The Transactional Relationship between Occupation and Place: Indigenous Cultures in the American Southwest

Abstract

The transactional metaphysics of philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) is applied in this article to the study of cultures and occupations among the Pueblo, Navajo, and Ohlone peoples. The data on these peoples’ occupations come from presentations by New Mexico-based scholars Dr Theodore S. (Ted) Jojola, Dr Kathleen Whitaker, and Dr Les W. Field, at the 6^th Annual Research Conference of the Society for the Study of Occupation (SSO:USA) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2007. This article makes use of Dewey's concept of ‘situation’ to emphasize responses to problems that break into the continuous, emergent nature of human experience in specific regions or locales over time. The author proposes viewing occupations as the sites within Deweyan situations where cultures undergo transformation through the actual doing of things. Further, this article takes a transdisciplinary perspective, drawing on resources in occupational science, geography, anthropology, and postcolonialist perspectives to explore the relevance of Deweyan concepts to occupational science as an emerging and evolving discipline.

Keywords:

• Occupation
• Place
• Culture
• John Dewey
• Pragmatism
• Post-colonialism

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions to this article of Ted Jojola, Regents’ Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, and Tribal Member, Pueblo of Isleta; Kathleen Whitaker, Independent Scholar, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Les W. Field, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico. Any errors or omissions in characterizing their work are the author's alone. The author also thanks the Conference Committee of the 6^th Annual Research Conference of the Society for the Study of Occupation (SSO:USA), with special appreciation to President Virginia Dickie, Conference Chair Elizabeth Francis-Connolly, Site Chair Nancie Furgang, and Treasurer Esther Huecker for facilitating the inclusion of the plenary panel in the conference program. Finally, the author thanks readers and reviewers of drafts of this article, particularly Editor Clare Hocking of the Journal of Occupational Science for her insightful comments and support.

Notes

1. Gelya Frank is a cultural anthropologist and a member of the founding faculty of the doctoral program in occupational science at the University of Southern California. She has been a consultant to the Tule River Indian Tribe in central California since 1972. She is author of Defying the Odds: The Tule River Tribe's Struggle for Sovereignty in Three Centuries (Frank & Goldberg, 2010).

2. The Mexican Cession of 1848 included the present day states of California, Nevada and Utah, most of Arizona, parts of Wyoming and Colorado, and New Mexico west of the Rio Grande. The land in east of the Rio Grande was part of the Republic of Texas, which broke away from Mexico in 1836. Eventually part of the territory east of the Rio Grande became part of New Mexico.

3. See Dickie's (2010) treatment of pottery as artifacts that can be ‘read’ in terms of social, cultural, economic, physical, and other dimensions of occupation. See also Dickie and Frank (1996).

4. As disciplines mature, they tend to display elaborations, variations, and controversies in their key terms and core concepts. E. B. Tylor, in 1871, is credited as providing the first modern anthropological definition of culture as: “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (quoted in Stocking, 1968, p. 73). By the mid-20^th century, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) listed more than 150 definitions of culture. Although the concept of culture has become ever more diverse, complex, and contested (Darnell, 2002), achieving consensus or synthesis is not a concern of most anthropologists today (Darnell, 2001). Nor should achieving consensus preoccupy occupational scientists, since the adequacy of any definition, theory, or discipline should be judged with respect to how well it is suited to the problem at hand. The author of the present article recommends John Dewey's definition of the term occupation, in his essay, “The Psychology of Occupations” (Dewey, 1990), originally published in 1915, which is consistent with his transactional approach to culture and views in Democracy and Education, published the following year.

5. See Frank and Zemke (2009) for a discussion of the pragmatist reformers centered around the Hull House settlement in Chicago, ca. 1890-1910, in which Dewey (1859-1952) and Meyer (1866-1950) were active. While there is debate about the proper relationship of the discipline of occupational science to the profession of occupational therapy, the meliorism of Dewey and Meyer is clearly significant to both.

6. The relationships between John Dewey and Franz Boas, and between pragmatist philosophy and modern American anthropology, are topics that deserve further development. In 1904, after leaving the faculty of the University of Chicago, Dewey spent the rest of his career in New York City as a professor at Columbia University and Columbia Teachers College. Columbia University was the institution where Franz Boas established the first department of anthropology in 1896. In Experience and Nature, Dewey cited the anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser, a professor at the New School for Social Research and one of Franz Boas’ earliest doctoral students, as well as citing the leading modern British anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski.

