Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2003
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 2003, pp. 128.
Abstract
While the merging of historical and anthropological outlooks has been a productive trend in Plains Indian studies, there are pitfalls. For one, the authority inherent in an accurate chronology or lively narrative can mask basic errors in social analysis. Sometimes historians have difficulty in properly employing the terms and principles of social organization so carefully wrought in the neighbor discipline. Readers get an epic infused with mistaken ethnology, resulting in a setback rather than advance in understanding.
So it is with Gerald Betty's Comanche Society. The work attempts to recast the history of Comanche expansion via chapters on kinship, migration, pastoralism, economics, and violence. Each chapter hinges on an ornate retelling of an episode such as the 1786 Comanche-Spanish peace or the 1821 interception of American trader Thomas James. One appreciates Betty's eye for nuances until the author assembles them to support untenable suppositions, driven by the concept that kinship was the determinative force in all matters Comanche. The imperative was sociobiological, with altruism as well as territoriality and brutality playing a part, notions derived from the largely unpublished corpus of anthropologist Lyle Steadman and other sources.
Trouble really starts when the author decides that the Comanches had lineages and clans that shaped organization and outreach. Such units never existed for the Comanches, and the only Native names for them supplied in the text actually refer to political divisions formed from bilateral bands. Elaboration of this false premise coincides with numerous other errors (on page 100, for instance, cultural specialization in regional trade is called a "division of labor," in a departure from the term's meaning fixed since Durkheim), unsupported generalizations (such as the claim on page 119 that "Interpretations of Comanche economics have tended to assume a zero-sum situation in which the Indians lose"), and conclusions of dubious value (for example, the statement on page 120 that "Trade is social, whereas hostile behavior is fundamentally antisocial"). Prior writers are criticized for missing these points, and many a straw man is sent for a tumble, too.
Comments
Copyright 2003 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln