CULTURE IN CRISIS A STUDY OF THE HOPI INDIANS BY LAURA THOMPSON, WITH A FORE- WORD BY JOHN COLLIER « A CHAPTER FROM THE WRITINGS OF BENJAMIN LEE WHORF HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK Under the Editorship of Gardner Murphy CULTURE IN CRISIS: A STUDY OF THE HOPI INDIANS Copyright, 1950, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America All rights in this book are reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Brothers I-Z CONTENTS Foreword by John Collier ix Preface XV Acknowledgments Xxi The Problem > The Earth Mother and Her Children 21 PY Ancient Americans 47 w “We All Help One Another” 63 F Intensity Within Tranquility 90 The Path that Leads to the Sun 121 D N Strange Ways of the White Brother 136 Time, Space and Language oe by Benjamin Lee Whorf 152 Culture in Crisis 173 10. A Two-Ply Lariat 185 Bibliography 203 Index 215 PLATES Following page 214 Corn Rock Shipaulovi pueblo Houses in Mishongnovi South plaza, Shungopovi pueblo View of Old Oraibi Peach orchard, New Oraibi Spring-irrigated terraced garden Ranch house Farmer with digging stick Herding sheep on the Hopi range Indian Service range manager instructing Hopi in sheep care Sheep owner culling his flock Range management plot Storeroom in a Hopi home Cooking at the open hearth Evening meal during the last war Women grinding corn House scene Coiling a basket Girls’ puberty ceremonial costume Married woman’s ceremonial costume Up the mesa trail A mechanic at work At the village store Tribal Court Judge of the Tribal Court Hospital-delivered infant with Hopi nurse-aide Boys’ washroom in a Hopi day school Shungopovi day school Day-school playground Day-school classrooms Children going home from school In the home economics class Recess at the Oraibi high school Beginners’ classroom Mothers with infants on cradleboards Mother and child Boy preparing to spin top Hopi school girl Taking care of baby brother Girl at work Youth on horseback Hopi man Hopi man A Hopi ceremony FOREWORD I suspect no book yet produced is like this book. I also believe that its importance will not be quickly apprehended, because the book draws into relationship with one another many matters that usually are not thought of as belonging together. It deals with relationships not con- ventionally apprehended as yet. Through deep attention to these unat- tended-to relationships, it makes discoveries—fundamental discoveries, of theoretical and practical moment at the same time, and of local mo- ment, and perhaps world moment. But if the reader is to make these discoveries on his own part, he too must bring deep attention to bear; and in these hurrying years, with their myriad demands upon quick attention, little of reading is done with deep attention. The individual, as all know, yields his meanings only to profound study. Profound study of even the lowliest individual, in even the re- motest part of the world, yields understanding of life as a whole and of man’s whole world. And the understanding of the individual has been an unwearying pursuit of the European mind ever since the Greek years; toward such pursuit, every enlightened mind pays respect, and most enlightened minds share in it. But as yet, the pursuit of the understanding of human societies attracts little. of that deep, sustained attention which the individual demands and receives. The two centuries behind us were not very sure that society had any effective existence at all. Contemporary social study is broken down into many specializations, whose hypotheses are narrow and not very exciting or demanding upon profound attention. And here I come to one of the elements of importance in this book. I The many specialized disciplines of social science break down the questioning of society into many hypotheses, each one useful but each ix X Foreword one limited and limiting. As long time rolls on, synthesis may dawn from the vast volume of data gathered under the many and incomplete hypotheses; or synthesis may not dawn, even after long years. Not in this manner do other sciences and arts reach their useful goals—indus- trial engineering, for example, and medicine. Numerous are the spe- cialties of medicine, but they do not await on some far future intellectual event for their synthesis. Instead, they move here and now, incessantly, into coéperative, clinical application. This book results from the codperative and integrative use of the many specialities of social science, including psychological science and ecology, by specialists who collaborated in the search for the whole- ness of a complex social fact or event. The specialities functioned as they function in the medical clinic. There emerged discoveries not con- tained within or predictable from any of the specialized hypotheses or all of them together. The discoveries threw a flood of genuinely new light upon an entire human society—its past, its present, and its pos- sible future. Immediate practical understandings’ were attained, and some very moving, universal significances appeared. Synthesis and pragmatic yield did not have to wait on the intellectual construction of some indefinite future year; they emerged at once, right out of the human and social data as examined through the method of converging specialized disciplines within a codperative research. One of the desperate needs of the clouded world situation now is the speeding-up of social discovery, the quick achievement of generaliza- tions which can be used by statesmen. When the specialities of social science move into codperative, integrative research, a corner in the his- tory of social science is turned, and a critical acceleration takes place. The corner is turned, the critical acceleration is demonstrated, in this book. 11 The pueblos of the Southwestern United States are the most repre- sentative survivors of pre-Columbian Indian civilization. They are such through the complexity of their life, its many-sidedness and its extraordinary balance, its religious profundity, its man-nature world Foreword xi view, and its weight and radiance of symbolism. None other of the complex Indian civilizations was allowed to hold its own through the centuries after white conquest. The pueblos held their own. But now, their deepest crisis is upon them. None can say that it is their final crisis; but it could be the crisis leading to social death, while if, through great inner resourcefulness and with very wise aid, they surmount the crisis, the achievement will have world-wide interest and might be productive of world-wide values. Among the pueblos, none except possibly Taos is in the grip of crisis so manifest and so profound as are the Hopi pueblos. And among the pueblos, it is the Hopi who preserve the most unmixed of the pre- Columbian cultures and life-systems. This book searches to its roots and to its core the Hopi society as the conserver of an immense past and as the builder of souls; and it searches to its roots the nature of the crisis which has come upon this society and upon its personalities. In this search, the book deals, in terms valid for all the continents, with one of the major conditions of humanity today. The hundreds of millions of nonliterate or nonindus- trial peoples within their societies usually ancient, have moved or are moving into crisis. The crisis is far, far deeper, more central, than the merely political view or the merely economic view apprehends, though it is, too, a political and economic crisis. This book is a case study in the crisis of one people among the many hundreds of peoples who are in crisis. It is exhaustive in terms of this one people, but it is a study carried out in the search for an understanding of the crisis of all non- industrial and nonliterate people, and also the crisis of our world in its entirety. For our world is in crisis as stern and as obscure as that of the Hopi Indian tribe, and an aspect of that crisis is the dissolution of the human bonds and the sinking of faiths and values which are from of old. Wy . The world profoundly needs to have its sense of society deepened; to become aware of the universal potency of societies as the determiners and creators of life; even to acquire a reverence for these intangible yet so definite entities which from out of obscurity are the dominators