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Abstract
Kokopelli “the hump-backed fluteplayer” has become an icon of the Southwest as well as a metonym for the region's Native American cultures. Guided by the trope of the primitive, this essay analyzes contemporary Kokopelli imagery as a projection of Euro-American masculinist fantasies and as a contemporary commodity form, the cipher. Kokopelli imagery models a virile and promiscuous heterosexual masculinity while erasing its anatomical signs. It articulates intersections of gender, race, and culture that simultaneously highlight and obscure primitive masculinity and racial difference, enabling the use of Native American culture and spirituality to (re)vitalize Euro-American masculinity and promote (neo)colonial appropriations.
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2006 meeting of the Western States Communication Association.
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2006 meeting of the Western States Communication Association.
Notes
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2006 meeting of the Western States Communication Association.
1. Dennis Slifer and James Duffield, Kokopelli: Flute Player Images in Rock Art (Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City, 1994), 3.
2. Wayne Glover, Kokopelli: Ancient Myth/Modern Icon (Bellemont, AZ: Camelback/Canyonlands, 1995); Dave Walker, Cuckoo for Kokopelli (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland, 1998).
3. Kelley A. Hays-Gilpin, Ambiguous Images: Gender and Rock Art (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004), 12; see also Ekkehart Malotki, Kokopelli: The Making of an Icon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
4. Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1978), xv, xiii, xvi.
5. Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). See also Marianna Torgovnick, Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
6. S. Elizabeth Bird, “Savage Desires: The Gendered Construction of the American Indian in Popular Media,” in Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures, ed. Carter Jones Meyer and Diana Royer, 62–98 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); Derek T. Buescher and Kent A. Ono, “Civilized Colonialism: Pocahontas as Neocolonial Rhetoric,” Women's Studies in Communication 19 (1996): 127–53; Peter van Lent, “‘Her Beautiful Savage’: The Current Sexual Image of the Native American Male,” in Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture, ed. S. Elizabeth Bird, 211–27 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996); Kent A. Ono and Derek T. Buescher, “Deciphering Pocahontas: Unpackaging the Commodification of a Native American Woman,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001): 23–43.
7. Van Lent.
8. Bird; Van Lent.
9. Bird; Torgovnick.
10. Buescher and Ono; Torgovnick.
11. Torgovnick.
12. Jason Edward Black, “The ‘Mascotting’ of Native America: Construction, Commodity, and Assimilation,” American Indian Quarterly 26 (2002): 605–22; Ward Churchill, Indians Are Us? (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1994); Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
13. Churchill; Lesley V. Kadish, “Reading Cereal Boxes: Pre-packaging History and Indigenous Identities,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900–present) 3, no. 2 (Fall 2004), http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2004/kadish.htm (accessed 29 August 2005); Mary E. Stuckey and Richard Morris, “Pocahontas and Beyond: Commodification and Cultural Hegemony,” World Communication 28 (1999): 45–67; Laurie Anne Whitt, “Cultural Imperialism and the Marketing of Native America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19, no. 3 (1995): 1–31.
14. See, e.g., Berkhofer; Bird; Van Lent.
15. Van Lent, 211.
16. Hays-Gilpin.
17. Gilman; Torgovnick.
18. Bird, 75.
19. For a related discussion of androcentrism in rock art interpretation and its connection to the crisis in masculinity, see Richard A. Rogers, “From Hunting Magic to Shamanism: Interpretations of Native American Rock Art and the Contemporary Crisis in Masculinity,” Women's Studies in Communication 30 (2007): 78–110.
20. Karen Lee Ashcraft and Lisa A. Flores, “‘Slaves with White Collars’: Persistent Performances of Masculinity in Crisis,” Text & Performance Quarterly 23 (2000): 1–29; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Sally Robinson, Marked Men: Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: BasicBooks, 1993).
21. Bederman. See also Robinson; Rotundo; Harry Stecopoulos, “The World According to Normal Bean: Edgar Rice Burroughs's Popular Culture,” in Race and the Subject of Masculinities, ed. Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 170–91.
22. Ashcraft and Flores, 2.
23. See also Bederman; Robinson.
24. Bederman, 7.
25. Relevant examples of intersectional analyses of masculinity include Ashcraft and Flores; Bederman; Eric Lott, “All the King's Men: Elvis Impersonators and White Working-Class Masculinity,” in Race and the Subject of Masculinities (see note 21), 192–227; Robinson; Stecopoulos.
26. Bederman; Robinson; Rotundo.
27. Hays-Gilpin; Malotki.
28. Ekkehart Malotki and Donald E. Weaver, Jr., Stone Chisel and Yucca Brush: Colorado Plateau Rock Art (Walnut, CA: Kiva, 2002); Dennis Slifer, The Serpent and the Sacred Fire: Fertility Images in Southwest Rock Art (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico, 2000); Slifer and Duffield.
