Klein Reclaiming The F-Word

Pacific Historical Review, 65:2 (May, 1996): 179-215
Reclaiming the "F"Word,

Or Being and Becoming Postwestern
KERWINLEE KI.FIN
The author,currentlya lecturerin historyin the Universityof
California,Los Angeles, will becomea memberof the history
departmentin the Universityof California,Berkeley,beginning with the 1996-1997 academicyear.
With the nation still adrift in the sea of words devoted to

the recent Columbian quincentennary, historians of the American West find themselves in a strange position. Their research
specialty, the frontier history of the European occupation of
Native America from the East Coast to Alaska and Hawai'i, has
exploded into public consciousness. The breakup of colonial
empires, fighting over multiculturalism, and the commercial
success of films like Danceswith Wolvesand BlackRobe have kindled popular interest in the sort of stories that western historians
have long told. Scholars from other fields have joined in the
enthusiasm, producing new biographies of Columbus, novels
from indigenous viewpoints, or even literary histories like SteAll in all, it looks like a
phen Greenblatt's MarvelousPossessions.
very good time to be a western historian, for the field has once
again become a topic of national debate.1
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the conference, "American
Dreams,WesternImages, WilliamAndrewsClarkMemorialLibraryand the UCLA
Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies. The author thanks the
participantsand organizers.Thanksalso go to Dorothee Kocks,Stephen Aron, and
Robert V. Hine for their criticisms.The writing of this paper was facilitated by
grants from the Pauley Foundation and the Carey McWilliamsFoundation at
UCLA.
1. For a sense of the sweep of this literature,see Simon Schama, "TheyAll
Laughed at Christopher Columbus; New Republic(Jan. 6 and 13, 1992), 20-40;
Garry Wills, "GoodbyeColumbus"New YorkReviewof Books,XXXVIII (Nov. 21,
PacificHistoricalReview ?1996 by the PacificCoastBranch AmericanHistoricalAssociation
179
180
Pacific Historical Review
Unfortunately, some of the most celebrated recent developments in historiography would distance specialists from these
broader conversations. Debate circles around an assemblage of
authors and texts known as "NewWestern History."Some "New
Western Historians" have argued publicly and polemically that
western history is not, should not, and cannot be frontier history,
and that true western history is found only in those arid spaces
west of the hundredth meridian, a place that escaped the gaze of
Columbus and his acquisitive crew.Time was, old western historians like FrederickJackson Turner spoke of the West as a place
where European and indigenous cultures collided, a place that
moved north, south, east and west with the imperial tide. In the
late sixteenth century, the West was NewJersey and New Mexico;
in the early nineteenth, Illinois and Texas. By the end of the
twentieth century, white people had overrun the continent, and
the last of the Wests, stretching from the plains to the Pacific, has
kept the name. Influential scholars like Patricia Limerick,
Richard White, and Donald Worster have insisted that we must
settle down in this last, best West and recant frontier history if we
are to escape the evil priestcraftof the Tumerian dark ages. But
not all "NewWestern Historians"have given up on frontier and
continental Wests. Scholars like William Cronon, Antonia Castafieda, and Stephen Aron criticize triumphalistnarrativesof white
male westering, but still imagine a "GreaterWestern History"that
studies frontier processes in continental or global terms. Though
commentators have conflated them, we must distinguish at least
two schools of "New"western history: students of the Greater
West and New Western Regionalists.2
1991), 12-18; andJames Axtell, "Moral Reflections on the Columbian Legacy,' in
Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (New York, 1992), 241-266.
2. For a sampling of recent discussions, see Michael P. Malone, "Beyond the
Last Frontier: Toward a New Approach to Western American History," Western
Historical QuarterlyXX (1989), 408-436; Brian W. Dippie, "The Winning of the West
Reconsidered, Wilson Quarterly,XIV (1990), 70-86; William G. Robbins, "Laying
Siege to Western History: The Emergence of New Paradigms"' Reviews in American
History, XIX (1991), 313-332; Antonia I. Castaiieda, "Women of Color and the
Rewriting of Western History: The Discourse, Politics, and Decolonization of History,"Pacific Historical Revie4wLXI (1992), 501-533; Gerald D. Nash, "Point of View:
One Hundred Years of Western History,' Journal of the West,XXXII (April 1993),
3-5; Susan Armitage, Elizabeth Jameson, and Joan Jensen, "The New Western
History: Another Perspective" ibid. (uly 1993), 5-6; Richard W. Etulain, "The New
Western Historiography and the New Western History: Continuity and Change"
Reclaiming the "F' Word
New Western Regionalists contend that only the arid, transMississippi West is really "The" West, and historians using the
label for any place back east or using the "F"word anywhere at
all are voting for Manifest Destiny. "Frontier,'said PatriciaLimerick in her important study,Legacyof Conquest:TheUnbroken
Past of
the AmericanWest(1987), "is an unsubtle concept in a subtle
world."And in "Whaton Earth Is the New Western History?,'she
described the word as "nationalistic;'"ethnocentric;' and even
"racist."The old, frontier-stylewestern history, so the argument
goes, has so closely identified itself with celebratory accounts of
what a good thing it was for Europeans to have slaughtered their
way across the continent that the only way to introduce non-male,
non-white voices to our public memory is to renounce frontier
history, give up talking about western history in continental
terms, and concentrate on the West as region. In a more recent
essay,"The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century"
(1994), she has noted that after a slow crawl through the foggy
swamps of false historical consciousness, scholars began to revise
our bad, old triumphalist narratives and a few, such as Jack
Forbes and Gloria Anzaldua, even tried to reclaim the "F"word.
Limerick has reluctantly concluded that we are stuck with the
word, but she seems to have little hope that recent attempts to
redefine frontier as a zone of cultural interaction will succeed.
Other New Western Regionalists, like Richard White, have spent
comparativelyless time and ink on critiques of the "F"word, but
White's textbook, It's YourMisfortuneand Noneof My Own (1992),
simply begins and ends West of the Mississippi, thereby erasing
the "F" word far more completely than any critique ever
could.3
ibid. (Oct. 1993), 3-4; William Deverell, "Fighting Words: The Significance of the
American West in the History of the United States," WesternHistorical Quarterly,XXV
(1994), 185-206; Stephen Aron, "Lessons in Conquest: Towards a Greater Western
History;' Pacific Historical Review LXIII (1994), 125-148; Michael Allen, "The 'New'
Western History Stillborn," Historian, LVII (1994), 201-209; Susan Rhoades Neel, "A
Place of Extremes: Nature, History, and the American West," WesternHistorical
Quarterly,XXV (1994), 488-206; andJohn R. Wunder, "What'sOld about the New
Western History: Race and Gender, Part 1" Pacific Northwest Quarterl)yLXXXV
(1994), 50-58.
3. Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest:The UnbrokenPast of the American West
(New York, 1987), 25; Limerick, "What on Earth Is the New Western History?," in
Limerick et al., eds., Trails: Toward a New WesternHistory (Lawrence, 1991), 85;
Limerick, "The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century," in James R.
181
182
New Western Regionalists have written some wonderful histories, but they have chained them to a geographic abstraction
created by western historians.They would also segregate the field
from all the exciting frontier history now in the works, at a time
when even Shakepearean scholars like Greenblatt are scurrying
to get in on the action. Worse, they would separate the West
from the imperial processes that placed it at the center of national memory and joined it to transnational global histories.
And they propose that replacing "frontier"with "West,'historically the key word of Orientalism, will eliminate ethnocentrism
from our scholarly discourse! It is more than faintly ironic that
we arrived at this parochial position out of a desire to reconnect
the specialty to larger dialogues about race, class, gender, and
sexuality. Meanwhile, people in other departments and professions continue to watch TheLast of theMohicansand follow the
media controversyover Europe's imagination and occupation of
Native America. The New Western Regionalist'smessage to these
enthusiasts? "Callus when you reach the Rockies."
The regionalist attack on "frontier,'the "F"word, enacts an
understanding of language that is at best partial and at worst
ahistorical. It also effaces a tradition of frontier histories, written
by scholars like William MacLeod, Americo Paredes, Edward
Spicer, William Appleman Williams,Robert F Berkhofer,Wilbur
Jacobs, and Robert V. Hine, at odds with the triumphalistfrontier
tales that New Regionalists rightly criticize.4 Even Limerick's
recent genealogy of "frontier"paints a remarkablymonolithic
Grossman, ed., The Frontier in American Culture (Chicago and Berkeley, 1994),
66-102; Limerick, "TurneriansAll: The Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World;'AmericanHistoricalReview,C (1995), 697-716; Donald Worster,
Rivers of Empire:Water,Aridity, and the Growthof the American West(New York, 1985);
Historical
Worster,"NewWest,TrueWest:Interpretingthe Region'sHistory, Western
XVIII (1987), 141-156;Worster,"Beyondthe AgrarianMyth' in Trails,
Quarterly,
3-25; Richard White, "Trashing the Trails" in ibid., 26-39; White, "It' YourMisfortune and None of My Own":A New History of the American West(Norman, 1991).
4. Several writers have recently drawn our attention to the many frontier
historians who have offered critical or counter-Turnerianhistories. See Allan G.
Bogue, "The Significance of the History of the American West: Postcripts and
Prospects,' WesternHistorical Quarterly,XXIV (1993), 45-68; John Mack Faragher,
"The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West,"
AmericanHistoricalRevie, XCVIII (1993), 106-117; and Gerald D. Nash, Creatingthe
West:Historical Interpretations,1890-1990 (Albuquerque, 1991).
Rerlaiming the "F" Word
picture by claiming that only recently have scholars begun to

revise the word's reactionary meanings. But the portrait is too
plain, and it disconnects recent developments, such as Forbes's
and Anzaldfa's revisions, from their complicated linguistic pasts.
In a way,the refiguration of frontier as a cultural border actually
returns to much older senses of the word, usages that have never
disappeared from anthropology and some corners of American
history. Although the ritual flagellation of Frederick Jackson
Turner has become a popular scholarlypastime, we need a more
careful conceptual history. A simple etymology will not suffice,
for the meanings of words like '"West"and "frontier"shift and
change from story to story. Set "frontier"beside "culture"and
"ethnicity,'as scholars have done across the last century, and we
may reclaim the "F"word and perhaps return western history to
the continental and global stages.
Frontier carries centuries of meaning. But the usage that
worries critics, the conflation of frontier with "free land" and
social evolution, is very recent. In 1966John T.Juricek traced the
word back to medieval Latin, frontis,and then forward through
several centuries of semantic change. Frontierapparentlyworked
its way into Western Europe as a term for the militarized border
region of a political entity, a line where one social group came
up against another. In nineteenth-century Europe, frontier usually referred to a political boundary between two or more nationstates. Some fifty years before Turner's essays, American usage
basically conformed to that in Europe. AsJuricek put it, "Until
about the mid-nineteenth century most Americans would have
agreed that the United States, like the English colonies before it,
did not border on emptiness in the West. Rather, like European
nations, it bordered on other countries-Indian countries"After
the war between the United States and Mexico, the KansasNebraska Act of 1854, and the California Gold Rush, it became
impossible to describe a single, clear, north-south boundary separating Indian country from American territory.In 1882 the Census Bureau fixed a line of Euro-American population density
"beyond which the country must be considered as unsettled."
183
184
What had long been read as a civil boundary could now be

thought of as a place where civil society ended.5
Turner'sfrontier history originated in the older understandings of frontiers as social borders. In his dissertation, "The Indian Trade in Wisconsin;'Turner enlisted the language of Victorian ethnology to describe the West as a region of imperial
exchange. The trading post was an economic institution built on
the exploitation of a "primitive"or "undeveloped society" by a
"higher"or "moreadvanced people."This basic frontier situation
has recurred through history: Phoenicians and Greeks, Romans
and Barbarians, European Christians and African Moslems. Of
course, the Mediterranean and American experiences are not
perfectly analogous: "The Phoenician factory, it is true, fostered
the development of the Mediterranean civilization, while in
America the trading post exploited the natives.... But the study
of the destructive effect of the trading post is valuable as well as
the study of its elevating influences" The Phoenician and Greek
frontier elevated the Greeks, while the European and Native
American frontier exploited the Indians.6
In "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"
5. John T. Juricek, "AmericanUsage of the Word 'Frontier'from Colonial
Times to Frederick Jackson Turner,"Proceedingsof the AmericanPhilosophical Society,
CX (1966), 10-34 (the quotations are on pp. 28, 33). Comparehis story with the
(Oxford,1933),565, 566, and the
chronologyset out in the Oxford
EnglishDictionary
new Supplementto the OxfordEnglish Dictionary(Oxford, 1972), 1167. See also Fulmer
Mood, "The Concept of the Frontier,1871-1898:Commentson a List of Source

Documents,"Agricultural
History,XIX (1945), 24-30; Jack D. Forbes, "Frontiersin
American History, Journal of the West,I (1962), 63-73; and Walter Rundell, Jr.,
"Conceptsof the 'Frontier'and the 'West;"ArizonaandtheWest,I (1959), 13-41. On
European usage, see J. R V. Prescott, The Geographyof Frontiers and Boundaries
(London, 1965), 9-55; and Lucien Febvre,"Frontiere"Rivuede Synthese

Historique,
XLV June 1928), 31-44.
6. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Characterand Influence of the Indian Tradein
Wisconsin:A Study of the TradingPostas an Institution (Baltimore, 1891), reprinted in
Fulmer Mood, ed., The Early Writings of FrederickJackson Turner (Madison, 1938),
85-182 (quotation on p. 90). See also Turner'smaster'sthesis, "TheCharacterand

Influence of the Fur Trade in Wisconsin, in Wisconsin State Historical Society,
XXXVI(1889), 52-98. The dissertationshould be comparedwith a later
Proceedings,
address, "AmericanColonization"(1893), reprintedin Ronald Carpenter,TheEloquenceof FrederickJacksonTurner(San Marino, Calif., 1983), 176-192. The single best
account of Turner and his legacy remains RayAllen Billington, Frederick

Jackson
Turner:Historian, Scholar,Teacher(New York, 1973). For an annotated bibliography
of writings on Turner, see Vernon E. Mattson and William E. Marion, Frederick

Jackson Turner:A ReferenceGuide (Boston, 1982).
(1893), Turner described the frontier as a boundary between

wilderness and civilization,as well as savageryand civilization.His
very first paragraph opened with the report of the United States
census that the line of frontier settlement could no longer be
clearly distinguished and concluded that, "Up to our own day
American history has been in a large degree the history of the
colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free
land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American
settlement westwardexplain American development."Only a few
paragraphs later, still another side of "frontier"came into view:
"The frontier,' said Turner,is "the meeting point of savageryand
civilization."One sentence later he asked again, "What is the
frontier?" While it was "not the European frontier-a fortified
boundary running through dense populations"'it did include
"the Indian country."7Wilderness and savagery: These words
interweave in his writings and have passed down into later
histories.
We should treat them with care. RichardWhite has said that

