dominant earlier meaningâ&#x20AC;? (Hopper 1991). De-categorialization is the idea that as a lexical item moves toward grammaticalization, it will undergo semantic change. This generally means loss of noun-like or verb-like grammatical markers becoming syntactically more constrained, compared to their lexical progenitor, loss of the autonomy afforded to members of its grammatical class, and often acquisition of discourse-type functions.

2.2 Topicalization The way in which speakers of a given language package information and discourse units depends largely on how the language codifies such information. Sandler and Lillo-Martin (2006) suggest that one such way is a topic/ comment construction. Topics represent shared or old information in the discourse, while comment elaborates on the topic by adding new information. In some languages, such as English, topic is grammatically tied to the subject, which is a fully grammaticalized category and functions as the clause topic.

However, this is not a languageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only option; in fact, topic-prominent languages do not have a formalized subject category but instead have grammaticalized the construction of topic/ comment itself.

2.3 Tendencies of Topic Marking We find topic marking to co-occur with the discourse form of HAPPEN in a large number of our tokens. Additionally, we find conditional use, with the same markings, in a small subset of our data. In his 1978 treatment of conditionals and topics cross-linguistically, John Haiman convincingly demonstrated that disambiguation between the two is spurious. In actuality, they share a common definition, form and function. Both identify a frame of reference where the main clause is either true or false and are marked the same phonologically and syntactically. There is good reason, however, to separate topics/conditionals from subjects. Here the former usually occur at the beginning of the

sentence, which is iconic since that which is uttered first is “older.” In the following example HAPPEN is marked for topic, but is not the subject of the clause in which it occurs. The subject of this sentence is “PRO.1.” and is not intonationally marked for topic.

(4)________t HAPPEN1 PRO.1 WORK FOR GALLAUDET (...)

“I was working for Gallaudet University” (dndmartin, 11) Strong support for the argument that HAPPEN is functioning as a discourse comes from Haiman’s (1978) treatment of Chafe (1972) where discourse is considered a stage upon which a speaker introduces themes; “The topic sets a spatial temporal or individual framework...which limits the applicability of the main prediction to a certain restricted domain” (1978, 585). We find the topic marked use of HAPPEN functions in this way.

2.4 Tendencies of Semantic Change In the following we discuss tendencies of semantic and pragmatic meaning common to grammaticalization processes and their relation to the observed functions of HAPPEN. According to Traugott (1989), propositional meanings may evolve over time to become textual, lending cohesion to discourse, having pragmatic or presuppositional meaning. We see this tendency for HAPPEN in our data.

Pragmatically there is a strengthening of informativeness and relevance when lexical items undergo a change. Traugott spells out this process as: “Meanings become more based in speaker subjective belief-state/attitude toward the proposition” (Traugott 1989, 35). An example using the English word “while” follows: (5)a. John waited for a while at the harbor. b. While that may be true, John disagrees.

Traugott states: “Pragmatic strengthening and relevance as I use the terms largely concern strategic negotiation of speaker-hearer

interaction and, in this connection, articulation of speaker attitude” (51). In its grammaticalized form, HAPPEN exhibits pragmatic strengthening; it signifies the following content as relevant. It is more subjective, based in the speaker’s own experience and emotions.

3.) Data/Methodology ASL does not have a large, publically available corpus from which to collect tokens of native speech. Because of this, ASL researchers are forced to create their own corpora or find publically available ASL video recording that can then be e extracted analyzed and transcribed. We extracted thirty-three tokens of thirty three HAPPEN, a small number from tokens of the Morford-MacFarlan Corpus (2006), as well as a larger portion a from Video Blogs (VLOGS), small number which are available on YouTube.

Videos included interviews, from the personal narratives and a public service announcement.

The orford conversations were transcribed ac arlan using ELAN annotation software, originally for language and gesture orpus as studies, and now widely used by signed language linguistics. Twelve well as a larger different speakers, both male and portion from female, were analyzed. Speaker ideo logs nativeness was judged based on conversation content including which discussions of growing up with deaf parents, being immersed in are available on deaf culture, having experiences ou ube as a deaf person growing up, and requiring equal opportunities for themselves as a deaf minority. Of these tokens, we found three distinct uses of HAPPEN— namely verb (V), noun (N), and discourse marker (DM), generally deemed conjunction— all of which had distinct phonological forms.

They are denoted by the following notation: HAPPEN (V), HAPPEN+ (N), and HAPPEN1 (DM) respectively.

