To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
he ignores the writing of any history as just
that, writing. It is always a translation,
always incomplete. The illusory objectivity
which Hornung maintains through the different
voices and viewpoints, all seeming to
speak for themselves, disguises another
reality: Hornung makes the editorial decisions.
He decides which questions and
issues to raise, and how the interviews will
be incorporated into the text. The constant
use of quotation marks to validate facts
comes to irritate the reader and the journalistic
idiom colours the assumed objectivity
of Hornung's writing. If Hornung is
implicated in the history which he critiques,
he is too heavily implicated.
Hornung makes it clear which side of the
Oka controversy he is on, but he could have
been a bit more honest if he had examined
his own opinions and biases, including the
problem of language itself, in a more direct
manner. As it is, Hornung sets himself up
as neutral—the static white receptacle of
Native knowledge and history.
Ridington's writing contrasts starkly with
Hornung's apparently transparent style. In
Little Bit Know Something, he emphasizes
the complexity in communication and
understanding between cultures. This book
may be read as an academic companion
volume to his Trail to Heaven; the series of
essays expands and amplifies Ridington's
personal experience of ethnography. He is
keenly aware that communication between
cultures involves translating between a tangled
web of discourse systems. One cannot
read about and understand other cultural
experiences by isolating and placing that
culture within a Western framework, a
Western context of experience. For
Ridington, like Hornung, the facts do not
shift, but one's perspective on the facts,
however, can shift dramatically—and affect
their meaning. The subtle self-consciousness
of Ridington's writing signals a shift in
thinking itself. In "Technology, World
View, and Adaptive Strategy," he argues for
a different definition, a different interpretation
of the word "technology." The Western
definition of technology is one comprised
of artifacts, material objects; in hunting
and gathering societies, technology needs
to include it opposite, the notion of artifice.
Ridington's personal goal is "to communicate
what I was learning from my own
experiences of an Indian way of life". He
emphasizes that he is learning from the
Dunne-za rather than about them, and
continually places the emphasis on the cultural
context of narratives by refusing to
read in isolation. He reinserts the personal
into anthropological discourse. The writing
is suggestive of the personal ethnographies
of the nineteenth century. This style fell out
of favour in the early part of the twentieth
century, when anthropology focused itself
on being scientifically objective. But
Ridington argues that one cannot separate
the personal from the ethnographic. The
cultural includes the personal, and these
together form the stuff of ethnography.
What happens when white European values
are super-imposed onto different societies?
Ridington notes, for example, that by
retaining Marxist concepts in radically different
cultural contexts, academics use a
sleight of hand to make them fit with
Native culture. In his paper on Wechuge
and Windigo, he questions whether the
idea of Windigo, which has taken on
mythic proportions in its translation to
white culture, is more a function of
Western categories of thought than of
Native categories. Anthropological study
needs to reflect the thoughtworlds of the
people studied, he insists, and not merely
our own. That this task requires a great
deal of familiarity with another culture,
and is objectively impossible, does not
invalidate the process. In the last section of
the book, which deals specifically with the
problem of discourse, Ridington looks even
more carefully at questions of interpretation
and context. Ultimately, Little Bit Know
114