Premium
Indeterminacy and history in Britton Goode's Western Apache placenames: ambiguous identity on the San Carlos Apache reservation
Author(s) -
Samuels David
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2001.28.2.277
Subject(s) - identity (music) , history , reservation , linguistics , aesthetics , art , philosophy , law , political science
In this article, I explore the inherent ambiguity of cultural identities through a discussion of placenames around the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona. The Western Apache residents of San Carlos live in a colonized landscape. Residents maintain an attachment to Apache history and cultural sovereignty, not only by preserving and maintaining placenames in the Western Apache language, but through the performance arenas of speech play, verbal art, and code‐switching puns. In this article, I concentrate on the placenames compiled by Britton Goode (1911–81), a Western Apache linguist and historian. These language practices problematize the question of identity by reading culture into and through the contingencies of everyday experience, [placenames, verbal art, identity, Western Apache, language and culture]