Which way will a culture turn?
Back when the Beatles made their first cultural splash on the international stage, a linguistic anthropologist named John Stirling journeys to “the wild mountains of southern Oaxaca” (WAH HA kah) in Mexico. In the tiny village of Santa Carmen, where perhaps 80 people live, he is to meet nonagenarian Juan de la Cruz, the last person on earth who can speak Xocatec.
Stirling wants to know how Xocatec is structured, but it’s soon clear more is required for someone to “get” a language. And when Juan is accused of murder by a mentally ill woman in the village, and Mexican authorities step in, John and his friends learn firsthand the sometimes deadly effects of a dominant culture.
“The Trial Of Juan De La Cruz” ($2.99 in Amazon Kindle edition, selfpublished) by Chicoan Mike Findlay, retired Butte College and Chico State anthropology instructor, is one of three novels “Through An Anthropologist’s Looking Glass,” including “The Tribe In The Red Brick House” and “The Trail To Tlaxiaco” (Tlah HEE ah Ko).
Most of the first half of “Trial” delves deeply into the Stirling’s work as a linguistic anthropologist (there’s a helpful glossary), but it threatens to overwhelm him as he spends more and more time with his tape recorder. “John often talked well into the night — endless streams of discourse with a mechanical device. He began to shut the world around him out, keeping his thoughts to himself in his little cottage up in” Santa Carmen.
John is shaken out of the “cult of grammar” as Juan tells the story of hunting with his brother many years before, coming to a place “empty and dead and brown like coffee. We knew we had entered the area of the ancient battles — the wars.” In frustration, Juan kills a great horned owl, a sacred animal, and the fruits of his desecration are with him still.
Juan’s trial shows the stark contrast between justice in Santa Carmen and the Oaxacan “guilty if we say you’re guilty” system.
This somber tale of how cultures mix (or don’t) raises a question: Which way will the owl turn in our own day — toward healthy community, or widening chaos?
This somber tale of how cultures mix (or don’t) raises a question: Which way will the owl turn in our own day — toward healthy community, or widening chaos?