29. Hays-Gilpin; Malotki; Slifer; Slifer and Duffield.
30. I do not wish to leave Hopi and other indigenous voices out of this essay, but I choose not to solicit and represent indigenous knowledge not already publicly available. One implication of this analysis is precisely how such information is appropriated, even if dealt with responsibly by authors. Therefore, I work to de-emphasize claims about the “true”/”authentic” meanings of both fluteplayer imagery and associated figures from Puebloan mythology. Instead, I examine what the available literature says about both the Native and non-Native, historic and contemporary meanings of traditional fluteplayers and (un)related figures; I am interested in the implications of meanings in circulation regardless of authenticity. I respect the desire to avoid additional exploitation of indigenous spiritual traditions as well as the belief that “religion is a private matter and that there is already too much information available to non-Hopis about Hopi spirituality.” Hopi Staff, “Cultural Theft and Misrepresentation,” The Hopi Tribe, 22 August 2004, http://www.hopi.nsn.us/view_article.asp?id=20&cat=1 (accessed 26 January 2006).
31. Hays-Gilpin; Malotki.
32. Hays-Gilpin; Malotki; Slifer and Duffield.
33. The “prehistoric” culture most associated with fluteplayer imagery is commonly known as “Anasazi.” However, “Anasazi,” derived from a Diné (Navajo) word meaning “ancient ones” or “ancient enemies,” is challenged by contemporary Pueblo cultures such as the Hopi. Archaeologists, national parks, and others have begun adopting the apparently more neutral “ancestral Puebloan,” but its acceptance is by no means universal. See Harry Walters and Hugh C. Rogers, “Anasazi and ‘Anaasází: Two Words, Two Cultures,” Kiva 66 (2001): 317–26.
34. Hays-Gilpin.
35. Hays-Gilpin; Malotki.
36. Slifer.
37. Slifer and Duffield, 7.
38. Hays-Gilpin, 142.
39. Ironically, while Kokopelli is verbally linked to Puebloan cultures of the Colorado Plateau, the prototype for commercial Kokopelli imagery appears to be a Hohokam pottery design from southern Arizona (Malotki).
40. My use of these and other “popular” verbal texts is twofold. First, these texts articulate meanings produced through application of Euro-American cultural codes to Kokopelli imagery, and therefore support my verbal interpretations of the imagery. Second, they provide additional information that both guides and adds to meanings inferred from the imagery itself, e.g., what fluteplayer imagery symbolized in various indigenous cultures. My use of these texts, therefore, is due not to the extent of their circulation but to their reflection of Euro-American interpretations of the imagery as well as the types of information provided in tourist literature, art galleries, trading posts, and gift shops.
41. In the analysis to follow, I quote from five of the ten websites: Max Bertola, “Kokopelli: Anasazi Casanova,” http://www.so-utah.com/feature/kokopeli/homepage.html (accessed 24 August 2005); Earth Studio, http://www.earthstudiomoab.com/home/es1/page_55_17 (accessed 5 July 2005); Kokopelli Kingdom, “Welcome to Kokopelli Kingdom,” http://www.angelfire.com/ny4/HOMEPAGE/kokokingdom.html (accessed 24 Aug. 2005); Kokopelli.com, http://www.kokopelli.com/kokopellidotcom/kokdec.html (accessed 5 July 2005); Zodiac Master, “Trickster,” www.thezodiac.com/koko.htm (accessed 24 August 2005).
42. Walker, ix, 2, 45.
43. Kokopelli Kingdom.
44. Walker, 11, 12.
45. Walker, 4, 18, 5.
46. Zodiac Master.
47. Bertola.
48. Rockin’ V Café, Kanab, UT, 19 June 2005.
49. Hays-Gilpin.
50. Hays-Gilpin, 19, 21.
51. Bederman.
52. Ashcraft and Flores; Bederman; Churchill; Rotundo.
53. Karl Marx, Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, ed. Frederic L. Bender, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986).
54. Whitt.
55. Bird; Torgovnick; van Lent.
56. Buescher and Ono, 130.
57. Ono and Buescher, 24–25, 26.
58. Ono and Buescher, 27, 37.
59. Robert Scholes, Protocols of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
60. Ono and Buescher.
61. Walker, 42.
62. Glover; Slifer and Duffield; Walker.
63. Walker, 5.
64. Bederman.
65. Bird; van Lent.
66. Gilman.
67. Cf. Stuckey and Morris.
68. Dana Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141–63; Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21–41.
69. Torgovnick; Deloria.
70. Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism,” Multiculturalism and American Democracy, ed. Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger and Richard Zinman (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 69–88.