"Old Western Historians"like Turner "apportioned the West at
any given moment before the magic date of 1890 between nature
and culture; they called the dividing line the frontier. On one
side of the frontier nature reigned."White'swork is insightful, but
his construction is anachronistic and potentially misleading. Wilderness, nature, and free land were not exactly synonyms in the
1890s, and while White is justified in suspecting them of some
rather unhappy implications, none of them emptied the West of
humanity. Wilderness for Turner was an area of wild nature and
7. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History" (1893), reprinted in Early Writings,183-232 (quotations on pp. 185-186).
Subsequent references are to this edition. For comparisons of the different versions
of this essay, see Fulmer Mood's valuable appendix to Early Writings,273-294. The
Cyclopedia entry is reprinted in Fulmer Mood, ed., "Little Known Fragments of
Turner's Writings;' WisconsinMagazine of History,XXIII (1940), 328-341 (quotation
on p. 339). By the time his first book, TheFrontierin AmericanHistory (1920; reprint,
New York, 1962) appeared, meanings and synonyms for "frontier" had multiplied
remarkably. The frontier was "the West,""the hither edge of free land;' "the line of
the most effective and rapid Americanization," "the graphic line which records the
expanding energies of the people behind it' "a migrating region, "the mere edge
of settlement,' "the belt of territory occupied" by frontiersmen, and "a form of
society rather than an area."In letters and conversations he professed his interest
in "the movement of population into unsettled geographic provinces" See Ray
Allen Billington, America'sFrontierHeritage (New York, 1966), 16.
185
186
wild people, a construction with roots in the medieval figure of

the "Wild Man" and Enlightenment philosophies of "Natural
Man."And "free land;' as William Cronon has shown, was a
technical concept of contemporarysocial science: "Suchland was
not free of inhabitants;it was free of rents"Wilderness and free
land were not quite "anti-culture,'at least not yet.8
We have been speaking rather freely of earlyunderstandings
of frontier as a zone of cultural interaction, but the phrasing is
anachronistic, and it marks an important change. "Culture"(as
we use it) was not readily available to young Turner. Victorian
vocabularies commonly distinguished social groups by "nation."
Alternativesincluded "people,'"race,'"blood,'"stock,'"spirit,'and
"society."Scholars with strong ties to Romantic and historicist
traditions, Turner among them, tended to prefer "spirit"He also
used "society,"a word that resonated with Victorian social evolutionism. Social evolution set different societies along a continuum of development, from savagismthrough barbarism to civilization. The meeting point of savagery and civilization
represented the convergence of two chunks of history, the past
and the future. Turner did not empty Native America of people,
but he placed it in the past. In 1893 "savagery"and "civilization"
were "scientific"concepts, and while we rightlymistrustthem, we
should not be scandalized that historians living in this linguistic
world reproduced it in their monographs.9
8. White, "Trashing the Trails" 28. On "wilderness"and "savagery,"see
ReinhartKoselleck'ssuperbessay,"TheHistorical-Political
Semanticsof Asymmetric
Counterconcepts, in FuturesPast: The Semanticsof HistoricalTime,translated by Keith
Tribe (1979; Eng. lang. ed., Cambridge,Mass., 1985), 159-197; RichardBernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology(Cam-
bridge, Mass.,1952); EdwardDudleyand MaximilianE. Novak,eds., TheWildMan

Within: An Image in WesternThoughtfrom the Renaissance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh,
1972); Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness:The Archaeology of an Idea"

(1976), in TropicsofDiscourse:Essaysin CulturalCriticism(Baltimore, 1978), 150-182;
George Boas and Arthur O. Lovejoy, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity: A
DocumentaryHistory of Primitivism and Related Ideas (Baltimore, 1938); Roy Harvey
Pearce, Savagism and Civilization:A Study of theIndian and theAmericanMind (1953;
reprint, Berkeley, 1965); Curtis Hinsley, Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian
Institution and theDevelopmentof AmericanAnthropology,1846-1910 (Washington, D.C.,
1981); Roderick Nash, Wildernessand theAmericanMind (1967; 3rd ed., New Haven,
1982), esp. 1-4; William Cronon, "Turner'sFirst Stand: The Significance of Significance in American History, in RichardW.Etulain,ed., WritingWestern
History:
Essays on Major WesternHistorians (Albuquerque, 1991), 82.
9. See the overviewsin George W. Stocking,Jr., Race,Culture,and Evolution:
Essays in the History of Anthropology(New York, 1968); Stocking, The Ethnographer's

Magic and OtherEssaysin theHistoryof Anthropology(Madison, 1992); and Christopher
Reclaimingthe "F' Word

Turner's mix of older understandings of frontier as civil
boundary with new definitions of frontier as the social development of wilderness opened at least two conceptual paths for
scholars to follow. Notoriously, many Americanists took up "vilderness" and dropped "savagery."In the process they helped to
change wilderness from an area occupied by wild people or
savages to a place where, as the Wilderness Act (1964) put it,
"Man himself is a visitor who does not remain,' and built the
conceptual grid through which later critics would read Turner
and frontier history. In Frederic Paxson's History of the American
Frontier(1923) Indians were quickly overrun by the Anglo-Saxons
in their "fight with nature and the alien." In 1930, E. Douglas
Branch's textbook, Westward:The Romance of the AmericanFrontier,
"the battles with the Indians...dwindle in importance. The battle
with Nature, the wilderness...that is the essential conflict." In
1949 Ray Allen Billington's textbook, WestwardExpansion, codified
the move from Native to nature. The story of westward expansion
is a tale of "a series of conquests;' in which Anglo-Saxon pioneers
surmount various natural barriers: The Alleghenies, the Great
Plains, the Rocky Mountains. Natives appear only when involved
in "war and land cession,' and they turn up in the index in
categories like "removal of,' "as allies of,' and '"ars with." The
table of contents formalized the conflation of Natives and nature,
for the chapter devoted to Native America is entitled, "The
Indian Barrier."By mid-century Indians had all but disappeared
from history textbooks much as white Americans had expected
them to vanish from the cultural landscape. If we need a villain
to blame for the development, Paxson, Billington, and their
epigoni seem far better candidates than Frederick Jackson
Turner, one of the few period Americanists to imagine Natives as
a worthy topic for historical study.10
Herbert, Cultureand Anomie:EthnographicImagination in theNineteenthCentury(Chicago, 1991).
10. Frederic L. Paxson, History of the AmericanFrontier(New York, 1924), 1; E.
Douglas Branch, Westward:The Romance of the AmericanFrontier(New York, 1930);
Ray Allen Billington withJames Blaine Hedges, WestwardExpansion: A History of the
American Frontier (New York, 1949). In the early forties, George W. Pierson denounced "frontier" as too squishy for social science. He circulated a questionnaire
to survey definitions of the "frontier hypothesis" and assess scholarly consensus on
its validity. The study offers clues to usage among professional American historians
of the period. See his "American Historians and the Frontier Hypothesis in 1941
(I)" and "American Historians and the Frontier Hypothesis (II)" in Wisconsin
Magazine of History, XXVI (1942), 36-60 and 170-185.
187
188

The older cultural understandings of frontier did not disappear, however. For students of the Spanish Borderlands and
the fur trade, especially writers like Herbert Eugene Bolton and
Louise Phelps Kellogg, two of Turner's early students, cultural
conflict stood at the heart of the tale. Bolton was best known for
his voluminous studies of Spanish colonialism in the Americas,
and in works like "The Mission as a Frontier Institution" (1917),
The Spanish Borderlands (1921), and "Epic of Greater America"
(1933), readers could find frontiers somewhat less constrictive
than those featured in other texts. They could also find "borders"
and "borderlands" employed as close discursive cousins of frontier, if not synonyms for that word. Though Bolton focused on
Spanish agents, the equivalents to Turner's Anglo frontiersmen,
the story resisted the naturalization suffered by frontier tales
elsewhere in North America. Eliminate the Natives from the
Spanish Borderlands, and you had no story.11
Other frontier revisionists were more critical. In 1928 William Christie MacLeod's The American Indian Frontier (1928) retold Turner's story in a darker tone. Its preface opened with a
lucid, if pointed, statement of the problem: "Every frontier has
two sides. Its movement forward or backward is the consequence
of two sets of forces. To understand fully why one side advances,
we must know something of why the other side retreats." On its
own, the claim resembles the introductory passages of Turner's
dissertation. But MacLeod meant to focus on Native American
experiences, and he believed that this enforced a different emplotment: "North European Indian policies in North America
gradually led the aborigines to moral and physical eclipse.... The
development is one of tragic irony" The statement could hardly
have been more pointed, and in MacLeod's text, Europeans and
later white Americans cheat, steal, and slaughter their way across
11. Herbert Eugene Bolton, "The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the
Spanish-American Colonies;' AmericanHistoricalRevieu, XXIII (1917), 42-61; Bolton,
The Spanish Borderlands:A Chronicleof Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven,
1921); Bolton, "The Epic of Greater America" (1933), in WiderHorizonsof American
History (New York, 1939), 1-53; David J. Weber, "Turner, the Boltonians, and the
Borderlands" American Historical Revieu, XCI (1986), 66-81;John Francis Bannon,
HerbertEugene Bolton: The Historian and the Man (Tucson, 1978); Donald Worcester,
"Herbert Eugene Bolton: The Making of a Western Historian" in Writing Western
History, 193-216; and Albert L. Hurtado, "Herbert E. Bolton, Racism, and American History," Pacific Historical Revieu, LXII (1993), 127-142.

