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On Puzzling Wavelengths
my data from the Indian jungle at a conference at the National Muse-
ums of Canada in 1965. She told me right away that my huntergath-
erers in India sounded similar in their values and their individualistic
behavior to a hunting band she had done research with in Canada.
Studying people in the way we planned involved interviewing large
numbers of bush- and town-oriented men and women of all ages and
backgrounds. It also meant working with them as much as possible
in their own tongue, a Dene (or Athapaskan) language that was dis-
tantly related to Navajo and Apache. Our Canadian field site was far
from the mainstream, so only a third of the adults who lived there
had developed much facility with English. This may have been pre-
cisely the situation we sought, but actually conducting the interviews
in their language was a daunting prospect, for Athapaskan languages
were notoriously difficult to learn. Remember the “Wind Talkers” in
World War II. More than the first half of our time would have to be
spent acquiring the ability to undertake what we had set out to do. If
that was what it was going to take, however, that was what we would
have to do. And the study did bear fruit (Gardner 1976 ; Christian
and Gardner 1977 ).
Being Drunk to Communicate
The most readily explained of the surprises I faced was the practice
of pairs of individuals becoming stone drunk together, ritually and
in certain circumstances, as a means of solving communication prob-
lems in their relationship. It was not at all obvious to me, initially,
that heavy drinking had a positive contribution to make to commu-
nication; surely, we all realize that alcohol consumed in excess can
only impair understanding. To appreciate how their practice works
we need to look, first, at the general values of Dene and at the rela-
tionships among adults in their society.
I described the settlement as having loose clusters of log cabins and
canvas tents. These tended to belong to sets of families that were not
only closely related to one another but also associated with given hunt-
ing and trapping areas lying upstream, for instance, or downstream,
or toward the mountains. The loosest cluster of all, the cabins across
the river, belonged to two amiable brothers who dwelt more than half