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M M F (2006), C B V (VLOGS), Y

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Table 1: Description and Distribution of HAPPEN Data Gloss Tokens (n=30) Part of Speech Translation

HAPPEN 6 Verb “to happen”

HAPPEN+ 3 Noun “things, event”

Syntactic Description Phonological Marking

Unrestricted

Unrestricted

HAPPEN1 21 Discourse Marker “then,” “one time,” “once,” “something happened” Clause initial

[pivot] [orientation]: pronation abduction

[pivot] [orientation]: pronation abduction [repeat]

either/or [pivot] only [orientation] only: pronation abduction

Examples of their use in context are as follows: (6) PRO.3 SUPPOSE SOMETHING HAPPEN TO PRO.3 (She was saying): “What if something had happened to you?” (Letsgofly08, 14) (7) PRO.1 SIGN TELL-STORY THAT FUNNY HAPPEN+ “I was telling a story about some funny events.” (KeithWann, 5) _________t (8) HAPPEN1 PRO.1 WORK FOR GALLAUDET (...)

“I was working for Gallaudet University.”

(Dndmartin, 11)

4.) Discussion Due to the scope of the project, no statistically significant claims can be made about the distribution of the three proposed forms of HAPPEN. Nevertheless, it is interesting that in this small sample, the so-called “conjunctive” use accounts for over two-thirds of the total number of tokens extracted.

4.1 Grammaticalization in ASL Researchers have proven that, crosslinguistically, grammaticalization is a universal tendency. Janzen (2005) and Wilcox (2007) have pioneered studies of grammaticalization in signed-languages. As Janzen (2005) points out, 40 | Best Student Essays

one of the challenges of grammaticalization studies in signed languages is the lack of historical documentation. Documentation of signed languages can be traced to the turn of the century; for the period prior to the advent of video recording, we must rely on dictionary entries, with written descriptions often accompanied by poorly depicted illustrations.

Despite these limitations, signed language linguists have made headway in unraveling the complexities of signed language change.

Wilcox (2007) has shown that signed languages have two different pathways through which grammaticalization can progress. While the first pathway is not unlike the grammaticalization process in spoken language, where a lexical item can become a grammatical item, the second pathway seems to suggest that signed languages can skip over the lexical stage and move directly from gesture to a grammaticalized item. This is a type of grammaticalization not seen in spoken languages. An example of this is the gesture of surprise: eyes wide open, eyebrows raised, perhaps head tilted forward or mouth open.

Wilcox (2007) makes the connection between this surprise gesture and the marking of a polar question. When one asks a polar question, one is anticipating a response and thus the gesture of raised eyebrows or widened eyes naturally accompanies the question. This natural expression then becomes grammaticalized over time to become the grammatical marker of a

polar question. Janzen (1999) has proposed that this grammatical marking for polar questions in ASL has grammaticized over time to also become a grammatical marker for topic. The connection between these two seemingly different constructions is the idea of shared information between the signer and the addressee. In both constructions some amount of information is shared between the speaker and addressee concerning previously accessible and identifiable content. While the topic marking construction has a loss of interactivity between the signer and addressee in that no response is intended, the question construction still functions similarly, assuming that there is previous information that is accessible and identifiable to the addressee.

HAPPEN1 (DM) can occur with topic marking when the intention is to indicate some amount of information is shared.

4.2 Phonological Reduction We find a progression of reduction from HAPPEN (V) to HAPPEN+ (N) and HAPPEN1 (DM) where the verb is rarely reduced but the noun and discourse marker forms are commonly reduced. The forms HAPPEN (V) and HAPPEN+ (N) are exemplars of a common process in ASL identified by Supalla and Newport (1978) know as “verb/ noun” pairs. In these pairs, semantically related objects and processes are disambiguated by reduplicated movements. Verbs are the bare, non-reduplicated form and nouns the “marked” form. Examples are PRINT/NEWSPAPER, CHIRP/BIRD, and SIT/CHAIR. It is common in these pairs for the reduplicated movement to be partially reduced in manner or degree. For example in SIT/CHAIR, the two first bent fingers of the dominant hand (representative of bent legs) move downward to contact the two first straight fingers of the non-dominant hand (representative of a chair seat). In the verb form the distance the dominant hand travels before contact is greater than a single token of the noun’s reduplicated movement.

We see this same tendency in HAPPEN (V) and HAPPEN+ (N). The degree of movement in the noun is reduced from that of the verb.

Using Brentari’s (1998) Prosodic Model to analyze this reduction we found variation from [pivot] and [orientation] to the latter only. Pivot is a movement using only one joint, usually the elbow. Orientation is a feature that relies on the wrist’s movement for its specification.

The parameters that vary in our analysis are [orientation: pronation], where the hand and wrist have not been modified (i.e. are at a neutral position with wrists facing inward as they would be held at rest), and [orientation: abduction] where the hand is facing down without movement of the wrist, but rather with a movement of the forearm.

The manner of reduction seen in HAPPEN+ (N) is identical to that in HAPPEN1 (DM) with the notable exception that HAPPEN1 (DM) has no repeated movement.