the continent in one long, bloody, imperial misadventure. Still,
MacLeod, like Turner and most social scientists, believed that
Indians would either assimilate or disappear.12
Anthropology was the logical home for those who still understood frontier as an international or intercultural process. And in
twentieth-century ethnographic imagination that single word,
culture, broke history in half. In a circuitous fashion, frontier
history sponsored the break. From the fifteenth century on,
Europeans and Euro-Americans had dealt in ways both clever
and foolish with the epistemic problems posed by Native America. The nineteenth century resolved interpretive difficulties by
locating both groups in a shared sweep of time. Indians came
before, Europeans after. Indians were primitive, Europeans civilized. Indians represented the deep past, Euro-Americans the
open future. On Turner's frontier of savagery and civilization,
two great slabs of history stood face to face without the mediating
grace of intervening centuries. From this concordant discord
came American democracy, from this division, a pluralized unity.
Anthropology placed Natives and Europeans into culture, and
into wildly different cultures, and broke the story firmly into
halves, dividing national memory straight down the middle. In
new varieties of anthropology, from the careful reconstructions of
ethnographers like Franz Boas to the theoretical manifestos of
functionalists like Bronislaw Malinowski, social evolution with its
old story of savagism's displacement by civilization was on the way
out.13
Few books did as much to popularize the culture concept as
Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934). Benedict juxtaposed
various tribal communities to show that customs could be so
12. William Christie MacLeod, TheAmericanIndian Frontier(New York, 1928),
vii, viii.
13. Raymond Williams, Keywords:A Vocabularyof Cultureand Society(New York,
1976), 76-82, offers a quick introduction. But see also A. L. Kroeber and Clyde
Kluckholn, Culture:A CriticalReview of Conceptsand Definitions (1952; reprint, New
York, 1963); Frederick M. Barnard, "Culture and Civilization in Modern Times,' in
Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York, 1968), 613-621;
Milton Singer, "The Concept of Culture, in David L. Sills, ed., InternationalEncyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), 527-543; and Robert H. Winthrop,
Dictionary of Conceptsin CulturalAnthropology(New York, 1991), 50-61. For overviews
of period anthropology, see Stocking, Ethnographer's
Magic, and Robert F Berkhofer,
Jr., The WhiteMans Indian: Images of the AmericanIndian from Columbusto the Present
(New York, 1978).
189
190
PacificHistoricalReview
strongly patterned that they amounted to a coherent culture
analogous to a single personality or object of art. Customs were
arranged in systematicwholes rather than in evolutionary stages;
social mores were learned habits rather than natural tendencies;
and one could judge another culture only from within one's own.
As BeneThe revision had important consequences for "frontier."
dict saw it, capitalism, greed, and imperial aggrandizement were
cultural products, the result of "ourparticularsystem of property
ownership.... Self-support is a motive our civilization has capitalized. If our economic structure changes so that this motive is
no longer so potent a drive as it was in the era of the great
frontier and expanding industrialism, there are many other motives that would be appropriate to a changed economic organization."Both Turner and MacLeod were wrong; there was nothing
natural about the degradation of the Indian by the great frontier.
The frontier, to ethnographers like Benedict, meant death and
decay.14
The conventions of field work reinforced this frontier tragAs

edy. late as the twenties most ethnographers believed Indians
on the brink of cultural extinction, and they raced to collect the
last remnants of vanishing tradition. "Salvage ethnography"
stressed the collection of previously unknown rituals, customs,
stories, and art objects. Since Natives had been degraded by
contact with whites, ethnographers scrambled to find the oldest
customs possible, and avoided like the plague any habits that
synthesized traditional tribal forms with Euro-American forms.
Much as historians used source criticism to identify corrupt texts
and uncover the purified Ur-text, ethnographers sought out the
oldest Natives and purged their informants' contributions of
white contaminants. At some point, the desire to recreate precontact cultures was bound to collide with practice. Native informants did not look like the flintnapping primitivesof the newest
shiny monographs. On the other hand, the residents of Old
Oraibi looked fairly exotic compared with suburban academics.
How should ethnographers describe Natives who drove cars and
watchedJohn Waynewhile still claiming tribal identities? In 1935
14. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934; reprint, Boston, 1989), 36. The
single best source on Benedict's life and thought is Margaret M. Caffrey, Ruth
Benedict:Strangerin This Land (Austin, 1989).
Reclaimingthe "F"Word
anthropologists meeting under the auspices of the Social Science
Research Council (SSRC) began exploring Native and EuroAmerican interaction. Acute enough to realize that Natives had
not yet disappeared, some ethnographers now doubted they
would. Some tribes had vanished, others seemed to have assimilated, but still others looked to be growing. They were not the
people they had been in 1492, but neither were they all residents
of Middletown. To explain this development, ethnographers took
up a new trope, "acculturation;' that placed frontier issues near
the heart of American ethnographic imagination.15
In 1936 an SSRC Subcommittee on Acculturation (Melville
J. Herskovits, Robert Redfield, and Ralph Linton) defined the
word as "those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous firsthand contact, with subsequent changes in the original culture
patterns of either or both groups." They distinguished it from
assimilation, "which is at times a phase of acculturation."16 The
classic statement came in Ralph Linton's 1940 anthology, Acculturation in Seven American Indian Tribes. Partly financed by
grants from the Works Progress Administration, the book gathered a series of articles into an overview of acculturation. Linton
saw the study as a technical report for New Deal social engineering: "AsWhite world dominance declines, the direct and forceful
15. On salvage ethnography, see Stocking, Ethnographer'Magic, 276-340; and
Jacob W. Gruber, "Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology, American Anthropologist,LXXII (1970), 1289-1299. Also relevant here is Brian W. Dippie,
The Vanishing American: WhiteAttitudes and US. Indian Policy (Middletown, Conn.,
1982). On acculturation, see Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, and Melville Hersokovits, "Memorandum on the Study of Acculturation" American Anthropologist,
XXXVIII (1936), 149-152; and Stocking, Ethnographer'sMagic, 142-144, 228-229.
16. Redfield, Linton, and Hersokovits,"Memorandumon the Study of Ac-
culturation." See also the Social Science Research Council Summer Seminar on
Acculturation, "Acculturation: An Exploratory Formulation,' AmericanAnthropologist,
LVI (1954), 974. According to the editor, Ralph Linton, this journal published its
first article on acculturation in 1932, but the subject effectively began with the 1936
memorandum. As the editor put it, in the editorial comment to American Anthropologist in 1954, the 1936 and 1954 issues "mark off the whole history of a subject"
(ibid., 972). The 1954 piece lists 117 items in its bibliography, virtually all of which
were published after 1936. Philip Gleason, Speaking of Diversity: Language and
Ethnicity in Twentieth-CenturyAmerica (Baltimore, 1992), offers a good overview.
Compare Russell A. Kazal, "Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal
of a Concept in American Ethnic History,' American Historical ReviewuC (1995),
437-471.
191
192
Pacific HistoricalReview
methods which Europeans have hitherto employed in their dealings with other groups become less effective and more dangerous
to their users. There is an obvious need for new techniques and
for exact knowledge upon which the development of these techniques can be based" As the earlier frontier period of world
history ended, Europeans and Euro-Americans needed to learn
new ways of incorporating others. Ethnography was ideally situated to inform policy in a world where cultural frontiers transected nations rather than wilderness.17
Most of the contributors to Acculturation measured cultural
survival in terms of "adaptation:' "adjustment;' and "maladjustment" Some cultures successfully adjusted to a world dominated
by Euro-Americans; others, the "maladjusted:' did not fare so
well. As a rule, authors placed contemporary cultures into one of
three categories. In one, the Indians were nearly assimilated, so
close to complete Europeanization that it seemed a sure bet.
Another possibility was that they might unrealistically resist white
culture and disintegrate entirely. Still another was a sort of equilibrium in which Natives retained certain features of traditional
culture while sustaining themselves in a white political and economic system. Few of the authors believed this resolution appropriate for their subjects. Most fell back on custom and the ethnographic tragedy. Still, the articles mixed confident displays of
analytic language with moral ambivalence. Virtually all told tragic
stories of maladjusted cultures facing adaptation or extinction;
virtually all described aspects of Indian life at odds with this
narrative.
Editor Linton blandly smoothed out these wrinkles. His
summaries drew the often discrepant accounts of his contributors
into his own simple story in which acculturation sounded suspiciously like assimilation. And his mechanical metaphors filled out
17. Ralph Linton, ed., Acculturation in Seven American Indian Tribes (1940;
reprint, Gloucester, Mass., 1963), vii. Such appeals to the needs of government
administrators quickly became a rhetorical convention for acculturation articles
published in the American Anthropologist,the discipline's leading journal in the
United States and edited by Linton. See, for instance, Laura Thompson, "Attitudes
and Acculturation' AmericanAnthropologist,
L (1948), 200-225; Florence Hawley, "An
Examination of Problems Basic to Acculturation in the Rio Grande Pueblos" ibid.,
612-624; and Edward M. Bruner, "Primary Group Experience and the Processes of
Acculturation" ibid., LVIII (1956), 602-623.
the anthology's theoretical chapters. Cultures were "adaptive

