Evon Zartman Vogt

I don't know what to make of this book, honestly. It's an exhaustive- and exhausting- compendium and analysis of Zinacanteco ritual behavior. But is it an ethnography? You so rarely get a sense of the Zinacantecos as individuals, in contrast to Don Eustacio (of Redfield's Chan Kom) or June Nash's informants. There's something to be said for not following the basic formula for writing ethnography when you're describing a culture, but Vogt flips it upside down- he attempts to describe a culture without talking about it at all. I know that this is just one portion of the voluminous writings of the Harvard Chiapas Project, but it seems so strange out of context. I just read two hundred pages about the Zinacantecos, and all the knowledge I gained from it can be summed up in:

hot != cold
rising sun != setting sun
culture != nature

I think what Vogt's doing here is really cool- and therein lies the problem. Vogt is trying to roll the universe up in a ball, to have this perfect cohesion. In so many ways, it feels more like Vogt's play-pretty than a real report on a real people. There's this weird undercurrent in the book of Vogt's "got you now!" moments; he very clearly thinks he knows this stuff better than his informants do. It's not like he's just pulling it from nowhere- it's not uncommon for ritual actors to lose metapragmatic awareness of their own rituals- but he takes it to an extreme that I'm just not comfortable with.

I think what he's doing is ultimately dishonest. To his credit, he lays it right out in the subtitle: A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals- compare that to A Maya Village. That notwithstanding, I think his writing style is intentionally misleading. He does break it down into his report of the ritual followed by his analysis, but his analysis creeps into the report constantly. I get the sense, from what I know of him and how he writes, that he doesn't know he's being misleading; he just thinks he's right. This is exactly why I liked June Nash- with Nash, you can keep the text and toss the theory, but with Vogt, you've got to take it or leave it.

I'm also having a hard time seeing the utility of this document in general; I understand it as a theoretical text and as a historical report, but I don't think it has a lot of explanatory power in a larger context. It just feels like a catalogue to me- I guess that's nice if you're really into ritual behavior, but the things that I did get out of it- hot vs. cold, spatial relationships- have been articulated better and faster by other authors.

Do I think this is ultimately an ethnography? No. Do I think it has much value out of context? Not as much as Vogt thinks, apparently. Do I want my afternoon back? Sort of.… (altro)