Either the parameter hen one asks [pivot] or the parameter of [orientation] may be elided. a polar question Reduction can be observed one is anticipating where movement of a sign produced closer to the a response and body (proximally) is in turn thus the gesture produced further from the body (distally). In the case of raised eyebrows of HAPPEN1 (DM), this means that we should expect or widened the absence of [pivot] to eyes naturally be the most common form of reduction and also an accompanies the indication of a higher degree question of reduction since proximal movement is articulatorily more difficult and distal movement is articulatorily more simplistic. We found no clear tendency in the direction of either [pivot] or [orientation] absence.

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Figure 1 Grammaticalization processes of happen(v) to happen+(n) and happen1(dm)

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4.3 Semantic/Pragmatic Specialization We find HAPPEN1 (DM) to function as an evidential. Following Traugott’s (1989) definition of evidential, HAPPEN1 (DM) serves to mark the source of information and the speaker’s belief about the validity of that source.

Namely HAPPEN1 (DM), occurring before the recitation of a narrative, tells the interlocutor that the speaker has a personal interaction with the content and they believe it to be true.

HAPPEN1 (DM) also grounds the statement in the past. Additionally, subjectivity is common of evidentials. We suspect HAPPEN1 (DM) along with the other “conjunctions” discussed in the introduction of this paper, gives information about the emotional state of the speaker. This tendency is clear with examples like WRONG or HIT where distress and surprise are conveyed respectively. With HAPPEN1 (DM), subjective content is slightly more nebulous, but there are intimations of speaker interest and relevance of the topic.

Using HAPPEN1 (DM) in a phrase that tells the listener what the speaker wishes to talk about is clearly the domain of topic marking.

It is therefore unsurprising we find near total co-occurrence of HAPPEN1 (DM) and topic marking in our data. Janzen (2007) has called these forward-looking, or transition, pivots that add coherence and cohesion to a discourse. With the following chain of relations in mind we conclude that HAPPEN1 (DM) is a grammaticalized discourse marker. It has reduced form, distribution and specialized semantics, and it functions in discoursesignificant constructions.

5.) Conclusion Although we worked with a limited number of tokens, we found a clear tendency for HAPPEN1 (DM) to function as a discourse marker, complete with topicalization. In the future we would like to test this tendency against a bigger corpus to see if the pattern persists. A full corpus study would also allow the study of the secondary grammaticalization tendency we perceived, where HAPPEN1 (DM) has also

42 | Best Student Essays

grammaticalized into a modal/auxiliary verb that occurs before a verb phrase, grounding the verb in the past tense.

Future research is needed to study what types of verbs tend to follow this grammaticalization path. Janzen (1999), and Fischer and LilloMartin (1990) have both found this tendency in FINISH and UNDERSTAND respectively.

Both FINISH and UNDERSTAND belong to this grammatical category, considered to be conjunctives. While this may have been the primary stage of their grammaticalization, from verb to subordinating conjunction which introduces an adverbial clause, it seems clear that these conjunctives have continued to grammaticalize, picking up more pragmatic function along their path. Fischer and LilloMartin (1990) have suggested that other verbs such as WRONG and SUPPOSE have also made the transition to subordinating conjunctions, and perhaps they too have further grammaticalized into discourse markers.

Regardless, it is clear that the grammaticalization path from full content word to functional item—well established cross-linguistically in the spoken modality—holds true within the manual modality of ASL as well.

6.) Appendix: Notation Conventions Notational Conventions: Identifying Signs

Use

Symbol

Example

SIGN

CAT

A single uppercase English word identifies a single ASL sign. Using the gloss CAT to identify a sign “cat” does not mean that the sign has the same morphological, syntactic, or semantic characteristics as the English word cat.

SIGN-SIGN-SIGN

OH-I-SEE

Uppercase English words separated by hyphens also represent a single sign.

SIGN^SIGN

HOME^WORK

The symbol ^ indicates that two signs have been combined into a single compound sign.

SIGN+++

TREE++

Plural form of a noun, denoted by repeated morphemic movement.

SIGN+

HAPPEN+

++ indicates noun form: denoted by repeated morphemic movements.

S-I-G-N

B-U-D-G-E-T

Hyphens between uppercase letters indicate a sequence of alphabetic character signs used to spell a word.

#SIGN

#WHAT

# indicates a lexical sign ultimately traceable to a sequence of alphabetic character signs.

PRO.#

PRO.1

The notation -1 indicates a first person form.

Number represents person.

POSS.#

POSS.1

Denotes a possessive form. Number represents person.

SIGN[ASPECT]

WORK[DURATIONAL]

A sign derived from WAIT. The label in the square brackets identifies the grammatical process underlying the sign being represented.

SIGN1…SIGNn THEME----------

EVERY-WED CALENDER------

The top line represents the signing of the strong hand while the bottom line represents the signing of the weak hand. Here the weak hand maintains the THEME buoy in place during the sign sequence SIGN1…SIGNn. This serves as a form of anaphoric schematization.

“gesture”

“wave”

Denotes a gesture without specified lexical form.