mechanisms;' acculturation required a meeting of two distinct
cultures, and in most situations one found a socially "superior"
and "inferior"culture side by side. In such cases, assimilationwas
almost certain, since inferior cultures would normally adapt by
voluntarily borrowing from the superior culture, and superior
cultures commonly imposed themselves on inferiors. Assimilation, though, was never a simple case of one culture replacing
another. Linton saw the end product as a "cultural fusion" in
which elements of each culture combined. This was the most
common outcome of Native and white interaction, the melding
of both in an overarching Euro-American society with some
limited Native elements. The story could be tragic, especially
when the Natives chose "unrealistic"strategies of resistance and
ensured their own doom. It could also find a happy resolution
not unlike that projected by historians like Billington. Indians
might smoothly assimilate into Euro-Americanculture, though
such instances were rare. Or they might reach an equilibrium
and retain some aspects of traditional culture while successfully
functioning in white America.18
Cultural equilibrium seemed to be an instance of frontier
interaction that did not end in assimilation. Natalie E Joffe's
"The Fox of Iowa" offered an example. The Fox had adopted
modem technology and held onto their land base while rejecting
white religion and values: "Whenthe problem of acculturation of
the Fox tribe with the White man is viewed over a long time
span, one dominant leitmotif, namely that of vigorous and
planned counter-opposition, is apparent."Linton enthusiastically
glossed the story. Although a solid scholar whose attention to
detail was legendary, his redescription of cultural equilibrium
exchanged mechanical tropes for an an organic, but profoundly
unfortunate, metaphor: "The Fox present an example of a group
which has become encysted within another society and culture"
This likening of the Fox to a diseased sac of tumorous liquid
within the body politic of white America did not become pop18. Linton, "Acculturation and the Process of Culture Change, Acculturmtion,
463-482; "The Processes of Culture Transfer, ibid., 483-500; and "The Distinctive
Aspects of Acculturation' ibid., 501-520. On Linton, see Adelin Linton and Charles
Wagley, Ralph Linton (New York, 1971), esp. 49-52.
193
194
ular, but Linton's conflation of acculturation and assimilation

did.19
Acculturation studies helped to open the space for a new

specialty,"ethnohistory,'and both subfields had obvious continuities with frontier history. While frontier historians like Paxson
and Billington largely ignored the scholarship of ethnographers,
thereby partly emptying frontier of its older meanings, the word
remained attractivefor anthropologists retelling the story of the
European occupation of Native America. In a 1952 article for
AmericanQuarterly,
"HandsomeLake and the Revivalin the Great
West,' Anthony E C. Wallace employed both Turnerian metaphors (West and frontier) in his study of a Native American
revitalization movement. Where MacLeod had seen the frontier
pointing towards darkening tales of assimilation, Wallace pioneered an early telling of the reinvention of new ways of being
Indian, tracking the Seneca's syncretic adoption of Christian
religiosity into a new frontier synthesis. In 1957 A. Irving Hallowell's "The Backwashof the Frontier"explored the obverse side
of the syncretic coin, looking at the waysin which Native thought
and cultures imprinted EuroAmerica. The reading of frontier
and West as synthetic, if often exploitative, process was taken up
by another important scholar active in both acculturation studies
and ethnohistory. In 1962 Edward Spicer synthesized several
decades of research into a magisterialfrontier narrative, Cyclesof
Conquest.20
19. Natalie E Joffe, "The Fox of Iowa, in Linton, ed., Acculturation,
259, 332.
Joffe's article drew extensivelyfrom primarydocumentsand quoted Louise Phelps
Kellog's "The Fox Indians during the French Regime:, WtsconsinStateHistorical
1907 (Madison,1908), 142-188,a workcompletedunder Turner's
Society
Proceedings,
direction.
20. Anthony E C. Wallace, "HandsomeLake and the Great Revival in the
IV (1952), 149-165;Wallace,"RevitalizationMovements:
West, AmericanQuarterly,
Some Theoretical Considerationsfor Their ComparativeStudy, AmericanAnthropologist, LVI (1956), 264-281; Wallace, TheDeath and Rebirthof the Seneca (New York,
1969); Hallowell, "The Backwashof the Frontier:The Impact of the Indian on

American Culture"(1957), in WalkerD. Wymanand Clifton B. Kroeber,eds., The
frontierin Perspective
(Madison,1965), 229-258; Hallowell,"AmericanIndians,White
and Black:The Phenomenon of Transculturation,Current
IV (1963),
Anthropology,
519-531; EverettC. Hughes and Helen M. IHughes,WherPeoplesMeet:Racialand
Ethnic Frontiers(Glencoe, Ill., 1952); Edward W. Spicer, ed., Perspectivesin American
Indian Culture Change (Chicago, 1961); and Spicer, Cyclesof Conquest:The Impact of
Spain, Mexico, and the United Stateson theIndians of the Southwest,1533-1960 (Tucson,
1962).
Rerlaiming the "F" Word
In its introduction, "Cultural Frontiers,' Cyclesof Conquest

joined keywords of both ethnography and history. Spicer placed
his story directly within the narrative tradition of "frontier"history: "The scope of the modern European expansion which
began in the fifteenth century far exceeded that of any previous
'world' conquest. During the 1500's and 1600's it proceeded to
enmesh in its web of domination the natives of the Americas,
Africa, southern Asia, and the islands of the South Seas.... The
lives of several million natives of North America were steadily
transformed through systematic efforts to involve them in the
European trade lines and political systems and to replace their
Thus far readers
religions with the various forms of Christianity."
might expect the ethnographer's customary tragedy of the vanishing Indian. But Spicer told a more twisted tale, for many
Natives "resistedsuccessfully"both "assimilationand extermination" In his prescient conclusion, the frontier story was a universal history of the simultaneous incorporation of local cultures
into a global capitalism and the creation of new local identities.
On the frontier, assimilation and differentiation went hand in
hand. Spicer had superseded both the triumphal tale of Anglo
progress and its demonic twin, the simple ethnographic tragedy.
And despite the later academic apartheid of frontier history and
ethnohistory, Cyclesof Conquestmade the two complementary if
not identical.21
EthnohistorianJack D. Forbes, a second-generation Boltonas
David Weber describes him, elucidated this usage in a
ian,
series of articles and books begining in 1959. A Native American
scholar of mixed Powhatan, Delaware, and Saponi heritage, he
embodied the modern cultural mixture unthinkable with tropes
like assimilation.Where for a Turner or MacLeod the interethnic
connotations of frontier held echoes of the developmental narratives of social evolution, Forbes's rendering took up the postBoasian meanings of culture, along with their potentially
relativistic implications. In a 1960 essay, he indicted the "one21. Spicer, Cyclesof Conquest, 1. Compare Spicer's double plot with that in
Ethnography,Literature,and
James Clifford, ThePredicamentof Culture:Twentieth-Century
Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 17; and Stephen Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics of
Culture" in Learning to Curse:Essays in Early Modern Culture(New York, 1990), 151.
See also Kerwin Lee Klein, "In Search of Narrative Mastery: Postmodernism and
the People without History,"History and Theory,XXXIV (1995), 275-298.
195
196
sidedness" of meaning in writerslike Paxson and Billington, and

