Word: anthropologists
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...mysterious Thomas Pynchon, whose novel Gravity's Rainbow is reviewed in our Books section by R.Z. Sheppard. The other elusive character is our cover subject, Anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, whose three volumes about his experience with Indian Sorcerer Don Juan have become national bestsellers...
...Yaqui. The book was The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968). With its sequels, A Separate Reality (1971) and the current Journey to Ixtlan (1972), it has made U.S. cult figures of its author and subject ? an anthropologist named Carlos Castaneda and a mysterious old Yaqui Indian from Sonora called Juan Matus. In essence, Castaneda's books are the story of how a European rationalist was initiated into the practice of Indian sorcery. They cover a span of ten years, during which, under the weird, taxing and sometimes comic tutelage of Don Juan, a young...
Castaneda's books insist otherwise. He is eloquent and convincing on how useless it is to explain or judge another culture entirely in terms of one's own particular categories. "Suppose there was a Navajo anthropologist," he says. "It would be very interesting to ask him to study us. He would ask extraordinary questions, like 'How many in your kinship group have been bewitched?' That's a terribly important question in Navajo terms. And of course, you'd say -I don't know,' and think 'What an idiotic question.' Meanwhile the Navajo is thinking, 'My God, what a creep! What...
Turn the situation around, Castaneda argues, and there is your typical Western anthropologist in the field. Yet a "very simple" alternative exists: the crux of anthropology is acquisition of real membership. "It's a hell of a lot of work," he says, explaining the years he spent with Don Juan. "What Don Juan did with me was simply this: he was making his sorcery membership available, handing down the necessary steps." Professor Michael Harner of The New School for Social Research, a friend of Castaneda's and an authority on shamanism, explains: "Most anthropologists only give the result. Instead...
...duck the final battle with an ally. He admits to an inner struggle on the matter. Some times, he says, he feels strongly tugged away from the commitment to sorcery and back into the mundane world. He has a very real urge to be a respected writer and anthropologist, and to use his new found power of fame in tandem with the printed word to go on communicating glimpses of other realities to hun gry readers...