To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
of Nelligan's life, his madness, his "women",
and his deeply embedded fascination for
generations of Québécois than in the larger,
more scholarly study. Godin assuages our
fear of biographical fallacy because he does
not read the poems as biography that is as
in the commonplace interpretation of the
"vaisseau d'or" as a metaphor of Nelligan's
descent into madness, but instead as poetic
premonitions. When he lays the lines before
us from "Soirs d'octrobre," we feel a shiver:
"Oui, je souffre, ces soirs, démons mornes,
chers Saintes... ./Mon âme se fait dune à
funèbres hantises."
Suddenly, Godin is absolutely right; this
is a frightening premonition. When he turns
to the theme that preoccupied Lemieux—
love and women—Godin, although sailing
too close to the oedipal, to biographical fallacy,
and to misogynous metaphors (can we
really read "le puits hanté" as the sinister
symbol of the vagina?), captures what was
quite possibly, given the oppressive religious
context, the complex response of a
young man both fearing and desiring sexual
experience.
The book is charming and affecting,
interposed as it is with photographs, paintings,
and newspaper clippings; it radiates
immediacy and intimacy. In this thoughtful,
whimsical, mournful 57 pages, one will
have at last a sense of this elusive young
poet and his art.
Ethnography as Dialogue
T. F. Mcllwraith, with introduction by John
Barker
The Bella Coola Indians. (Two vol.) U Toronto P
$60.00/ Cloth $125.00.
Reviewed by Julie Cruikshank
"Ethnographies begin as conversations
between anthropologists and their hosts,"
John Barker reminds us in his introduction
to T.F. Mcllwraith's The Bella Coola Indians.
A classic study of Nuxalk society conducted
in the 1920s and first published in 1948, this
1,500 page two-volume work demonstrates
how ethnographies continue to be conversations,
not only in inception but also in
construction, publication and in their
ongoing lives.
T.F. Mcllwraith was born in Hamilton,
Ontario, in 1899, one year after Franz Boas
published The Mythology of the Bella Cook
Indians. Following overseas service in
World War I, young Mcllwraith studied
anthropology at Cambridge. In his preface,
he confirms that he was already distinguishing
the approaches of "the American
school" of anthropology from "the older
school of English anthropology" when he
began his fieldwork in 1922. With Edward
Sapir's sponsorship and financial assistance
from the Anthropology Division at the
Victoria Memorial Museum he spent two
six-month periods in Bella Coola between
March 1992 and February 1924.
Franz Boas's salvage paradigm dominated
North American anthropology by this time.
Boas interpreted narrative texts as providing
objective evidence of the past, somehow
uncontaminated by the observer, and he
recorded stories with scant reference to
narrator or circumstances of narration.
While disagreeing with Boas on a number
of points Mcllwraith's most compelling
long term conversations with his Nuxalk
hosts began because he initially decided to
avoid replicating Boas's narrative collection.
Ironically, he observed "...the Bella
Coola... are so intensely proud of the deeds
of their first forefathers that several insisted
on recounting them before they were willing
to do other work; in consequence, a fair
number of myths was collected through
necessity."
Unexpectedly, then, oral narrative
became central to Mcllwraith's ethnography.
He learned the trade language
Chinook and recorded stories in that language
so that he could make his own translations.
He came to realize that
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