Zuni and the American Imagination
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10016376 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Larry J Zimmerman, Larry Zimmerman (0000-0003-1006-9717, University of Iowa, corresponding author), Eliza McFreely |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 89 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 236-236 |
| Publication date | 2002-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2700844 |
| OpenAlex | W2397389582 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
Like many other American Indian nations, the Zuni survived the onslaught of Euro-American culture. Although intense pressures from the Spanish and then American colonizers constantly pushed them toward assimilation, they resisted. Culturally damaged and forced to adapt, they still managed to retain the core of their identity and practices. The forces of contact, however, were not one way. The Zuni, as it turns out, also had an impact on the colonizers, visible in influences on novelists such as Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World (1932) and Robert Heinlein in his Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and on scholars such as Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture (1934). Eliza McFeely considers the source of this influence to be centered in the work of three early anthropologists, Frank Hamilton Cushing, Matilda Stevenson, and Stewart Culin, who studied the Zuni during the late 1800s into the early 1900s. As mid-Victorians, the three anthropologists were middle-class people who craved prestige and respect, loved the exotic and remote, and needed to be in control of situations. Their opportunity came with the fluid American social structure of the post–Civil War period. They found themselves in a situation in which anthropology was defining itself as a professional discipline and in which Native Americans were thought to be disappearing. Associated with the nascent Bureau of American Ethnology, founded in 1879, they began a series of expeditions to the Southwest that continued into the new century. Although they saw themselves as preserving an endangered culture, as much as anything they were entangled in a process of defining a discipline and themselves as individuals
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Cherokee · Culture of the United States · Ethnology · Identity (music · Native american · Political science · Prestige · Sociology · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.23 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2004 - 2021 (18) |
| Highly cited | No |