In considering the equivalence of Dewey's definition of ‘life’ and ‘experience’ with anthropologists Mead's and Lowie's definitions of ‘culture,’ it is also possible that Dewey himself had an effect on the New York anthropologists in emphasizing habits and custom, on the one hand, and education, on the other, as the two means by which the knowledge needed for human survival and the continuity of culture is transmitted from generation to generation. Dewey, the transactionalist, used the dynamic term “renewal” of the group and its lifeways. Ruth Benedict (Franz Boas's student and Margaret Mead's teacher) is one link. Benedict studied educational philosophy with John Dewey at Columbia University, then anthropology. She began work with Boas in 1921 (Young, 2006). Her doctoral research examined the cultural implications of an individual religious experience. Benedict's focus on the reciprocal relationship between individual and culture became a movement in anthropology and suggests the influence of pragmatists John Dewey and also William James. Further, Benedict's insistence on viewing individual and culture as a relational unit suggests an application of Dewey's transactional approach. This brings us to the question of Dewey's naturalism and also to the many strands of postmodern understandings of the term ‘culture’ (Rorty, 2010). Unlike that of the British empiricists, whose views underlie scientific inquiry, Dewey's naturalism was consistent with and saturated by experience. Nevertheless, reconciling Dewey's naturalism with postmodern understandings of culture presents a challenge. This topic goes beyond the scope of the present article, but perhaps can be reconciled through the concept of ‘situation’ or ‘problematic situation,’ as suggested in the text.

7. Contemporary geographers, including those cited by Cutchin (2008) such as Tim Cresswell, Doreen Massey, and others such as David Harvey and Edward Soja, are bringing new approaches to the relationship of locales to human experience and, conversely, the impact of human settlement and utilization on spaces and regions. But, as Cutchin's (2008) article appears to indicate, there is no necessary relationship between occupations and place in Dewey's thought, or we might expect Cutchin to have mentioned it in his treatment of the implications of Dewey's metaphysics for geographers. We can note that occupations can and do change physical spaces into places. This is a completely appropriate area for occupational science to explore but perhaps not as foundational as might be thought at first glance. The present article argues that there is a necessary relationship between occupations and situations in Dewey's metaphysics. In the author's view, this formulation has more potential bearing for the development of occupational science than the relationship between occupations and place (geography) or even occupations and culture (anthropology).

8. Postcolonialism is a political and scholarly standpoint or approach to indigenous cultures that gives “equal weight to outward historical circumstances and to the ways in which those circumstances are experienced by postcolonial subjects” (Young, 2001, p. 58). Thus postcolonialism involves assessing and reframing received histories in order that indigenous peoples and their cultures may recover from damage to their economic and social conditions, health, well-being and survival (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1995).

9. Alfonso Ortiz (1969), a member of the San Juan Pueblo and an anthropologist, described the spiral-like mapping of two kinds of reference points or ‘earth navels’ found in the villages of the six Tewa-speaking Pueblos living in northern New Mexico within sight of the mountains near Albuquerque. Ortiz wrote: “The mountain earth navels gather in blessings from all around and direct them inward toward the village; the mother earth navel is the source of all these blessings, so they are directed outward in all directions. By the system of ideas at work here, everything good and desirable stays within the Tewa world” (1969, pp. 21–22).

10. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the Cherokee numbered 697,421 and the Navajo 298,197 (www.census.gov, accessed January 14, 2011).

11. Ted Jojola (1998b) noted the irony that American Indians, 8.9% of the state population at the time of his writing, constitute the largest factor in New Mexico's business economy based on cultural tourism. “Non-Native communities such as Sedona, Arizona, and Sante Fe, New Mexico, procure the bulk of their commerce on the merchandising of authentic Indian arts,” Jojola wrote, “while very little of this marketing hype is present in the tribal communities. Instead, the tribal communities are witness to pockets of poverty, and their labor forces are primarily employed by the government sector. In fact, arts and crafts are seen as supplemental income activities. Items traditionally produced by Native artisans as utilitarian wares are now rarely retained in their own communities for such purposes” (p. 175).

12. For an application of postcolonial principles in a transdisciplinary project carried out by anthropologists, occupational scientists and occupational therapists, and a California tribe, see Frank (2007), Frank, Murphy, Kitching et al. (2008), and Frank, Kitching et al. (2009).

13. Campbell (1995, p. 42) wrote: “Dewey is emphasizing the degree to which human activities cannot be adequately understood if viewed simply as the doings of an individual in isolation.” If we consider some of Dewey's examples, this point becomes clearer. Sound and light and fire are themselves, physical facts, for example, but humans integrate such facts into their social lives. Quoted by Campbell (1995.), Dewey wrote: “The use of sound in speech and listening to speech, making and enjoying music; the kindling and tending fire to cook and to keep warm; the production of light to carry on and regulate occupations and social enjoyments; —these things are representative of distinctively human activity” (Campbell, 1995, p. 42). Regarding this quote from Dewey, Campbell (1995) commented: “It is this participation in the larger life of society by means of shared tools and goals and traditions that demonstrates the cultural meanings of our actions. To the extent that we are organized by such practices, our selves are essentially social selves” (p. 42).