Guy Lanouetransformation of Giant Animals’ physical bodies and not their spirit,
that I had been missing: if things are “timeless” (to use an expression
from our society), then they are not “time-ful” as they are in the West.
They are simply unmarked for time.
It was only when I abandoned my own spatial meanderings that
I understood what space meant to the Sekani in terms of acquiring
power. Only by understanding in very personal terms that space and
place no longer meant anything to me as means of understanding my-
self was I able to see that space and place were fundamental in defin-
ing power for the Sekani. Power is linked to time, but time is, and can
only be, metaphorized in spatial terms. Access to power can be evoked
only by immobility, which is a meaningful trope only in the context
of people who have somatized the need to move continually over the
homeland to survive and to politicize territory. My coming to under-
stand the phenomenon was far from the interplay of elements that
define the “ecstatic side” (as the editors put it, in their call for contri-
butions) of fieldwork. I did eventually understand something about
power by “relaxing [my] controls,” but it was a form of control and
agency that was so somatized and part of my being that I was com-
pletely unaware of it when I did my initial fieldwork. I suggest that
anthropologists listen not so much to the voices of fieldwork but to
the echoes that may still be reverberating many years later.
Notes
- Among Athapaskan speakers, this power is called by several names: nadetche by the
Sekani (according to Jenness 1937 , 68 , although the Sekani in 1978 – 1979 never used the
word); zhaak (which Legros 1999 translates as “grace”); ink’on among the Dogrib and Dene-
Tha (Helm 1994 ); and nitsit among the Kaska (R. McDonnell, personal communication).
Discussions of the same concept are found also in Sharp ( 1987 , 1988 ) for the Chipewyan,
in Ridington ( 1988 b) for the Beaver, and in Goulet ( 1998 ) for the Dene Tha.