Decolonizing Methodologies (1999)

While conversing with someone about Alert Bay, Cormorant Island I brought up Ruth Benedict's configurationalist Patterns of Culture (1934), where she writes of the "Dionysian" Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw) in contrast to the "Apollonian" Zuni, with whom she did her fieldwork. 

Here is the concluding paragraph of Benedict's mostly Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw) chapter:

The section of human behaviour with which the Northwest Coast has marked out to institutionalize in its culture is one which is recognized as abnormal in our [Eurowestern?] civilization, and yet is sufficiently close to the attitudes of our own culture to be intelligible to us and we have a definite vocabulary with which we may discuss it. The megalomaniac paranoid trend is a definite danger in our society [Mussolini, Hitler, Franco]. It faces us with a choice of possible attitudes. One is to brand it as abnormal and reprehensible, and it is the attitude we have chosen in our civilization. The other extreme is to make it the essential attribute of ideal man, and this is a solution in the culture of the Northwest Coast [and, as of this week, 72+ million U.S. voters?]. (195)

The person I was speaking with was both intrigued and repulsed by Benedict's conclusions, and so in a fit of social responsibility I told him I would pick up for him a copy of Patterns of Culture and we could read and discuss the essay together, perhaps in light of the Beau Dick hosted potlatches he had experienced during his visits to Cormorant Island.

Pulpfiction being my first stop for used books, I stopped there, only to be told by Chris that he was "almost certain" the store didn't have it, but I could look (Aisle 5), and if I found a copy he would be "amazed." No amazement for Chris, but unexpected amazement for me when I found in a jumble under the bottom shelf a book that is now, for some inexplicable reason, almost impossible to find: Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999).

Here is the opening line of Smith's "Introduction":

From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term "research" is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. (1)