A review by Kelsy Timler.  Written for ANTH 300 (Feb. 2011).

Sitting in a small cafe I completely lost track of time, surprising myself as I turned the page to find the bibliography. I had read it all in one sitting. Behar’s journey through history, memory, and identity is engaging, and the entire experience, rather than being complimented by Mayol’s works, seems instead to be triggered by the collection of black and white photographs.

Behar traces her personal connection with Jewish Cuba, a place she left at a young age, and returned to years later, her anthropologically inquisitive mind and personal memories driving her to find those that remained after the mass exodus of Jewish people from Cuba that was ignited by Fidel Castro’s rise to power.

Her dialogue with the Jewish communities residing in Cuba today, as well as the images she provides for us alongside her text have a definitively nostalgic feel to them. She explains in the beginning pages how her faded photographs of her birthplace acted as a replacement for the Cuban soil that she didn’t exactly remember, yet could not forget. Through her travels to and from Cuba she creates an ongoing remembering of that past, and it’s connections with the present day Jewish identity of her motherland.

Flipping through and gazing at the predominantly solemn faces of the Jewish Cubans she interviewed over the course of her studies there, the distant memory of Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida (1980) began to echo in my mind, his use of the photograph in that book, as well as his explanation of how the photograph, in itself, represents death.

With the click of a shutter the image is captured, arrested in time. Forever static. That moment will never again exist, it is deceased, the still image the only existing evidence that it ever occurred. Memory is subjective, fickle even, and from the death of any given moment springs the evolution of that story, the hyperbolizing and alteration of that past action, continually created, and recreated over time. But the photograph traps that moment, there is no room for the subjective self to grow, it is caged in it’s reality, it’s absoluteness eternalized.

Each photograph Behar offers was captured, like a moth pinned to the entomologist’s board, because of her melancholic longing for a past, and a future which she  left at a young age. I find it eloquently fitting that the sense of loss she felt, the need to discover the lost moments, began in cemeteries as she searched for stories of the buried Jews of Cuba. Were they visited by their kin, or had their families fled, adding themselves into the human diaspora? From the real estate of the dead to the living Jewish communities spread throughout Cuba, Behar seeks to recover something lost, a sense of place and time, while Mayol’s photographs promise the preservation of specific moments of her voyage.

The irony of her use of the photograph to try and create a living connection is not lost on Behar, who calls them “the album of [her] return to a forbidden home.” Her despondent reminiscing of Cuba, the upheaval and loss of the context with which she left, all are cumulative to the sense of emotional drainage Behar’s writings inspire. She even refers to the photographic murder feared by anthropologists such as Margaret Mead. Yet it is with a deep understanding of memory and possession that Behar enters into her photo journey. Her connection with the place and the people allows her to stop time, to take the photograph, the possessed subject, and recreate a dialogue around it. There is no sense of trespassing or using the peoples forever trapped between the covers of her book. She doesn’t enter into homes, leaving nothing behind and stealing away with the still life images, the captive people in Mayol’s negatives. She relates their conversations, their personalities, their family relations and works within the community. She eats with the Jewish people that Mayol photographs, she brings them commodities from the United States, she enters into a contract. This contract is safe from contamination because of how bound she is to the images, for in printing the photographs, she ensnares these moments in time, but they are not merely for the sake of adding another published work beneath her name.  They are, in her words, a memoryscape. Any misuse of the photographic deaths she presents to the world would not only tarnish the black and white faces of those represented, but also her memories. It was with the utmost respect for the power of the still image that she entered this project.

A Review by Deanna Ikari.  Written for ANTH 300 (Feb. 2011).

Abalone Woman is a Spirit Being, one of those who indigenous people of California say came before, and who gave them their rituals and their knowledge of the land upon which they live. Abalone Woman become involved in a relationship with an abusive man and from her pain abalone is created. Upon this much, most of the narratives that Les W. Field includes in his ethnography, Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California agree. However, the existence of multiple telling of this tale reveals that variations exist between, and perhaps even within the different groups that Field describes, a point to which he returns throughout the book.

Field’s ethnography of Native Californians documents multiple groups’ struggles for official recognition and subsequent attempts at cultural revivification through the reestablishment of cultural patrimony and ritual dance. He approaches both of these endeavours with reference to the cultural significance of abalone. As Field describes the succulent flesh and the stunning beauty of its iridescent shell, the reader begins to understand why abalone is anthropomorphized as a woman.

Rather than telling one version of Abalone Woman’s story and thus establishing that specific tale as canonical, Field makes room for multiple tellings within his ethnography, and this inclusion of diverse voices is reflected in the way he structures his book. While still identifying himself as the author rather than as an editor, Field includes large passages of text that are written by his interlocutors, including Francis Lang, a Karuk scholar, and Wiyot Cheryl Seidner. In these sections, Field’s voice is barely present if not entirely mute. He also includes direct transcriptions of his conversations with others such as regalia maker Bradley Marshall, rather than recraft their conversations in a more typically ethnographic fashion. This technique of including the words of his interlocutors in lieu of building his narrative entirely upon his own representations is Field’s effort to simultaneously ensure that indigenous peoples are given their say, while avoiding the creation of a “single native voice,” which he stresses does not exist.

Field’s book is as much about the people with whom he speaks as it is about the title subject. Chapter Three is exclusively concerned with Field’s conversations and relationship with Florence Silva, granddaughter of John Boston, who was a famous practitioner of the Dreamer religion. The pair discusses Pomo myths, including John Boston’s story about “the Parent of All Abalones,” with whose existence all life on earth is intertwined. Florence also speaks of her grandfather’s position as Dreamer and healer for the Point Area Pomo, and with Field attempts to dispel misrepresentations created by previous ethnographers about the Dreamer religion in general, and her family in particular. Field’s narration is clearly empathetic, and at times even sentimental. This is not the objective observer of the past, but the involved ethnographer of the present who is aware that his very presence is consequential to his interlocutors.

Another topic that Field and Florence examine is John Boston’s abalone shell pectoral, central to his Dreamer rituals. The significance of abalone regalia is further explored in Field’s conversations with other Native Americans, including Bradley Marshall. Marshall, a crafter of abalone regalia speaks of the importance of mindset when creating such pieces. He explains that when a piece is danced it becomes alive, imbued with the life forces of the animals that went into its creation, which amalgamate to form a new consciousness. This consciousness can be affected by the negative feelings of its maker. Marshall stresses that although he creates the piece, he is not its owner but merely its holder, and like any other living being the regalia too has a voice that can both sing and cry out in pain.

Abalone regalia is one of the types of artefacts central to establishing a cultural patrimony for native groups seeking recognition from the Californian government. However, as Field comes to realize, although such patrimony is necessary for obtaining sovereignty, in an ironic reversal of direction, sovereignty is necessary for identifying such artefacts as one’s own. In the book’s final chapter, Field takes note of what he has accomplished in the writing of Abalone Tales, as well as of the limitations of which he is conscious. Throughout the ethnography, the author has been extremely aware and often highly critical of his own presence. He even briefly questions whether what he has learned might perhaps harm some groups’ sovereignty claims. Still, his efforts to give each of his interlocutors his or her own voice grants each of them sovereignty over their own expression, which is something integral to their cultural revivification and is, in its own way, a step toward official recognition.

A Review by Claire Midenberger.  Written for ANTH 300 (Feb. 2011).

“How many Jews are there in Cuba?” “About a thousand.” I was surprised to be greeted with this question (and be able to provide an answer) as soon as I began describing the book An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, because I had just read an account of the author, Ruth Behar, being asked the very same question. The very fact that it is recurrently the first question asked is particularly important. It evinces the reality that very little is known by the general public about the Jews in Cuba: how they came to be there in the first place, how they are holding on to their traditions in Castro’s Cuba, and what it means to be Jewish in Cuba today.

In 1881, Jewish immigrants were legally allowed to enter Cuba for the first time, and the new Cuban constitution in 1897 decreed freedom of religious belief and worship, but it was not until the First World War that large numbers of Jews were settling on the island. Sephardic immigrants escaped to Cuba from the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1914, and Ashkenazic immigrants, turned away by the American Emergency Quota Act of 1921, began arriving soon after. When Cuba established relations with the Soviet Union in 1960, U.S.-owned businesses were seized and a trade embargo was imposed. Ninety percent of Cuba’s Jews emigrated, and for the next 30 years, the remainder were not allowed to practice Judaism under the atheist, communist state.

In the early 90s, Cuba was declared a secular state, and Communist Party Members were allowed to practice a religion if they choose. Jewish projects originating in the U.S. and Canada supported the restoration of cultural programs and traditional practices through donations, however, hundreds of Jews still chose to emigrate; many repatriated to Israel. Those that have remained face the difficult task of rebuilding their community, redefining themselves, and adapting Jewish traditions to a novel framework.

Behar’s intensely personal ethnography of Jewish Cubans begins with her own search for closure in the death of Henry Levin, a young relative whom she had never met but who was “a trauma of such dimensions that we all carried his memory with us into our second diaspora in the United States.” Her repeated trips to the country she escaped as a child eventually evolved from a private search for long-lost memories into a shared, communal pursuit of how to adapt erstwhile Jewish traditions within even the most antithetical of contexts.

An Island Called Home is not a traditional book. Behar worked with a photographer, Humberto Mayol, to produce a photo journal in an effort to “convey visually the mesh of Jewishness and Cubanness.” The partnership is effective because Behar and Mayol are each insiders and outsiders in their own way, as a Jew and as a Cuban, respectively. Behar is in an especially fascinating position because she is an anthropologist in her native land; she is capable of making connections, both holistically and with her informants, only from in between, as an insider and as an outsider. Most of the photos are taken in the same manner: the people were asked to pose with their photos and Jewish documents. These images of “unrehearsed moments of self-awareness and reflection” powerfully impress upon the reader the sentiments of loss, hope, and pride. Behar was careful to insure that the photos did not only depict the “heroic story of the Jewish rebirth in Cuba,” but also the underlying story of loss and the Jewish identity outside of religion.

Nor is an Island Called Home a traditional ethnography. As an ethnographic text, it might be construed as a modernist interpretation, and unfortunately, this entails attracting the standard criticisms of modernist ethnographic writing; the reflexive style involves the input of the author throughout the study, and in this case, Behar makes the anthropologist-informant dialogue the primary interest of the text, which makes it difficult to generalize beyond Behar’s very personal experiences. Even though Behar’s text risks becoming too self-indulgent, she successfully conveys her message by manipulating the form of a text and remaining conscious of the research process itself. There is an immediate sense that this is her journey and not ours, but the reciprocity of perspectives and the strength of the imagery (both textual and photographic) is deeply compelling; it is the very subjective human element that draws you in and makes you reflect on the common urge to define oneself and make sense of the world.