then returned to the word'sLatin roots to explain contemporary
anthropological and European usage: "Inits narrowestand most
non-ambiguous usage...frontier refers to a boundary or border
region-a place where two groups confront each other.... [I]
would, therefore suggest that we define a frontier as an inter-group
contactsituation,that is, as any instance of more than momentary
contact between two ethnic, cultural, or national groups."Frontier connoted any interethnic situation where two different cultural groups met. Ethnohistory was not a relative of frontier
history. Ethnohistory was frontier history. And while frontier
histories might focus on the experiences of whites in remaking
locales recently emptied of Natives, they always presupposed a
meeting of different cultural regimes if only in the replacement
of one cultural landscape by another. This idea of frontier as a
space where two cultures came together aligned with broader
trends in contemporary thought.22
If to juxtapose two distinct cultures is to create a frontier,
the question remains, what gives a culture its identity? Boasians
had treated cultures as given social units characterizedby distinct
behavioral and intellectual traits.So-called "trait-lists"
chronicled
a culture's contents. Presumably,once a group had given up its
defining traits, it would have disappeared. Hence the anxiety
over Indians buying canned goods and cars. More systematic
ethnographers might privilege a particular trait. For a strict
Marxist, the distribution and relations of means of production
was the determining trait. Hence the anxiety over the incorporation of Natives into the capitalist economy. For Benedict, it was
not the traits that defined a culture, but the end towardswhich
they moved. Groups sharing identical traits might move towards
different goals and so create different patterns of culture. In all
of these concepts, the very notion of frontier or border was
problematic. At borders, cultures mixed and matched traitswith
their neighbors; aims and goals blurred. Natives might participate in a cash economy and yet retain more "traditional"forms
22. Jack D. Forbes, "The Indian in the West:A Challenge for Historians,'
Arizonaand theWest,I (1959), 210; Forbes,"Frontiersin AmericanHistory, 64, 65;
Forbes, "Frontiersin American History and the Role of the American Historian;'
XV (1968), 203-235.
Ethnohistory,

of gift exchange. Thus the ethnographer's disdain for "frontier"
informants straddling two cultures. And yet, even as reservations
accumulated cars and canned goods, many tribes persisted in
calling themselves tribes and acting on that calling.23
"Culture" was still shifting meaning, and Forbes's employment of "ethnicity" points to another critical turn. In 1969
Fredrik Barth's "Introduction" to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries
declared that ethnic borders persist despite the flow of traits,
cash, and even people back and forth across them. The thesis
that frontier interaction always leads to the assimilation of at least
one of the cultures was wrong. Interaction createdethnic identity:
"[T]he nature of continuity of ethnic units is clear: it depends on
the maintenance of a boundary." It was "the ethnic boundary that
defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses." The
book's subtitle, "The Social Organization of Culture Difference;'
distributed its themes across three closely related but not quite
identical concepts: ethnicity, society, and culture. The diversification suggested ever more nuanced ways of engaging culture
difference, and the affinities with Forbes's frontier stand out. The
interethnic spaces where Lakota and Crow, Zuni and Spanish,
Serrano and Anglo come together are not forever darkling plains
of cultural death. They are the places and processes whereby
groups set themselves apart from others and create a distinct
sense of self with all the potential violence and creativity that
implies.24
23. Stocking, Ethnographer'sMagic; Berkhofer, White Man's Indian; James A.
Clifton, "Alternate Identities and Cultural Frontiers," in Being and BecomingIndian:
Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers (Chicago, 1989), 1-37. These are
crucial issues in ethnographic criticism. See especiallyJohannes Fabian, Time and
the Other:How AnthropologyMakes Its Object(New York, 1983); James Clifford and
George E. Marcus, eds., WritingCulture:ThePoeticsand Politicsof Ethnography(Berkeley, 1986); Clifford, Predicamentof Culture; and Marc Manganaro, ed., Modernist
Anthropology:FromFieldworkto Text (Princeton, 1990).
24. Fredrik Barth, "Introduction, in Ethnic Groupsand Boundaries: The Social
Organization of CultureDifference(Boston, 1969), 10, 14, 15. Barth gave a plenary
address before the American Anthropological Association in 1966 ("On the Study
of Social Change"). For samplings of the vast body of literature on "ethnicity,"see
G. Carter Bentley, "Theoretical Perspectives on Ethnicity and Nationality, Part 1'
Sage Race Relations Abstracts, VIII (May 1983), 1-53; Bentley, "Theoretical Perspectives on Ethnicity and Nationality, Part 2" ibid. (Aug. 1983), 1-26; William
Boelhower, Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature (Oxford,
1984); Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture
(Oxford, 1986); Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (Oxford, 1989); Anthony
197
198
In 1972 Edward Spicer edited an anthology, PluralSocietyin

the Southwest,that linked his earlier frontier histories with the
meanings of ethnicity and culture limned by Barth. The telling
of different histories, the creation of collective memories for
particularethnic groups, these were all frontier processes,waysof
marking out boundaries that differentiated an "us" from a
"them."The complex affinities of border, boundary, frontier,
margin, and edge, especially when set against even more densely
loaded words like culture, society, and ethnicity, provided a semantic depth that both Spicer and his coauthors turned to good
advantage. Over the course of the seventies, these new figures
became staples of an emergent vocabularyof multiculturalism, a
concept not yet named by the anthology, but one which we can
read back into its title phrase. "Pluralsociety"implied a mixing
and matching of diverse cultural identities typical of Spicer's
vision of frontiers. And another of his contemporaries, anthropologist Paul Bohannon, drew the new significance of frontier in
a sourcebook, BeyondtheFrontier:
SocialProcessand CulturalChange
(1967). "Today,'said Bohannon, "frontiershave reversed themselves. Westerners are becoming doubly awareof boundaries and
frontiers. They themselves are the people who are in the way,
who are beyond the frontiers of non-Western peoples experimenting with new and effective technologies. Things look different from this side-and the world looks different to everyone
from its look in 1945" The table of contents described the new
world as a "post-colonial"place of "margins, action, counteracculturation and new nations;' and its geographic key placed
postcolonialism well inside North America. The chapters sampled writers like Billington, MacLeod, and Hallowell, but ended
with an excerpt from Franz Fanon's TheWretched
of theEarth.25
Smith, TheEthnicOriginofNations(Oxford, 1986);WilliamA. Douglass,"ACritique
of Recent Trendsin the Analysisof Ethnonationalism,EthnicandRacialStudies,XII
(1988), 192-206; David Hollinger, "PostethnicAmerica" Contention,II (1992),
79-96; and Hollinger, "HowWide the Circle of the 'We'?American Intellectuals
and the Problem of the Ethnos since World War II, AmericanHistoricalRevieu
XCVIII(1993), 317-337.
25. EdwardH. Spicer and RaymondH. Thompson, PluralSocietyin theSouthwest(New York,1972). See Spicer's"Introduction,1-20, and "PluralSociety in the
Southwest, 21-75. For the discussionof Barth, see esp. 54-64. For the connection
to Spicer's earlier frontier studies, see esp. 10-11. Miguel Le6n-Portilla, "The
Nortefio Variety of Mexican Culture: An Ethnohistorical Approach, 77-114,
strongly complemented Spicer's account and usage, but John H. Parry, "Plural
Reelairningthe "F"Word
The work of anthropologists like Spicer, Barth, Hallowell,

and Bohannon pointed towardboth world history and the genre
of cultural studies thatJames Clifford has called "ethnographic
history" World frontiers were not new in the sixties. Turner's
dissertation had placed American frontiers in a world historical
context, and later historians like James Westphal Thompson,
Owen Lattimore, and Bolton had explored that potential. Walter
Prescott Webb's The GreatFrontier(1953), a work much admired
by Arnold J. Toynbee, was perhaps the best known of the many
works in this genre, but by the time Spicer's Cyclesof Conquest
appeared in 1962, review essays could list a great arrayof works
ranging from continent to continent. In 1968 Lattimore's early
ethnographic description of frontiers turned up as a chapter in
an anthropological teaching anthology,and just as PluralSocietyin
theSouthwestrolled off the presses, a social anthropologist named
Immanuel Wallersteinwas writing TheModernWorld.System
(1974)
and acknowledging his debts to scholars as diverse as Karl Marx,
Walter Prescott Webb, and Owen Lattimore.In such global histories we see not a theoretical exotic which we might usefully
import into western and frontier history, but rather the oldest
forms of frontier history, taken up into other disciplines and
debates and invested with new meaning.26
In the loose collection of fields and texts called cultural
studies,27histories of the invention of culture are too many and
Society in the Southwest:A HistoricalComment; 299-320, at times verged on the
older assimilationisttale that Spicerand most of his coauthorswere criticizing.Paul
Bohannon, "Introduction, in Bohannon and Fred Plog, eds., BeyondtheFrontier:
SocialProcessand CulturalChange(GardenCity,N. Y., 1967), xi.
26. The literatureis vast, but for a sampling,see Owen Lattimore,Studiesin
FrontierHistory:CollectedPapers,1928-1958 (New York, 1962); James Westphal
Thompson, An Economicand SocialHistoryof theMiddleAges,300-1300 (New York,
1928); Bolton, "The Epic of GreaterAmerica";Walter Prescott Webb, The Grat
Frontier(Boston, 1952); Dietrich Gerhard, "The Frontier in ComparativeView,
CompartiveStudiesin SocietyandHistory,I (1959), 205-229; MarvinMikesell,"ComofAmericanGeographers,
parativeStudies in FrontierHistory"Annalsof theAssociation
L (1960), 62-74; ImmanuelWallerstein,TheModernWorld-System
I: CapitalistAgricultureand the Originsof theEuropeanWorld-Economy
in the SixteenthCentury(San
Freedom
and
Diego, 1974), esp. 15-79; and WilliamH. McNeill, TheGreatFrontier:
in ModernTimes(Princeton, 1983).
Hierarchy
27. I mean by "culturalstudies"somethingbroaderthan the neo-Marxisttexts
and scholarsassociatedwith the Britishprogramand writerslike RaymondWilliams
and StuartHall. See Jose DavidSaldivar,"TheLimitsof CulturalStudies,"American
LiteraryHistory,II (1990), 251-266.
199
200
too diverse for us to summarize, but we ought at least to hint at

the convoluted trails stretching from Victorian frontier tales to
our postmodern moment. Alongside new words, "frontier"built
new stories. And their key verbs plot a history of changing narrative politics. Originally,"others;'Natives especially,were exploited
and vanished on the frontier. Eventually they assimilated and
acculturated. In later tellings they resisted, and, finally, began
reinventing themselves. Vanish, assimilate, acculturate, resist, reinvent: The frontier construction of group identities reaches
directly into current debates over the roles of race, class, gender,
and sexuality in historical consciousness. Turner made his frontier synthesis in his own white, male, midwestern, heterosexual,
and middle-class image. We are prone to see in it the marching
black boot of Anglo patriarchyand forget that it was a subaltern
discourse gathering marginal regions and actors into a scholarly
circle previously dominated by Puritans and Presidents. A century later,we understand that margins are many.28In the Spanish
Borderlands, for instance, cultural and racial mixture, mestizaje,
produced a new ethnicity, society, and, ultimately,nation. Where
Bolton had devoted most of his attention to Spanish protagonists, the mexicano(as in the work of George Sanchez and Americo Paredes) would eventuallyjoin padres and conquistadores as
a leading frontier figure. A quick sketch can give us a sense of
the ways in which historical identities come together in frontier
history.29
In mid-century social science, cultural mixing held an ambiguous place. Sociologist Robert Parks's"marginalman" stood at
the center of George Sanchez's history of Hispanic New Mexico,
ForgottenPeople(1940). In keeping with period convention, Sanchez described the Anglo sweep across mexicanoculture as a
tragic judgment on modernity. Harmonies of pathos and hope
timbred his conclusions, as he lamented the loss of organic
28. Compare Edward M. Bruner, "Ethnography as Narrative;' in Victor W.
Turner and Bruner, eds., TheAnthropologyof Experience(Urbana, 1986), 139-153; and
Clifton, "Alternate Identities and Cultural Frontiers." I have treated this topic at
greater length in Frontiersof HistoricalImagination: Narrating theEuropean Occupation
of Native America, 1890-1990 (Berkeley, forthcoming).
29. I do not mean to suggest that only these three (and internally variegated)
ethnicities, Anglo, Native, and Mexican, exemplify frontier issues and history. But
the genealogy running from Spanish Borderlands history to Chicana/o studies
illuminates broader patterns in historical imagination.
community but looked forward to a day in which even the villages of the Rio Grande Valley could enjoy the benefits of social
democracy. His groundbreaking study, later denounced for its
reactionary "assimilationistrhetoric,'did not much swaythe storytelling of contemporary frontier historians, but the readable
works of journalist CareyMcWilliamsplaced Anglo oppression of
Mexicans and Hispanic Americans firmly within California history, if not inside America'sFrontierHeritage.By the end of the
fifties, ethnographers like Robert Redfield and Oscar Lewis, and
folklorists like Paredes, had rewritten Mexicano culture as a
viable unity, rather than a degraded cross-breed. In their
texts, the "village"figured organic community, a new frontier
topos certifying the authenticity of a formerly "intercultural"
society.30
Mexicano culture was a product of mestizaje, and so even
the simplest of tellings, an even blend of two cultures, ethnicities,
nationalities, or races, forced some critical choices upon any
narrator.One could identify predominantlywith either European
or Native heritage. Authors like Sanchez and Paredes emphasized
continuity with the Hispanic traditions of Europe. Strong academic traditions enforced this choice: Borderlandshistory'sdominant focus on the Spaniard and the hegemony of Peninsular
literature in departments of Romance languages. But the possibility of stressing Native identity, indigenismo,had a tradition all its
own, embodied in the great works of art, literature, and philosophy of the revolutionary era, articulated by writers like Jose
Vasconcelos and artists likeJose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera,
and Frida Kahlo. During the sixties, American activists revised
indigenismo for Chicano activism. Some of the clearest expressions of the new genealogy could be found in political manifestos
like El Plan Espiritualde Aztlin from the First Chicano National
Conference in 1969 and reprinted in the opening issue of Aztldn:
ChicanoJournal of theSocialSciencesand theArts.
In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud
historical heritage but also of the brutal "gringo"invasion of our

