Beaver Dreaming and Singing
R. Ridington
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| Topics | Dreaming |
| Key points | Argues that Diamond Jenness's detailed ethnography of the Sekani reveals a complex Northern Athabascan conceptual world of totemic thought and shamanic structure, but that the work, like much Boasian ethnography, fails to provide an adequate conceptual framework to translate the meaning of the practices it describes. |
Abstract
Diamond Jenness must have been a magnificent field worker, for the description he gives us of the Indian worlds he visited are rich in the kind of detail that only a trusted and sympathetic friend would be told. In his fine ethnography of the Sekani Indians he gives us fifteen pages of vivid first person accounts of Sekani religious practice.1 We are told of people who died and returned to become medicine men, and of a variety of personal medicines and spirit quests. Because Jenness's account is so detailed, concrete and true to what he was told, one glimpses that the Northern Athabascan conceptual world must be more complex than their social institutions, a world of totemic thought set in a shamanic cosmic structure. Nonetheless, the descriptive excellence of Jenness's work and a great deal of North American ethnography in the Boasian tradition leaves the reader tantalized but curi ously unfulfilled because of its inability to find an appropriate conceptual framework with which to translate the meaning of what it describes.