(a) x SIGN1…SIGNn

(a) t BOOK RED

(b) [SIGN1…

SIGNn]-x

(b) [BOOK RED]-t

The sequence of signs from SIGN1 to SIGNn is accompanied by a non-manual signal, in this case for topicalization. Other non-manual signal categories include n (negation), q (y/n, rhetorical), wh (question), cond (conditional), and certain adverbials.

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References Bridges, Byron, and Melanie Metzger. 1996.

Deaf Tend Your: Non-Manual Signals in ASL. Silver Spring: Calliope Press.

Brentari, Diane. 1998. A Prosodic Model of Sign Language Phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Bybee, Joan. 2006. From Usage to Grammar: The Mind’s Response to Repetition.

Language 82.711-733.

Curnow, Timothy Jowan and Catherine E. Travis, 2009. Clause-Combining in Spanish Cleft Constructions. Paper presented at the 11th Conference of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), Melbourne University, Melbourne.

Fischer, Susan, and Diane Lillo-Martin. 1990.

Understanding Conjunctions. International Journal of Sign Linguistics 1. 71–80.

Haiman, John. 1978. Conditionals Are Topics.

Language 54. 564–589.

Hopper, Paul. 1991. On Some Principles of Grammaticalization. Approaches to Grammaticalization, ed. by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and B Heine, 1:17–35.

Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Humphries, Tom. 1994. A Basic Course in American Sign Language. 2nd ed. Silver Spring Md.: T.J. Publishers.

Janzen, Terry. 1995.

The Polygrammaticalization of FINISH in ASL. Manitoba, Ontario: University of Manitoba master’s thesis.

Janzen, Terry. 1999. The Grammaticization of Topics in American Sign Language. Studies in Language 23.271-306.

Janzen, Terry. 2007. The Expression of Grammatical Categories in Signed Languages. Verbal and Signed Languages: Comparing Structures, Constructs and Methodologies, ed. Elena Pizzuto, Paola 44 | Best Student Essays

Pietrandrea, and Raffaele Simone, 171– 197. Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 36. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Liddell, Scott. 1980. American Sign Language Syntax. The Hague: Mouton.

Morford, Jill, and James MacFarlane. 2003.

Frequency Characteristics of American Sign Language. Sign Language Studies 3.

213–225. Tokens: 6.

Sandler, Wendy, and Diane Lillo-Martin.

2006. Sign Language and Linguistic Universals. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Supalla, Ted, and Elisa Newport. How Many Seats in a Chair? The Derivation of Nouns and Verbs in American Sign Language.

Understanding Language through Sign Language Research, ed. by P. Siple, 91– 132. New York: Academic Press.

Traugott, Elizabeth. 1989. On the Rise of Epistemic Meanings in English: An Example of Subjectification in Semantic Change. Language 65. 31–55.

Valli, Clayton. 2005. Linguistics of American Sign Language: An Introduction. 4th ed.

Washington D.C.: Clerc Books.

Primary Sources Deaf Person and Cop Story. Perf. Dndmartin.

YouTube. 16 Feb. 2007. Web. 31 Oct. 2010. Tokens: 9–11.

TRUE STORY about Two Deaf Couple on 9/11. Perf. Letsgofly08. YouTube. 04 Sept.

2008. Web. 31 Oct. 2010. Tokens: 13,14.

Wann, Keith. Keith Wann Interview. Here and Now. NPR. Tokens: 1–5, 7, 8.

Superhuman:

Cultivating Transcendence on the Bodhisattva Path, and Nietzschean Considerations Thereof Kris Miranda

Everybody dies. Thus Siddhartha Gautama learned after having seen the debilitations of old age and illness, and, deeply disturbed, he sought a higher way of life that could save him from this suffering, eventually becoming the Buddha and deciding to help others along the path to enlightenment and liberation. The Mādhyamika scholar Candrakīrti lays out in his Entry to the Middle Way an advanced account of the Buddhist ideal, the bodhisattva, a seeker of enlightenment, who seeks not only her own liberation but that of all beings. “Nirvāna, or individual salvation, is set aside as unworthy of the bodhisattva. The goal is now nothing short of full awakening—to become a Buddha oneself—for the welfare of all sentient beings.”1 The aspiring bodhisattva sets out on this path, because she realizes the truth of how the world is, because she has attained an understanding of reality as empty of the meaning(s) we conventionally ascribe to it. But some others with the same understanding, or at least the same knowledge, seem not to share the inclinations that, for her, follow from it. Over two thousand years after the Buddha’s awakening, the German proto-existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche, observing that the search for the truth of life’s meaning reveals such meaning not to exist, would present his own vision of a path for humanity to overcome itself and give life meaning. Both the Buddha and Nietzsche place some conception of skill and training near the center of their visions.

Can these visions of human transcendence through skill, both rising out of a struggle with nihilism but born millennia and a continent apart, be synthesized?

