Importance Of Ceremonies In Pueblo Life example essay topic

Response Piece - Silko & Benedict As noted in the response by Janet Tallman, there are three main themes concerning Ruth Benedict's ethnography of Pueblo culture, Patterns of Culture, and Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony. Both detail the importance of matrilineage, harmony and balance versus change, and ceremonies to the Pueblo Indians. It is important to note that Silko gives the reader a first-hand perspective of this lifestyle (she was raised in the Laguna Pueblo Reservation), while Benedict's book is written from a third-person point of view. Because of this, it was fairly easy to see how much of the actual culture was overlooked or misinterpreted in Benedict's work. While the above-mentioned themes about Pueblo Indians were indeed mentioned in her book, Ceremony allows the reader comes away with a better understanding of why they lived as they lived, and how their lifestyle choices impacted every decision they made. As in my first assignment, my interpretation of the books was that Silko's was from a much more personal perspective; a luxury provided because her book is to be enjoyed as a fictional novel instead of an academic text.

Set against the backdrop of post- WWII reservation life, the struggles of the Laguna Pueblo culture to maintain its identity while adjusting to the realities of modern day life are even more pronounced in Ceremony. Silko uses a wide range of characters in order to give a voice to as many representatives of her tribe as possible. The main character, Tayo, is the person with whom the reader is more than likely to relate. The story opens with him reliving various phases of his life in flashbacks, and through them, the reader shares his inability to discern reality from delusion, past from present and right from wrong. His days are clouded by his post-war sickness, guilt for being the one to survive while his cousin Rocky is slain, and his inability to cope neither with life on the reservation or in the outside world. He is one of several representations of the beginnings of the Laguna Pueblo youth interacting with modern American culture.

Tayo's aunt (Auntie) is the personification of the Pueblo culture's staunch opposition to change. She is bound to her life and the people around her; more so because of the various "disgraces" brought upon her family by her nephew Tayo being a "half-breed", her brother Josiah's love affair with a Mexican woman and her younger sister abandoning the tribe to live amongst the white man. The reader can see how she feels forced to abide by unspoken rules established by her tribe, and Silko emphasizes in her how one person's disgrace shames every person with whom they are connected. As the eldest daughter in her family, it is her duty to tend the household, took after her mother, and to raise Tayo after he was abandoned by his mother at a young age. In contrast to her strict adherence to Pueblo life, she is also a devout Christian. At several times in the story there are references to her polishing her church shoes with great care, or reading out of her large black bible.

In Benedict's ethnography, this would be as result of the culture selecting from among the possible traits in the surrounding region those traits which it could use, and discarding those which it could not (Chapter 3). Her husband Robert represents the role of husband and provider in their matrilineal culture -"he was patient with [their family] because he had nothing to say. The sheep, the horses, and the fields - everything belonged to them, including the good family name (pg. 32)". The only man who was able to assert himself in the family by right is the eldest son, Josiah.

Auntie and Robert's son Rocky is the representation of Indian youth fully embracing American culture. In another contrast to her set ways, Auntie sees her son as the one way her family will gain respect with the Laguna people again. She sends him to boarding school to learn Western ways, and is proud of his embrace of science instead of Pueblo rituals and ceremonies. When he disrespects the household elders while attempting to disprove traditional stories with scientific facts, Auntie pretends to not hear the conversation. He refuses to partake in ceremonial dressings of slain deer, he plays football instead of tending the cattle with his uncle, and is so eager to leave the reservation he hastily enlists in the Army to expedite his departure. Rocky gives the reader a strong character to contrast with Tayo, who is neither encouraged nor allowed to be bold enough to determine his life's path without consulting the family or tribe.

Though raised in the same household as Rocky, he tended to believe in the "old ways" more than his cousin. Much of his struggle came from attempting to reconcile the lessons he learned in boarding school with the realities he saw in his day to day life. While he could recall times when his teachers gave hard evidence to contrast with Pueblo stories, there were many things he saw in his life that gave them (the stories) much weight. Tayo's mother, represented in third-story accounts by the narrator, gives the reader a chance to see the emerging impact of white culture on young Indian women. Unlike her older sister, she was sent to an Indian school taught by white people. There she was taught to be ashamed of her culture and to shun the ways of her people and she began to revolt against her traditions.

Caught between two worlds, she was taught to hate herself and her lineage and to be excited and flattered when she was acknowledged by those in the white community. At the same time she hated the white culture for talking about the peculiarities of her people, and "the feelings of shame, at her own people and at the white people grew inside her... like monstrous twins that would have to be left in the hills to die (pg. 69)". Or drowned in cheap wine and whiskey. Also providing contrasts to Tayo's sensitive, almost fragile character are his peers Leroy, Harley and Emo. These men represent the disillusioned Pueblo youth and the bitterness of the tribes towards the white man.

When they were in the war, they were elevated to a social level they had never experienced. They were noticed, respected and even appreciated as part of American society. However, as soon as the war ended they fell back to their secondary level in society, and the transition was not easy for any of them. While Tayo vomited and had hallucinations from his experience, these men chose to spend their days getting drunk and recounting the short-lived enjoyment of loose white women and non-reservation life.

