Reconstruction 9.1 (2009)




Van Dyke, Ruth. The Chaco Experience: Landscape and Ideology at the Center Place, Sante Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007.

 

<1> Sometimes one enters a book with preconceived ideas that get in the way of a complete appreciation of its contents. Such was this reviewer's experience with Ruth Van Dyke's treatment of the meaning of Anasazi architecture at what many consider the capital of that culture in and around the great sites of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. One aspect that contributed to this conflict between this reviewer's ideas and that presented by the book is the subtitle of the book: "Landscape and Ideology at the Center Place." Center Place can mean political and cultural center, which presents no problems with our concepts of Chaco Canyon. Ideology implies cultural meaning. Landscape usually refers to the terrain in general. Entering this book this reviewer was interested in how the terrain of Chaco Canyon would reveal the ideology of the Anasazi people. Instead the book focuses almost exclusively on Anasazi architecture. Now, in all fairness to Ms. Van Dyke, it is the architecture, primarily, we have that inspires our imagination about how the Anasazi lived. That is what has always drawn this reviewer to write about and study the Anasazi. Because the book focuses so exclusively on the architecture, the reader gets lost in the minutiae of Van Dyke's descriptions of archaeological sites attempting to present the evolution of Anasazi thought.

<2> At the beginning of the book Van Dyke spends some time establishing the phenomenological methodology of her approach to her assessment. This is good both as a tactic to firmly plant one's argument in an approach, and the approach itself, here seems to be the correct one.

<3> Going through, briefly, some of language from the beginning of the book may help us unravel what it is trying to do. In a subsection of the first chapter called "Lived Landscapes" Van Dyke writes: "This book is built on a vision of landscape as a reflexive dimension of human social interaction" (4). What is good about this sentence is its clarity. Even the word "built" displays this books emphasis on the buildings of the Anasazi over the natural environment or conjecture about what the people who built these buildings were like. "Reflexive" and the rest of this important springboard sentence suggests that the Anasazi architecture was a response to the place in which the bricks were being laid. What fails to come across is why that reflex would change over time when the landscape remained relatively the same. Van Dyke's exhaustive description of the evolution of Anasazi architecture over time draws us into this criticism of the assertion that the architecture is a response to the landscape.

<4> The author herself writes that one of her purposes is "to understand some of the ideas that resonate through Bonito-style architecture"( 4). In trying to do this one should either stick with a strict evidence-based lineage of semiotics, or freely admit that, short of extrapolating from Hopi, Zuni, or Acoma cultural traits and making an assumption that they are the direct descendents of the Anasazi, all traits of the Chacoans described in the book are strictly speculative. The book remains less than consistent on this point. Van Dyke writes ". . . landscapes are not only culturally constructed--they are also inherently ideological" (5). So, in her argument landscape is essentially a culturally constructed object. This reviewer continues to struggle with this concept as presented by Van Dyke. The formula should be environment (found landscape) + human response = architectural output. Landscape is relational, where this reviewer wants the architecture to be the evidence of the relationship.

<5> Van Dyke shies away from ethnographical hypothesis. In a telling sentence she tries to deny an attempt "to equate Chaco with any specific contemporary pueblo . . ."and yet, "Within the Chacoan world of a millennium ago, there are clear archaeological indicators that similar worldviews were present" (48). At points she makes concrete assumptions about the hierarchical nature of Anasazi culture that bears little solid evidence. She states: "Through the medium of shared spatial experience, ritual leadership became political authority" (35). Anasazi kivas were, clearly, important places to the people who lived in the North American Southwest a thousand years ago, and no more important than at Chaco Canyon, but the relationship between the religious and astronomical with power politics is not clear or not explained by Van Dyke in her book. Just as easily as the priest-king paradigm she relates, the Anasazi could have been a utopian society where the large architectural projects we see before us so many centuries later were built equally by all members of a society that made decisions by consensus rather than theocratic dictatorship.

<6> Lest it seem that this criticism is overly idealistic in desire, let us point to one text that comes to mind as similar to Van Dyke's work. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry's The Universe Story is an excellent book that attempts to describe the entire history of the cosmos in such a way that a contemporary human reader can understand and appreciate some of the strange metaphysical points in astrophysical history. By collaborating between a mathematical cosmologist and a cultural historian the book can weave a story of something quite alien in such a way that it sinks easily into the human imagination. Van Dyke might benefit from such an interdisciplinary approach or collaborative relationship.

 

Bennett Huffman

Oregon Department of Agriculture

 

Works Cited

Swimme, Brian, and Thomas Berry. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1992.

Van Dyke, Ruth M. The Chaco Experience: Landscape and Ideology at the Center Place Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007.

 

 

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