Traveling with native collaborators among the Yoeme (Yaqui) pueblos of Sonora, Mexico, before the days of cell phones, it was not uncommon to arrive at a house to hear that our arrival had been predicted hours or days before by a particular bird. As both friends and strangers would begin serving the special dinner prepared in advance for our arrival, the family elders would describe how a bird had landed on the tree branch or perhaps rooftop near them and had told them to expect us within the day. As a student of indigenous worldviews, I had long recognized that for many native peoples birds often acted as messengers, and I had learned throughout my studies that some species were considered related to particular types of news: good, bad, meteorological, and particularly news of death. Of course the wide variety of feathers used in peyote fans and the omnipresent role of feathers in headdresses across native country does more than suggest a special relationship between human and bird kin. At the very least, humans and birds have had phenomenal relationships for a very long time. As with other animal-human relationships, the study of indigenous ontologies often depends greatly upon the understanding of how particular groups and tribes have related to their feathered kin, and more generally their animal neighbors, friends, and allies.
Amadeo M. Rea’s book, Wings in the Desert: A Folk Ornithology of the Northern Pimans, offers a fine model of the sort of treatment much needed to perceive human-bird relationships in one particular indigenous community. Based on decades of work across the Sonoran Desert, Rea’s book includes some important introductory chapters on the “Northern Pimans and Their Environment,” “Native Consultants,” “Documentary Sources,” and “An Overview of Avian Folk Taxonomy.” The next four chapters contain, for me at least, the core of Rea’s ethnographic contributions with sections on “Birds, Guardians, Shamans, and Healers,” “Bird Keeping and Rearing,” “Feather Use,” and “Hunting and Trapping, Game Preparation and Cooking.” Part Two of the book contains the “Plan of Folk Generics” and the praiseworthy “Species Accounts,” to which I will return below.
This is a very handsome book. Wings in the Desert has absolutely beautiful illustrations of the birds under discussion (many of them by Rea). Add to these sketches of the birds Marvin Popkin’s photographs of hunting arrows, the few but exquisite photos of Piman ceremonies from the Arizona State Museum, and Rea’s own photos of collaborators’ drawings of ceremonial layouts, one intriguing but not fully examined sketch of Piman cosmology, and this book will please many readers of native ethnography, U.S.-Mexico borderland studies, and of course ornithology. The structure of the book is consistently thorough; from the preface to the appendices, one gets the sense that Rea is a perfectionist because the information is so clearly presented and detailed. That said, the seemingly exceptional index is made into a difficult tool by printing the text in three columns to a page. Perhaps due to the columned pages, I often struggled to find the brief mention of a phrase or subject listed in the index on a particular page. Such printing also leads the page count of 293 to be misleading: this is a big book with a wealth of information. This book will surely please those readers wanting to delve into the minutia of all things bird-related in Piman culture. The book will challenge the reader hoping for a straightforward explanation of how relating with birds provides Piman knowledge, which is a central claim of the book’s advertisement.
Whether reading about the book on the press’s website, the book jacket, or online at a retailer’s site, its advertised central claim is that tribal people have a science of their own comparable to, if not exactly the same as, what we might call “formal science as practiced by Westerners.” Yet, the book offers no justification for what might be meant by either “science” or “Westerners.” In a similar vein as other scholars, Rea convincingly argues that all societies have science since all people test their observations and theories of the natural world over extended periods of time. His argument is built firmly by the innumerable stories told about the birds by Rea’s collaborators and the depth of their knowledge about where the birds came from, informing Piman history, cosmology, archaeology, geography, and intertribal relations. Yet, where this argument seems to never be followed through to its logical end is in the role of categorizing and taxonomic thinking in the “folk sciences.” What differentiates Piman knowledge production from “Western science”? How are they similar? And, more importantly, what is the role of oral tradition in Piman scientific thinking? For a book advertised to be “exposing the limitations” of thinking about tribal knowledge as inferior to Western science, it surprisingly does not list “epistemology,” “science,” or “knowledge” in its index. I would find the book much more satisfying theoretically if the author’s discussion of Piman epistemology were carried out throughout the text and not simply suggested in the preface and in the chapters’ introductory sections. To make the case for Piman science convincingly, Rea could have attempted at least some framing device (introductory or concluding section) specifically devoted to making sense of Piman stories of and relations to birds as epistemological. How does understanding Piman folk ornithology help us, for example, understand knowledge-making in indigenous communities more generally?
The theme of Piman ways of knowing is one of several examples that highlight the ways the book might or might not be useful to different readerships. The scholar of native religiosity will probably be confused by Rea’s seemingly full-scale acceptance of the word “shaman.” Such usage is made more confusing than understandable when Rea describes certain people as not shamans, though they may have received a song that heals from their “animal guardian” (49). Rea’s sense of shamanism seems to have at its core a concern for the charismatic, secretive, and the curative. Such characterizations are fine enough if ethnographically demonstrated, but to use the thoroughly debated word “shaman” for any indigenous community in the Americas seems to beg for clarification of what is meant and what is not meant by the term. Similar questions arise when the author talks about “spirit power” (16), “moiety mascots” (49), “water monsters” (63), and so on. This is not a book where the reader can learn details about these intriguing and clearly powerful beings in Piman culture. Specifically, Rea doesn’t talk about their ontological status (their beingness), or who we might call the persons within a Piman cosmos.
That said, for those wanting to teach ethnographic writing, Rea is exquisite. Even when his paragraphs seem to ramble or progress in stream-of-consciousness manner, he is masterful at bringing the native voice into the narrative, infusing his histories and descriptions with a first-person perspective that authorizes his research. And in the last chapter, “Species Accounts,” I could not put the book down. I literally kept asking myself, “Who would have thought I would enjoy reading about birds this much?” Rea compiles here an invaluable compendium of Piman stories and songs about the individual birds, drawing from both previous research and his ethnographic fieldwork among the community members. He rightly offers for each bird a note whether the bird was misidentified in previous scholarship and technical notes about names, subspecies, and comparative linguistics. The book reads as exhaustive in its ornithological materials; and Rea’s research is clearly thorough.
Bird lovers will relish this book. Scholars of Piman worldview will love it. Anyone with serious and critically-minded questions about Piman ontology (who exists), epistemology (how they know), and axiology (how they value) in Uto-Aztecan speaking communities will be left wanting. Needless to say, this is a lot to ask of any author. Asking it of Rea, however, goes to show just how much he does contribute to our understanding of worldviews among Piman peoples. Let’s hope he has the support and inclination to continue publishing more of his findings.
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[Review length: 1337 words • Review posted on September 10, 2008]