I. You’re Doing It Wrong (Distractions from the Bodhisattva Path) The core principle of Buddhist metaphysics is the doctrine of dependent arising or dependent origination. All things come to be only in dependence on causes and conditions. Because of this, no one thing can be said to have an “essence” or “substance,” an immutable something that always makes it What It Is, regardless of context—a svabhāva. That is, nothing can be said to really have any meaning or significance independent of its relations to other entities; this is what the term emptiness refers to in Buddhism, and the Mādhyamika observes that it applies to argument and language as much as to tangible objects.

Huntington, C.W. with Geshé Namgyaal Wangchen, The Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian Mādhyamika (University of Hawaii Press: Honolulu, 1989), 19.

1

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For the Mādhyamika, the sort of argumentation upon which other philosophers rely so heavily to establish the truth is itself a hindrance to apprehending that truth (which for its part is only useful insofar as it helps the Buddhist’s soteriological endgame).

Mādhyamikas like Candrakīrti find themselves forced to use the same tools as everyone else in order to make this clear, but hold that, “If used for anything other than strictly deconstructive aims—aims that are accomplished by accepting an opponent’s reasoning only in order to turn it back on t is true that itself in a spiral of paradox the adhyamika and contradiction—logic can become a dangerous snare.”2 cannot actually This means, among other things, that in keeping with prove the the doctrine of “skillful nonexistence of means,” the Mādhyamika a transcendental may not quite honor the rules of language that everyone substrate but else does, as long as the job then she doesn t gets done. For example, in the prasanga method of really care argument, the prāsangika (Candrakīrti was one) “is not compelled to accept—as the sole result of the refutation of an opponent’s proposition—the antithesis of the logical consequences he has exposed,”3 because to establish an alternative thesis does not entirely solve the problem presented by the thesis being refuted. Theses in general are refuted not only because they are (probably) wrong, but because they are clung to, and clinging is the root of suffering. The Mādhyamika’s “thesis” is that theses are bad.

Odd, perhaps, and apparently linguistically problematic. But not unfathomable: if language were, say, a credit card, the Mādhyamika may well be able to make good use of it, but not merely to purchase things; she could instead be interested in—at this moment—coaxing open a locked door. If language is a Frisbee, the Mādhyamika may be interested not in throwing and catching it, but in—at this moment—an improvised

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Huntington, 35.

Huntington, 36.

plate (perhaps for pie). Just because language (or anything else) is designed for a particular use doesn’t mean that this use is its only possible purpose, or even its best purpose in a given set of circumstances. The would-be bodhisattva lacks, perhaps, the ideal tool for her purposes (as the locked-out person with only a credit card at hand would probably prefer a key), but she makes do. In the process of using language and argumentation in a non-conventional way, she also cultivates nonattachment (which, as a rule for the Buddhist, is what frees us from existential angst) with respect to the supposed essence of language. Nonattachment to things linguistic turns out to be particularly important: “As the crystallized essence of conceptualization, logic tends by its nature to engender the clinging and antipathy associated with reified thought.”4 The problem extends beyond language itself to include that which language is concerned with establishing. Other Buddhist schools, like Yogācāra, take dependent arising to imply a “transcendental substrate, an intrinsically existent ground” beneath or beyond the world that we see.5 But for Candrakīrti, to see the world as it really is, is not so much to literally and perhaps supernaturally see through a veil to a transcendental substrate (with which we cannot interact in any meaningful way), but to understand in a new way that which we have always seen.

It is true that the Mādhyamika cannot actually prove the nonexistence of a transcendental substrate, but then, she doesn’t really care. Her preference (however careful) for her own approach to the problem of suffering lies in its being more useful and effective than the Yogācārin’s. “It is not that the Yogācāra is wrong per se, but that given his soteriological aim, the Yogācāra philosopher’s use of language is unskillful.”6 The Yogācārin’s references to a specific nature of ultimate reality beyond just a conceptual reframing of conventional reality—though they might indeed help undo attachment to conventional reality—cancel out Huntington, 35.

Huntington, 63.

6 Huntington, 64.

4 5

any such benefit by encouraging the reification of his world-as-mind concept. He is, or at least seems to be, overly invested in this theoretical concept at the expense of his practical mission.

The Mādhyamika “wins” because hers is not ultimately a war between ideas, but a war for souls: The ultimate justification for the Mādhyamika’s soteriological philosophy does not lie in any claim to a monopoly on objective, value-free truth, but in a very pragmatic sense of purpose: the desire to bring an end to clinging, antipathy, and delusion. “The analysis…teaches about the reality [expressed in the truth of the highest meaning] for the purpose of liberation.7

II. Baby Steps (Setting Out on the Bodhisattva Path) Having set aside undue concern with the manipulation of language and the establishment of any reality besides the conventional, the bodhisattvic aspirant can now focus on praxis.

She is concerned with ten perfections that will enable her to perform her chosen task.

