Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 1984, pp. 189-90.
Abstract
Anthropologists have been slow to take up intensive fieldwork in American life, partly because their professional training has emphasized that "the exotic" is something found only in remote tribal societies, not in urbanized North America. But with the transformation of tribal cultures into developing nations, anthropologists have begun to turn to their own culture and have found it possible to see it as exotic. This book is an example of that new genre. The author has unusual equipment for the task: she was trained as a veterinarian and also as an anthropologist, and her study of rodeo grew out of a wider interest in the relationship between humans and animals. The present work emphasizes the significance rodeo symbolism and attitudes may have for conceptions of the "wild," and animals generally, in North American culture.
Culture is the keyword. The author is a true cultural anthropologist: one who is concerned exclusively with the patterns of symbol, values, and aesthetics that presumably define the meaning of human experience and the world. This means that some aspects of rodeo are not dealt with at all: for example, the dozens of small, local rodeos all over the West and Middle West. The author's rodeos are the big ones and are, of course, a part of the entertainment media in both rural and urban North America. If one studies rodeo as a symbolic ritual, as she does, one looks for the most complete and pure versions, and these are the big ones. The symbolic focus also means that the social and economic aspects of rodeo are omitted from this study. The chapter that comes closest to a more social-reality-oriented approach is "Inheritor of Cowboy Tradition." The contents include some information on rodeo's roots in the range-cattle industry, where rodeo performers come from ("performers," not "participants"), the nomadic character of the performers and promoters, the anti-urban attitudes of many rodeo people, and rodeo's associations with countrywestern music. This chapter, however, is mostly about machismo themes, physical risks, male dominance and bondedness, some curious alliances with fundamentalist Christianity, and the cowboy image.
The animal theme occupies more space than other topics. Horses and cattle each get a chapter: the horse is not only an element of the "chivalric code" but what the author calls "animality," or a "merging" of human identity with the animal. Horses also have to be subdued and inducted into the human world-the man's world-and therefore the horse constitutes a "symbolic bridge between nature and culture" (p. 132). Thus, horses are both wild and tame and apparently symbolize the dual aspirations of the westerner, who wants both to ride the open range and to drive his Cadillac. The bronc is also the symbol of the outlaw, the resistor to organized society. The author considers the manhorse relationship as "sacramental," and also "sacrificial," since the horse takes a beating, first in the breaking, and later in the contests.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln