January 13th, 2009

How does the interaction of Ishi and the anthropologists who worked with him surprise you? How do of their world views and values differ?

The way Kroeber and Waterman treated Ishi was acceptable at the time given the history and the Western culture at the time, even though it seems rather inhuman to us. The anthrologists, as well as the general public's fascination towards Ishi is a result of their deliberate romantization of an "exotic" culture. In a way, their fascination seems to me, a product of the 21st Century college education, as humiliating and dehumanizing towards Ishi. Ishi's mean value to the anthrologists was a contribution to their study of the Yahi culture, and given that, they treated Ishi with more respect than their Indian-hunting peers from the same culture did.

The academia saw Ishi as if he were another object to be studied from the Yahi culture. The anthropologists' decision to publically exhibit Ishi in the museum, and the fact that Kroeber insisted to travel with Ishi back to his homeland in order to observe him interacting with nature were disturbing signs of condescention towards another group of human beings. They did not take Ishi's will into consideration. The anthroloogists back then were probably still under the impression that cultures develop on a linear basis, which is the result of their perception that the Yahi culture was primitive and underdeveloped comparing to the contemporary American culture at the time. While "civilized" anthropologists treated Ishi as a tangible item from the Yahi culture, Yahi, on the other hand, treated the "civilized" people with forgiveness and tolerance. Yahi was very adaptive accepting, and empathetic to others' feelings in his new environment. He forgave the people who locked him up, tolerated and accepted to be displayed as a museum object, tried his best to meet the anthropologists' demand, and gave in to Kroeber's decision to travel back to Oregon, even though the place carried the memories of several massacres he survived.