Our concern here is with the first five: four perfections of virtue or character “initially cultivated as an effective means to discipline the mind and so to lead it toward a sustained condition of relative calm and stability,”8 and a fifth, the perfection of meditation, in which the virtues are united and the mind readied for the perfection of wisdom.

The first perfection, the perfection of generosity, is intended to further cultivate the bodhisattva’s nonattachment. She gives to others for their benefit, and out of a gut sympathy, to be sure, but also to demonstrate and reinforce her liberation from desire for worldly objects, and “eventually [the Buddha’s teaching] fashions a person who would sacrifice

even his own flesh.”9 Set in the context of her all-encompassing mission and the possibility of having to give up something commensurately great and grave for its sake, mundane acts of charity serve as he first “dry runs” whose undertaking perfection the the aspirant would be sorely mistaken to decline. Giving up perfection of material objects will also prepare generosity is her for the more psychologically slippery task of making intuitive intended to her intellectual understanding of emptiness. “Through the practice further cultivate of charity a basic impulse of the bodhisattva s renunciation is engendered and the first significant step is taken nonattachment in a direction that will eventually culminate in total liberation from bondage to ideas as well as from bondage to objects.”10 The second perfection, the perfection of morality, is at its most basic level a code of conduct, but in the context of the bodhisattva’s path and her striving toward the transformative perfections of meditation and wisdom, it “lays the foundation for a stable mind.”11 Virtue for the Mādhyamika, says Huntington,

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need not be viewed as an arbitrary and absolutely binding code of ethics, for in essence it is a system of mental discipline designed to induce goodwill and peace of mind in oneself and in others…“A [bodhisattva] cultivates the desire to abandon all sinful and unmeritorious behavior. In this context, [an action] is evil and unmeritorious if it causes the mind to become agitated and so is opposed to balanced concentration.12 That is, evil acts are not (only) problematic because of the harm they inflict on parties Huntington, 69.

Ibid.

11 Huntington, 71.

12 Ibid.

9

10 7 8

Huntington, 47.

Huntington, 83.

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besides the agent; they are (additionally, and maybe primarily) problematic because they distract and hinder the agent in her task.

A possible worry in the idea that generous and otherwise morally praiseworthy acts are means to a specific greater end is that the bodhisattva may appear not to consider those whose suffering she alleviates, to borrow a Kantian concept, ends in themselves. But as the greater end in question is the alleviation of all beings’ suffering, and not just the bodhisattva’s own, what we have here is more along the lines of Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which one acts compassionately here are of (for example) in order to become compassionate.

An important course non difference is that in Aristotle’s uddhists account, the agent being made who have the virtuous does not necessarily begin with the inclination to act well, while insight or the the bodhisattvic aspirant sets out on this path in the first place because she luck good already desires to end suffering. She does not (merely) act compassionately or bad one to become compassionate. She acts cannot be sure compassionately in the best way she already knows how (she is already to apprehend acting from compassion whereas emptiness the agent in Aristotle’s account might not be, yet), so that she can eventually achieve, through the perfections of meditation and wisdom, something like a superhuman enhancement of her sufferingalleviating powers.

Similarly, the perfection of patience begins with striving for slowness to anger or frustration, while the perfection of energy (alternatively translated as vigor or zeal) is initially concerned with mundane endurance and enthusiasm,13 and both are ultimately concerned with cultivating a mind so alert, adaptable, committed, focused, and untiring that the aspirant can reasonably hope for “the attainment of full awakening and buddhahood in this life.”14 “During the previous four levels of the path the bodhisattva has cultivated generosity,

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Huntington, 73.

Huntington, 75.

morality, patience, and energy, each of which is necessary to lay a strong foundation for the practice of meditation.”15 In turn, the perfection of meditation involves constant attention to living and acting in accordance with those first four perfections “grouped under the generic title of śīla (good character).”16 As the bodhisattva’s powers of mindfulness improve, and with them the efficacy of her virtuous actions, her mind is reshaped into “an instrument of tremendous power and insight”17 so that her understanding of key philosophical concepts becomes more than intellectual: she actually comes to experience events and sense data “as dramatic instantiations of one or another key philosophical or doctrinal principle.”18 With this transformation, the need for the bodhisattva to interpret and evaluate a situation before acting goes away. She does not perceive the situation conventionally, but as, perhaps, a vessel into which she can flow like water, immediately taking exactly the form required. As Robert Morrison writes, “A Buddha, therefore, or any other person who has attained bodhi or enlightenment, quite naturally responds to the dukkha [suffering] of others with ‘compassionate activity’…quite naturally responds with ‘friendly concern’ or mettā to all other beings, simply because these are the natural responses from someone who ‘sees and knows things as they really are.’”19 It may be helpful here to reach into Buddhism’s future: “Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.”20 Huntington, 76.

Huntington, 77.

