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Zuñi Brujo

I began to suspect that B missed all this because she was trained in the "objectivity" of science. She tried to show only those aspects of Zuñi culture that were independent of the white observer.

This explains why the brujo is analyzed only in terms of relations within his own culture, although by her own accounting he was very much in contact with the whites. It was the white man to whom he sent for help and who saved him. It was the white anthropologists, presumably, who took dictation of all his songs and stories and made him well known in books of which his tribesmen could not have been ignorant
 
I concluded that the real reason the people of Zuñi made the brujo governor had to be because of this. The brujo had shown he could deal successfully with the one tribe that could easily wipe them out at any time it wanted to. It wasn't just a sweet singing voice that made him governor of Zuñi. He had real political clout.

Sometimes you can see your own society's issues more clearly when they are put in an exotic context like that of the brujo in Zuñi. That is a huge reward from the study of anthropology. As I thought about this context again and again it became apparent there were two kinds of good and evil involved.
 
I concluded that the real reason the people of Zuñi made the brujo governor had to be because of this. The brujo had shown he could deal successfully with the one tribe that could easily wipe them out at any time it wanted to. It wasn't just a sweet singing voice that made him governor of Zuñi. He had real political clout.

Sometimes you can see your own society's issues more clearly when they are put in an exotic context like that of the brujo in Zuñi. That is a huge reward from the study of anthropology. As I thought about this context again and again it became apparent there were two kinds of good and evil involved.
 
The tribal frame of values that condemned the brujo and led to his punishment was one kind of good, for which I coined the term "static good." Each culture has its own pattern of static good derived from fixed laws and traditions and values that underlie them. This pattern of static good is the essential structure of the culture itself and defines it. In the static sense the brujo was very clearly evil to oppose the appointed authorities of his tribe. Suppose everyone did that? The whole Zuñi culture, after thousands of years in continuous survival, would collapse into chaos.

But in addition there's a dynamic good that is outside of any culture, that cannot be contained by any system of precepts, but has to be continually rediscovered as a culture evolves. Good and evil are not entirely a matter of tribal custom. If they were, no tribal change would be possible, since custom cannot change custom. There has to be another source of good and evil outside the tribal customs that produces the tribal change.
 
If you had asked the brujo what ethical principals he was following he probably wouldn't have been able to tell you. He wouldn't have understood what you were talking about. He was just following some vague sense of "betterness" that he couldn't have defined if he had wanted to. Probably the war priests thought he was some kind of egotist trying to build his own image by tearing down tribal authority. But he showed later on that he really wasn't. If he'd been such an egotist he wouldn't have stayed with the tribe and helped keep it together.

The brujo'’s values were in conflict with the tribe at least partly because he had learned to value some of the ways of the new neighbors and they had not. He was a precursor of deep cultural change. A tribe can change its values only person by person and someone has to be the first. Whoever is first obviously is going to be in conflict with everybody else. He didn't have to change his ways to conform to the culture only because the culture was changing its ways to conform to him. And that is what made him seem like such a leader.
 
Probably he wasn't telling anyone to do this or do that so much as he was just being himself. He may never have seen his struggle as anything but a personal one. But because the culture was in transition many people saw this brujo's ways to be of higher Quality than those of the old priests and tried to become more like him. In this dynamic sense the brujo was good because he saw the new source of good and evil before the other members of the tribe did. Undoubtedly he did much during his life to prevent a clash of cultures that would have been completely destructive to the people of Zuñi.

Whatever the personality traits were that made him such a rebel from the tribe around him, this man was no "misfit." He was an integral part of Zuñi culture. The whole tribe was in a state of evolution that had emerged many centuries ago from cliff-dwelling isolation. Now it was entering a state of cooperation with the whites and submission to white laws. He was an active catalytic agent in that tribe's social evolution, and his personal conflicts were a part of that tribe's cultural growth.
 
I think that the story of the old Pueblo Indian, seen in this way, makes deep and broad sense, and justifies the enormous feeling of drama that it produces. After many months of thinking about it, I was left with a reward of two terms: “dynamic good” and “static good”, which became the basic division of the Metaphysics of Quality.

It certainly felt right. Not subject/object but static/dynamic is the basic division of reality.
 
When W____ wrote that "mankind is driven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existing language," he was writing about dynamic quality. Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new. It was the moral force that had motivated the brujo in Zuñi. It contains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good is freedom and its only perceived evil is static quality itself --any pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to contain and kill the ongoing free force of life.
 
Static Quality, the moral force of the priests, emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality. It is old and complex. It always contains a component of memory. Good is conformity to an established pattern of fixed values and value objects. Justice and law are identical. Static morality is full of heroes and villains, loves and hatreds, carrots and sticks. Its values don't change by themselves. Unless they are altered by Dynamic Quality they say the same thing year after year. Sometimes they say it more loudly, sometimes more softly, but the message is always the same.

:teach:
 
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