0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
The Politics of Ecstatic Research
and the social sciences to read. This development is related to a widely
held view in indigenous communities that “Western” society is woe-
fully, dangerously short of values, is spiritually deficient in its empha-
sis on rationalism and universalism, and that we are “people without
culture” (with apologies to Eric Wolf). In this purported absence of
spiritual strength, perhaps it seems an obvious path to insist on those
indigenous views that have depth and that are thought to produce a
life worth living. Goulet ( 1994 a, 88 ), for example, writes of a Dene
man who regarded whites as having lost their souls, a point that he
may have meant both metaphorically and literally.
In the same vein, Cove recently noted, “By the mid- 1980 s, Maori
claimed to have their own science.... It was asserted to be theoreti-
cal and more comprehensive than its Western counterpart insofar as
the former included a spiritual dimension, denied the validity of hu-
man/non-human and nature/culture distinctions, and fully integrated
basic and applied research (Cove 1999 , 115 ). The members of Coast
Salish communities have not stated their position in these terms but
have advanced a theory of learning and education (Hilbert 1985 ), of
ethnohistory and archaeology (Carlson 1997 ), and have positioned
their own approach in contrast to Western approaches.
The second issue arising from the “Belshaw wallet caper” is the pre-
sumption that I could understand what I was told and might be mo-
tivated enough to take action, in effect, believe their accounts, rather
than simply hear them or find them interesting. This relates to the new
sort of insistence on the recognition of indigenous presence and val-
ues I just mentioned, even or especially those that appear in contrast
to Western values and epistemologies.
The third issue is that different indigenous people provided differ-
ing interpretations of the wallet story. Part of this could be ascribed
to their differences in origin; in this story, one was a prairies person
and the other from the West Coast. The variation in response is itself,
in positivistic terms, interesting data; or, more humanely, it provided
insight into different perspectives, into cultural themes, including, po-
tentially, pan-Indian perspectives. But Bierwurt ( 1999 ) and others have
written about the need to fracture the authority of anthropological
accounts and, more generally, the authority of single narratives, and
