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Wisdom Sits In Places Summary

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Anthropology as a discipline has been plagued by privileged armchair anthropologists, universalizing statements of whole cultures and societies, and a lack of interest in the everyday lives of all people until the late 20th century: which is credited for the postmodernist, radical ideology, that demolished traditional ideals of culture and society. Postmodernism influenced anthropologists to think more critically about their role in producing knowledge and how there is no ethnographic “truth,” rather subjective knowledge. At this time ethnography began to take a more literary approach, ethnographer included their reflective stance on how their understanding shaped the writing, and a more diverse range of subjects were accounted for in the ethnographic discourse. Keith Basso’s, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and …show more content…

The chapters lend nicely to setting up Basso’s postmodernist and symbolic theoretical orientations. Highly influenced by Clifford Geertz’s symbolic approach, rooted in the ideology that culture is an organized collection of symbolic systems that transmit a deep cultural meaning for a collective group of people, Basso explains the hidden symbology of places for the Western Apache. Basso explains that place-names (1) provide context for mental images of a particular place, (2) evoke historical tales of ancestors, (3) affirm the validity of traditional moral values and ancestral knowledge, (4) and offers advice while healing wounded spirits (xiv, 100). Basso comments on the symbolic nature of Western Apache places, “named places have long been symbols of rich significance for the Apache people,” which are defined through each story attached to each of the 296 places that Basso maps

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