17 Huntington, 78.

18 Huntington, 82.

19 Morrison, Robert, Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities (Oxford University Press, 1997), 101.

20 Ch’ing-yüan Wei-hsin, quoted in Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series (Munshirm Manoharlal Publishers, 2000), 24.

15 16

Bruce Lee appropriated this saying and made it about action, substituting martial arts for Zen/enlightenment, and punches and kicks for mountains and waters. At a sufficiently high level of experience and technical expertise, the fighter does not experience her actions as very particular maneuvers which she selects by name prior to executing them, but merely as attack, attack, attack, or more precisely, the attack I need right now, the attack I need right now, the attack I need right now. The fighter entire, not merely her fist or her foot, is the weapon.

Similarly, the bodhisattva’s experience of action after attaining the perfection of meditation is less that she decides on the right solution to a given problem than that she simply becomes the solution.

III. Nietzsche Contra Candrakīrti (The Bodhisattva Path and [Nietzschean] Existentialism) There are, of course, non-Buddhists who have the insight or the luck (good or bad, one cannot be sure) to apprehend emptiness: in existentialist terms, for human beings, existence precedes essence. For manufactured objects, by contrast, an Aristotelian final cause, an essence, determines how an object will exist materially and formally. But even though their essence precedes their existence, that essence is given by humans; nothing possesses an essence, a meaning, by nature. For Nietzsche, as in Mādhyamika, there isn’t even really a self; “the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed.”21 And like the bodhisattva, the existentialist— upon experiencing something like Kierkegaard’s “fear and trembling” or Heidegger’s “call of conscience”—is acutely dissatisfied with the commonly accepted ways of being in the “oppressively artificial and fragmented world,”22 and seeks “a complete redefinition of one’s form of life.” 23 Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals (GM) in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), First Essay, sec. 13.

22 Huntington, 92.

23 Huntington, 93.

21

Some such individuals may not be constitutionally prepared for their insights.

“Again and again [the Mādhyamikas] admit that the doctrine of emptiness is frightening—and ought to be frightening for anyone who engages with it at an emotional and volitional level through meditation—because it lends itself so easily to nihilistic interpretations.”24 Someone who reaches the metaphysical understanding of the Buddhist or existentialist, but isn’t as psychically strong as, say, Nietzsche, might just lapse into some extreme hedonism, bouncing from indulgence to indulgence. At worst, if of particularly bitter or troubled spirit, he may yet succumb to a bleak nihilism and do terrible things. The bodhisattva’s task here is to draw the panicked back from the edge of the abyss and to improve their understanding of the doctrine.

But some emerge from their encounter with the abyss stronger than before, and these budding existentialists, though they realize like the bodhisattva that the world is full of meaningless suffering, may have quite a different reaction from the bodhisattvic quest to bring about suffering’s end. In particular, a Nietzschean may be inspired by the idea that the world is imilarly the only what he makes of it, and seek to go out in a blaze of perfection of glory, channeling his potential patience begins despair into creative energy and maybe breaking and/or with striving for making values along the way.

What should the bodhisattva slowness to anger say to this Nietzschean, who or frustration agrees with the Genealogy of Morals that “Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering”?25 Suppose further that the purpose in this case is art of Homeric or Wagnerian greatness, which may in fact help alleviate the suffering of others.

Indeed, can our Nietzschean not question why and how the bodhisattva, in a world with

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24 25

Huntington, 26.

Nietzsche, GM, Third Essay, sec. 28.

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no meaning of its own, has the grounds to suggest that the liberation of all other beings is an objectively superior path to his artistic endeavors? Why should the bodhisattva demand commitment to a moral code? And why that particular code? What hy should makes goodwill of a particularly compassionate and charitable the bodhisattva variety so much more compelling than the striving for dynamic demand greatness? What makes it true that commitment to a “knowledge that could release all creatures from fear and suffering moral code is the only knowledge worth striving for,”26 if those things can motivate an agent to become more than she is and allow her to revel in her power?

W

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IV. Beauty from You Who Are Powerful (Toward a Nietzschean Bodhisattva?)

“Schopenhauer as Educator” is, among other things, Nietzsche’s encouragement to find “the fundamental law of your authentic self ” in those objects and concerns that “form a stepladder on which until now you have climbed up to yourself ”; herein he declares, “Your educators can be nothing other than your liberators.”27 Morrison notes, apart from a general outline of the factors and hints involved in selfovercoming, we are at length left to find our own way. The process does seem rather sketchy and bereft of any clear and definite goal—a matter of experiment and trial and error…But having worked out their notion of selfovercoming—i.e. citta-bhāvanā [mind-cultivation]—one could employ Buddhism as a means of filling-in and completing Nietzsche’s sketchy outline.28 Huntington, 92.

27 Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator” in Unfashionable Observations, ed. Richard Gray (Stanford University Press, 1995), sec. 1.

