Holly Cusack-McVeigh began working in Hooper Bay, Alaska, in 1996. Following this first engagement in the Yup’ik community, she completed her doctoral studies in the southwestern Alaska region. This book develops and extends concepts that she explores in her dissertation. Over the past two decades, Cusack-McVeigh has remained continually engaged with the community, and she was worked with various organizations on community-based research projects, public presentations, and a variety of activities. Her new book reflects this orientation to collaborative research. The reflective and reflexive dimensions of Stories Find You, Places Know contributes to the richness of her discussion of relationships between narratives, place names, and the importance of place within Yup’ik history and culture. Her central focus is on relationships between place, culture, and agency, and she offers insight into these relationships through a wide variety of narratives and beliefs that she has documented. The book takes a provocative approach to placemaking. Rather than demonstrating how people create a sense of place out of empty space, Cusack-McVeigh explores how the Yup’ik regard place as imbued with agency. Relationships between place, people, culture, and agency are interrelated, and in the Hooper Bay community, place is an active resource for creating identity and meanings within the culture.
Following a preface and introduction, the book is organized around key themes. Chapters focus on symbolic associations and metaphorical relationships between human beings and the land, and on relationships between geographical features. Additional chapters offer analysis of narratives about various figures from Yup’ik folklore and mythology, the place of legends and memorates within their traditional culture, and stories of shamans and other cultural specialists. In the final chapters, Cusack-McVeigh gives particular attention to narratives of haunting and supernatural beings. She draws from a variety of theoretical approaches in her interpretations of the cultural traditions that she studies. Within her broad-based contextual study, she develops specific analyses through an eclectic application of performance-centered approaches. Although she rarely provides full-fledged representations of specific performances, she uses insights and techniques drawn from the ethnography of communication to elucidate how verbal expressions are related to wider cultural themes. In particular, she grounds much of her scholarship in the writing of Keith Basso. She develops concepts from Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places to explore significant relationships between place names, narratives, and cultural processes. Whereas Basso tends to emphasize the pragmatics of linguistic discourse, and he downplays—or even critiques—aspects of the belief that Native Americans have mystical connections to the land, Cusack-McVeigh explores how an understanding of Yup’ik spirituality and their supernatural beliefs can be integrated into her performance-centered approach.
Her work also further develops models used by Basso and other anthropologists and folklorists. Cusack-McVeigh picks up on their call to use these linguistic approaches in connection with place-based ethnography within a specific community. She develops this model through long-term fieldwork in the region, and the depth of her relationships with her contributors yields a rich narrative. The reflective elements in which she gains epiphanies into the deeper cultural values are especially telling. Many of these insights emerge from questioning her own tacit assumptions in which she reveals her skepticism about the supernatural aspects of the culture. Her conversational partners tend to follow a communicative pattern in which they first defer from making a direct confrontation that challenges her misunderstanding. Over time, however, they often develop subtle ways to question what Cusack-McVeigh believes is possible in this world and in other cosmological spheres. Her own tradition of disbelief is most dramatically called into question in a vivid narrative that can be read as her own memorate about a haunted schoolhouse. Throughout the book, the author elucidates similar examples of the need to move beyond a simple acknowledgment of the possibility of mystically transcendent experience. Rather, she develops in-depth discussions of the need to center her analysis of Yup’ik conceptions about place by basing her interpretation in the descriptions of their actual experiences and their wider systems of belief. A careful reading of the book, thus, affirms the value of the linguistic anthropology of Basso and other ethnographers of place while it also suggests ways to expand their insights by a deeper consideration of belief systems and cosmology.
When readers shift away from holding to conventional ideas about placemaking in which human agency is regarded as a key to turning space into place, they will gain a deeper engagement with Cusack-McVeigh’s representation of Yup’ik culture. Exploring how human agency is vital to placemaking can provide important ways to understand how folklore contributes to studies of cultural geography, and elements of this approach are evident in Stories Find You, Places Know. But—the book’s title is to be taken literally. In Yup’ik belief and narrative, places are imbued with active agency. This agency is grounded in their beliefs about their environment as well as in their beliefs in supernatural figures such as shamans, ancestral spirits, ghosts, dwarves, and other figures. The book gives in-depth descriptions of the beliefs and stories associated with these beings, and Cusack-McVeigh further contextualizes these descriptions to sketch a wider understanding of the spiritual context that comprises an intriguing belief system. Her own analysis is complex, but it is difficult to assess how deeply she goes in this analysis, namely because of her limited understanding of the Yup’ik language. She presents interview materials and narratives in both English and in the original language but relies heavily on the work of translators. There is some discussion of unique lexical and grammatical nuances, but these rich insights are counterbalanced by questions about how much is either lost in translation or simply unrecorded. This is more a limitation than a major problem, and her writing generally is smooth and engaging. Nevertheless, there are some quirks in her writing that result in unwieldy or even confusing prose. In particular, she has an unfortunate tendency either to explain that she is going to further develop a point in a subsequent chapter or to note that she has already made that point when she returns to it in another chapter. The result is rhetorically clunky, and there are more elegant ways to develop her interesting points.
Despite a few instances of stylistic awkwardness, this book is well written. The author blends her own experiences in the field with her analysis in engaging ways, and she also provides sensitive descriptions of incidents that she shared with the people of Hooper Bay. Her book is well organized, and it includes vivid and engaging incidents as well as highly readable narratives from her in-depth field research. She gives carefully reasoned and clear conclusions within each chapter, and a final chapter draws from a range of analyses to offer a fine summary of the extensive work that she has completed in her long engagement in the Alaskan community. Cusack-McVeigh emphasizes how relationships between narratives and place among the Yup’ik need to be understood within a wider systematic context that emphasizes a broader understanding of agency, and that this system is related to wider issues of human ecology. The insights in Stories Find You, Places Know deserve further consideration in subsequent studies of placemaking and storytelling.
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[Review length: 1184 words • Review posted on November 16, 2018]