Imagination, Conversation, and Trickster Discourse: Negotiating an Approach to Native American Literary Culture

Abstract

description of the Modoc world structurally or scientifically, but for the way he is willing to construct analogues between native belief systems and a specific, and relatively late, formulation of Western philosophy. Even if the particular sensibilities that we refer to as pragmatism can be shown to have antecedents in Western philosophy going back as far as the seventeenth century or further, one would assume that Modoc culture developed these traits without any knowledge of developments in Enlightenment epistemology. I suspect that the cultural traits that Ray intended to illustrate had developed in response to the experience of local conditions well before the arrival of Europeans. In the context of Ray's ethnography, the label "primitive pragmatist" is applied variously to describe the Modocs' emphasis on individual liberty, freedom of choice, and empirical reasoning. Or, in Ray's terms, "it may also help to explain the great freedom of choice allowed the individual and the conviction that right can be distinguished from wrong only by the test: does it work?" (Ray xiv). However, when field observation fails to provide Ray with adequate evidence to support his claims that indeed the Modoc do hold certain philosophical sentiments, he shows the Modoc to be incapable of sustaining the positive values which this philosophy offers. By extrapolating from a weak reading of pragmatism as a kind of selfish cost/benefit analysis of thought and action, Ray finds an explanation for the forms of "savagery" he witnessed during his time