Wisdom Sits in Places

“Some fifteen years ago, a weathered ethnographer-linguist with two decades of fieldwork in a village of Western Apaches already behind me, I stumbled onto places there (a curious way of speaking, I know, but that is just how it felt) and became aware of their considerable fascination for the people whose places they are.” 

This quote introduces a core theme of the book: that despite their central role in the formation of culture, places have been neglected as an object of study by anthropologists, including Basso, who “stumbles” across them. This quote also introduces Basso as someone with a longstanding relationship with the community of Cibecue. Despite that longstanding history, this statement hints at the fact that Basso, like any other outsider, still has much to learn. 

“People, not cultures, sense places, and I have tried to suggest that in Cibecue, as elsewhere, they do so in varying ways.” 

Here, Basso is explaining his choice to structure the book around four individuals from Cibecue, to explain the phenomenon of naming places from different perspectives. This quote also highlights a theme that Basso will develop later in the book: that Western Apache history, and therefore culture, is developed in ways that are subjective and perspectival, in contrast to Anglo-American history, which aspires to a disembodied, authoritative voice.

“Essentially then, instances of place-making consist in an adventitious fleshing out of historical material that culminates in a posited state of affairs, a particular universe of objects and events—in short, a place-world—wherein portions of the past are brought into being.” 

Throughout the book, Basso notes that place-making requires both memory and imagination, whereby people not only reference past events but also filter them through their own subjectivity and interpret their significance based on the current context. In this quote, Basso is also highlighting how this discursive process allows people to preserve the past without needing recourse to the tools of academic historians.