A brief character in the novel, the young Ute woman Helen Jean, was a female perspective of the despair felt by Pueblo youth. She left her home in order to make money in the town of Gallup and wound up having to either beg drunken men for money or prostitution. Ceremony makes a point to emphasize the duality of harmony versus change and harmony within change in Pueblo culture. It is everywhere in the novel and each character responds in a way that is typical of their personality. Auntie is driven deeper into her cynicism and anger towards Tayo with every change his presence brings; his abandonment at age four, his leaving to war with Rocky, his sickness upon returning, the ceremonies that must be performed to restore him and even when he is cured at the end of the book and is able to function normally within the tribe. Her inability to adjust her ways of thinking in order to adapt to the modern world is a source of much anger within her character throughout the book.

She never is able to forgive Tayo's mother for abandoning the tribe and for breeding with a white man, and consequentially takes it out on her nephew. Tayo is tormented by his changing life, and attempts to shut it out by sinking deeper into his madness while his friends drink to forget one day from the next. They no longer know how to cope within their old lives, and are sent to the outskirts of their tribes in order to avoid any disruption of day-to-day life. Benedict explains this is the result of an "Apollonian" culture: marked by a distrust of individualism and in which any actions and changes that may come about in a particular society are suspected and cloaked. While she does not go into as much detail as Silko in the actual affects of white culture on Pueblo cultures and mentalities as a whole, she does describe the impact within the culture of this societal structure. Ceremony reflected the assertion that people deemed too different or deviant from the normal way of life are isolated (Tayo sent to the ranch), or treated for having a mental illness (the medicine man being summoned to help Tayo get well).

What was interesting in Ceremony was the fact that the men who went to war were already considered sick by other Laguna Indians. The tribe viewed WWII as "the white man's big war", and was disgusted with their youth for choosing to partake in any such thing. Again, this continues with the theme of uniformity within a tribe; the war had nothing to do with the Pueblo people, joining the Army was not done with well-wishes for the soldiers, and the drought was seen as being caused in some way by the sickness each of these men brought with them. As in Ceremony, the rain was eternally a sign that the Mother was happy with the tribes people, and that everything was balanced in life.

It was interesting to note that Tayo actually cursed the rain while he was in the jungle. He "hated this unending rain as if it were the jungle green rain and not the miles of marching (pg. 11)... ". He also cursed the flies in the jungle after his uncle explained the importance of the fly to Laguna people. After he returned and learned that it had stopped raining for the six years he was gone, he began to blame himself and his sickness for the drought and suffering of his people. The novel made a point to reflect Tayo's mental condition in the landscape that surrounded him and the structure of the prose.

When he was sick and mentally barren, the land dried up and starved. The reader is led jolted back and forth between his past and present. By the conclusion of the story, Tayo is restored as is the land and the novel's writing becomes clear and concise. One could almost see the entire book as a collection of smaller rituals within a greater ceremonial transformation for Tayo. The process by which he comes to peace with his demons is through specific rituals conducted by medicine men in his tribe and through his own introspection on his life. The first ceremony by Ku " ooh did nothing to help, and his advice was simply that Tayo must get better or the entire tribe would continue to suffer.

His inability to understand the "new" war, where a man could indeed be killed without his enemy knowing it prevented Ku " ooh from being able to understand the horrors Tayo endured. Benedict spends much time in Patterns of Culture explaining the importance of ceremonies in Pueblo life. She describes the almost obsessive care the medicine men and priests take when performing any ritual out of fear of angering the gods, and the importance of every person attending the ceremony to fully believe in the process. Silko's story is no exception.

Tayo's inability to believe in the first ritual, his aunt's refusal to believe the ceremony would do him any good because he wasn't full blood - and even Ku " ooh's doubts of its success - made the ritual ineffective. The second ceremony performed for Tayo was a success. This I believe came about in part by Betonie the second medicine man's incorporation of Tayo's races into the ceremony. According to Betonie, a powerful medicine man to the Navajo tribes in Gallup, being half-white was nothing to be ashamed about, and it actually gave Tayo more strength as a human in the modern world. Betonie himself was a child of half-Indian, half-Mexican descent. After explaining to Tayo that the white man was nothing more than an evil unleashed onto the world by Indian witchcraft, he also explained that the state of the world was also due to the Pueblo people themselves.

The world was the way it was because the Pueblo tribes refused to adapt to the world around them, "they feel something happening, they can see something happening around them and it scares them (pg. 99-100)". Instead of looking within themselves for the causes of their misery, they chose to blame the white man for their misfortunes. At the same time, they were causing pain and suffering unto themselves by punishing those who were deemed too different (Emo trying to kill Tayo and settling on Harley) and shunning any changes to life as they knew it. By the end of the novel, Tayo represents the potentially new world for Pueblo culture. As Betonie said, elements in the world began to shift and it became necessary to create new rituals in order to keep the ceremonies strong. This represents a very modern view on Pueblo life (Silko's) of the price tribe people must pay in order to survive in this world.

As shown by Tayo's final change, Silko sees it as necessary to maintain the essential parts of Pueblo culture in order to maintain the web that connects all its people together; but one must also learn to adapt and accept the new world created around him or her in order to survive. "Don't let them stop you", Betonie said in page 152, "Don't let them finish off with this world". Stagnation is just as damaging as overwhelming change. Leslie Marmon Silko - Ceremony Ruth Benedict - Patterns of Culture.