28 Morrison, 171.

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Even if the bodhisattva’s endgame holds little interest for the existentialist, her pragmatism has a chance to make the path appear at least somewhat compatible with the Nietzschean’s self-reverence. In particular, our earlier worry—that the bodhisattva’s treatment of mundane compassion and morality as means to a superhuman end might detract from our sense of her virtue—need not be troubling to the Nietzschean, who can benefit from the more focused mind that he might develop by pursuing the bodhisattvic perfections. Even if the particular goal of liberating all beings from suffering is set aside, the bodhisattva path can offer something the existentialists shy away from providing in much detail: a guide to selfcultivation and self-enhancement. For this, the Nietzschean should be ripe.

Recall the perfection of meditation, in which the bodhisattva’s understanding of compassion and the other perfections, hitherto merely intellectual, becomes instinctual through both repeated practice and through her mindfulness regarding the perfections—in Candrakīrti’s words, she “gains extreme skill in the comprehension of the profound intrinsic nature of the truths of the noble-minded.”29 Morrison notes passages in Nietzsche that seem in harmony with this account: There is no ‘being’ behind doing…‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed— the deed is everything.30 All perfect acts are unconscious.31 Genius resides in instinct; goodness likewise. One acts perfectly only when one acts instinctively.32 Huntington, 156.

Nietzsche, GM, First Essay, sec. 13.

31 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), sec. 289.

32 Nietzsche, WP sec. 440.

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Morrison explains, “In other words, through self-overcoming we have to make that which we know in consciousness into instinct, in the sense that what we do instinctually springs from the depths of what we have become.”33 Again we have echoes of Aristotle’s virtue ethics; we recognize that some attitude or behavior of ours is undesirable or un-useful, and we begin to consciously work against this attitude or behavior, until we no longer have to work at it.

For the sake of further clarifying Nietzsche’s views, I would add, from Beyond Good and Evil: But the curious fact is that all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whether in thought itself or in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts just as in ethics, has developed only owing to the tyranny of “such capricious laws”...Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his “most natural state” is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of “inspiration”—and how strictly and subtly he obeys thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts.”34 Here Nietzsche is concerned not just with the nature of action in general or even good action in particular, but with the specific role of training and practice in the process of selfovercoming that produces good action. The sublime freedom of the great dancer (one of Nietzsche’s favorite images), the ability to seem to defy gravity and other laws that dictate how the rest of us clumsy mortals move about in the Morrison, 205.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), sec. 188.

world, the power to express what she feels in an utterly original way, must be cultivated through the strictest discipline and self-imposed tyranny.

Traditional, “conventional” technique must be mastered before the dancer can break the proverbial mold; she must internalize the rules before she can defy them and so make her mark.

The same goes for all great artists.

The Nietzschean, then, turns out to have more in common with the bodhisattva than he may have at first supposed. Both see that to be unfettered from an unsatisfactory status quo still requires fetters of one’s own making. The bodhisattva might, of course, have objections of her own, or at least feel curiosity regarding someone who can see the way the world really is, but does not, like her, feel compelled to seek an end to all beings’ suffering. She might be alarmed or even appalled by Nietzsche’s much-trumpeted disdain for pity. Nietzsche might raditional want to make a distinction between the pity he loathes conventional and the compassion of technique must the bodhisattva; he does say, after all, to “let your be mastered kindness be your final selfbefore the dancer Nietzsche’s conquest.”35 dislike for pity goes handcan break the in-hand with his dislike of proverbial mold ressentiment toward the strong; if pity is in any way the valorization of weakness, then it is bad.

But if the bodhisattva’s compassion entails the ultimate goal of elevating others to her level, of making them more than they are (even if right now the most appropriate course of action is simply to feed them when they are hungry), then it is good.

Ultimately, in any case, even the bodhisattva path itself must be considered empty of svabhāva, so its adaptation to the needs or interests of agents who seem far from Buddhist—but have, in this case, demonstrated formidable powers of both theoretical insight and practical wisdom—

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33 34

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), Second Part, “On Those Who are Sublime.”

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can be seen as an application of skillful means.

In keeping with this, a MÄ dhyamika bodhisattva could be attentive to opportunities for making generous use of Nietzscheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exhortative, even grandiose he tone and language, his martial analogies and his imagery of ietzschean height and flight and storms and then turns out lightningâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in short, his appeal to pride and power. Some, to have more in maybe even most, might be common with the drawn to the bodhisattva path or at least to Buddhism by the bodhisattva than promise of freedom from their pain. But some who might be he may have at particularly well-suited for the first supposed path, whose dissatisfaction with the meaningless world is more impatience and indignation than depression and despair, might be less interested in escape and peace than in the idea of becoming a hero.

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52 | Best Student Essays

Jory Vander Gailen Things to Come

Best Student Essays | 53

Jory Vander Gailen A Bright Spot

54 | Best Student Essays

Jory Vander Gailen

Indistict

Best Student Essays | 55

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