Apache | Excerpts from an ethnographer's diary

Digital montage © Roy R. Behrens

Keith H. Basso, "Strong Songs: Excerpts from an Ethnographer's Journal" in Daniel Halpern, ed., Antaeus. No. 61, Autumn 1988, pp. 26-37. These are fragments from a diary kept by a Yale anthropologist while living on the Apache reservation in Arizona during the summer of 1960—

July 11. I spent most of the afternoon practicing my meager Apache vocabulary. It has grown a bit during the last two weeks but my confidence to use it has not. This morning, while Dudley and Ernest [Apache friends] were here, a grasshopper crawled across the floor. I pointed to it and spoke the word for "insect." Dudley burst into laughter. What I had said, he informed me, was "vagina."  He went on to point out that the difference between grasshoppers and vaginas was quite considerable, an astute observation which prompted a broadly grinning Ernest to ask me if I were a virgin.

July 16.…I will attend the ceremony [an Apache healing ritual] with Dudley Patterson and Ernest Murphy. Although I am eager to see what happens, I know [as a White outsider] I will feel conspicuous and self-conscious. When I asked Dudley how I should conduct myself, a quizzical expression crossed his face. "Show respect," he said. Then he grinned. "And don't talk to nobody about grasshoppers."

July 17. Today, I produced my first comprehensible sentence in Western Apache. Sitting outside with Alvin Quay [an Apache boy], I pointed to my horse and said, "That horse eats grass." Alvin, who turned six last week, glanced at the animal, fixed me with a disbelieving stare, and responded in his own language, "Horses always eat grass."  Although my observation failed to impress Alvin, I thought the fact of its delivery—and of his responding to it in Apache—was nothing short of astonishing. Perhaps there is hope for me after all.

Apache Child

Design copyright © Roy R. Behrens, from Edward Curtis photograph.

Shane Connaughton
Jesus must have been an Irishman. After all, he was unmarried, thirty-two years old, lived at home, and his mother thought he was God.

Randall Jarrell
She was so thin you could have recognized her skeleton.

Woody Allen
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Jack Handey
I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they choose a king, they don’t just go by size, because I bet there are some chihuahuas with some good ideas.

John Berger
Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine…London is a teenager and urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

A.J. Ayer
[William] James was being teased by a theological colleague who said to him: “A philosopher is like a blind man in a dark cellar, looking for a black cat that isn’t there.” “Yes,” said William James, “and the difference between philosophy and theology is that theology finds the cat.”