30. George I. Sanchez, ForgottenPeople:A Study of New Mexicans (Albuquerque,
1940); Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico (New York, 1947); Robert Redfield,
Tepoztldn,a Mexican Village:A Study of FolkLife (Chicago, 1930); Redfield, The Little
Community, and Peasant Society and Culture (1955, 1956; reprint, Chicago, 1961);
Oscar Lewis, Life in a Mexican Village:TepoztldnRestudied (Urbana, 1951).
201
202
Pacific HistoricalReview
territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern
land of Aztlan from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land
of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the
sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility,
and our inevitable destiny.
This was frontier romance in revolt: spirit, consciousness, heritage, blood, power, destiny, all rooted in the soil.31 While scholarly works in Chicano history typically adopted contemporary
social science vocabularies, the mystic tribalism of Aztlan always
hovered in the distance as a potential horizon, much as AngloSaxon tribalism had shadowed Turner's western Volkgeist.32And
most period monographs implicitly identified Chicano culture as
indigenous victim of Anglo invasion and colonization. The title
of an early important synthesis, Rodolfo Acufia's OccupiedAmerica:
A History of Chicanos (1974), made the point clear enough for the
slowest frontier historians.33
theSocialSciences
31. "ElPlan Espiritualde Aztlian Aztldn:ChicanoJournalfor
and theArts,I (1970), iv,v;Jesis Chavarria,"APrecisand a TentativeBibliography
on Chicano History,"ibid.,133-141;JuanG6mez-Quifiones,"Towarda Perspective
on Chicano History,"
Aztldn,II (1971), 1-50; idemand Luis L. Arroyo,"Onthe State
of Chicano History:Observationson Its Development,Interpretations,and Theory,
1970-1974" Western
HistoricalQuarterly,
VII (1976), 155-185;CarlosE. Cortes, "New
Chicano Historiography,in EllwynR. Stoddardetal., eds., Borderlands
Sourcebook:
A
Guideto Literatureon NorthernMexicoand theAmericanSouthwest(Norman, 1983),
60-63; Weber,"Turner,the Boltonians,and the Borderlands";
Weber,"JohnFrancis
Bannon and the Historiographyof the Spanish Borderlands:Retrospectand ProsXXIX (1987), 331-363; Renato Rosaldo, "Chicano
pect; Journalof theSouthwest,
XIV (1985), 405-427; YvesStudies, 1970-1984: Annual Reviewof Anthropology,
Charles Grandjeat,"Conflictsand Cohesiveness:The ElusiveQuest for a Chicano
History, Aztldn,XVIII(1987), 45-58; Alex Saragoza,"RecentChicano Historiography: An Interpretive Essay; Aztldn,XIX (1988-1990), 1-77; David G. Gutierrez,
"Significantto Whom?MexicanAmericansand the Historyof the AmericanWest:
XXIV (1993), 519-539; and Ram6nA. Guti6rrez,"ComWestern
munity, Patriarchyand Individualism:The Politics of Chicano History and the
Dream of Equality,AmericanQuarterly,
XLV(1993), 44-72. Of these variousworks,
Chavarria,G6mez-Qufiones, Cortes, and Weber all adopt Spanish Borderlands
history (or even Hubert Howe Bancroft, in the case of G6mez-Quiniones),as a
starting point for their historiographies.Cortes, "NewChicano Historiography,"
points to yet another development,the creation of a scholarlycommunitydevoted
to transnational,international,or comparativestudiesof the United-States-Mexico
border regions.
32. See, for instance, John R. Chavez, TheLost Land: ChicanoImagesof the
Southwest(Albuquerque,1984); Saragoza,"RecentChicano Historiography."
Compare the frontierregionalismof Chavezwith that in RichardNostrand,"AChanging
Culture Region; in Borderlands
Sourcebook,
6-15; and OscarJ. Martinez,Troublesome
Border(Tucson, 1988).
33. Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied
America:
A Historyof Chicanos(New York,1974).

Octavio Paz, in Labyrinth of Solitude (1950; 1959), had narrated one of the most influential accounts of the frontier origins
of mexicano consciousness, tracing it from the dialectic symbolized by Cortes and La Malinche (La Malintzin, Dona Marina), his
indigenous mistress and translator. The frontier encounter of
European and Indian had been gendered from the origin, masculine conqueror violating the passive female to produce the
mestizo.Memoryjudged the event, and "the Mexican people have
not forgiven La Malinche for her betrayal." Paz found an existential significance in Mexico's allegorical descent from La
Malinche. Woman was the other and as La Chingada, "She loses
her name...she is Nothingness." Mexicans, said Paz, the "sons of
Nothingness,' had created an identity for themselves through a
desperate negation of history. Chicano history had reclaimed
history and indigenous origins by identifying its protagonists with
Native mother rather than European father, but it had nonetheless effectively masculinized that descent. La Malinche became
the dominant half of the cultural genealogy, but the resolution,
the Mexicano or Chicano, commonly appeared as the hero of a
patrilineal historical consciousness, and in 1959 Paredes, in 'With
His Pistol in His Hand," described history as "tales told by old
men"34
In an important 1981 essay, "Chicana's Feminist Literature:
A Re-Vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back
on the Object;' graduate student Norma Alarcon carefully unravelled the "male myth" of La Malintzin. As Chicanas embrace
feminism, said Alarcon, "they are charged with betrayal a la
Malinche" But they could not simply exchange "one male ideology for another;' and the replacement of Anglo patriarchy by
Chicano patriarchy was "no choice at all" Alarcon's frontier
34. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinthof Solitude(1950, 1959; Eng. lang. ed., New York,
1985); Paz, "Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude," in ibid., 327-354; Americo
Paredes, "WithHis Pistol in His Hand": A BorderBallad and Its Hero (Austin, 1958).
The gendering rested partly on grammatic structure. Where English had long used
"man" as a universal figure subsuming both male and female, the masculine "-o"
ending of Spanish meant that "Chicano" "Hispano" and "mestizo" were gender
coded in much the same way. For Chicanas, as for other women hidden under
masculine labels, the figures handed down painful traditions of patriarchy along
with a politicized ethnic consciousness, and the emergence of "Chicana/o" as a
discursive form partly represents the desire to make linguistic structure more
gender balanced; it also reflects a self-consciousness about the fluidity of subjectivity
and culture.
203
204

revision painted Malintzin not as traitor, but as a slave stranded
between patriarchies. "Putting Flesh Back on the Object" referred to the epigram from Antonio Machado that framed Paz's
Labyrinth of Solitude: "The otherrefuses to disappear; it subsists, it
persists; it is the hard bone on which reason breaks its teeth." As
Mexico was the other for Europe, Woman, symbolized by La
Malintzin, was the other for the Mexican male. Putting flesh back
on the object meant imagining Chicanas as subjects of history.
Alarc6n's essay appeared in a 1981 anthology, This Bridge Called
My Back: WritingsbyRadical Womenof Color,which quickly became
a major work within academic feminist discourse, and Alarcon's
subtitle encapsulated its aims. Stung by accusations of homophobia and racism, "mainstream" feminist journals and organizations were trying to listen to women of color who insisted that, as
Audre Lorde put it, "Assimilation within a solely westerneuropean herstory is not acceptable." Much as the largely white,
male, and affluent academic authors of the "American Mind" had
fashioned their subject after their own image, the fabulation of
an autonomous sisterhood of women hid crucial differences of
race, class, and sexuality. "Assimilation" had become a word of
opprobrium, and making women of color into historical subjects
did not simply mean, as many historians appeared to believe,
depicting them as so many anonymous social atoms locked in
decaying orbit around the capitalist sun.35
In the writings of Gloria Anzaldua, one of the editors of
Bridge, historical subjectivity and frontier history took on new
35. Norma Alarc6n, "Chicana's Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision through
Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object,' in Cherrie Moraga and
Gloria Anzaldia, eds., This Bridge CalledMy Back: WritingsbyRadical Womenof Color
(1981; 2nd ed., New York, 1983), 182-190; Audre Lorde, "An Open Letter to Mary
Daly, in This Bridge, 96. On the book itself, see Norma Alarc6n, "The Theoretical
Subject(s) of This Bridge CalledMy Back and Anglo-American Feminism;' in Hector
Calder6n andJose David Saldivar, eds., Criticismin theBorderlands:Studies in Chicano
Literature, Culture, and Ideology(Durham, N. C., 1991), 28-39; and Sonia SaldivarHull, "Feminism on the Border," in ibid., 203-219. Gutierrez, "Significant for
Whom?," includes this work in his survey of Chicano history. See also Gutierrez,
"Community, Patriarchy, and Individualism"; Norma Alarc6n, "Traddutura, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism, in Donna Przybylowicz et al.,
eds., "The Construction of Gender and Modes of Social Division, a special issue of
Cultural Critique,XIII (Fall 1989), 57-87; and Alarc6n, "Chicana Feminism: In the
Tracks of 'the' Native Woman" in Rosa Linda Fregoso and Angie Chabram, eds.,
"Chicana/o Cultural Representations: Reframing Alternative Critical Discourse" a
special issue of Cultural Studies, IV (Oct. 1990), 248-256.
forms. Borderlands/LaFrontera:TheNewMestiza(1987), part autobiography,part historical essay,part literarycriticism,part poetry,

and liberally salted with Spanish, Spanglish, and occasional fragments of Nahua, formalized the frontier "code-switching"that
Anzaldua saw as a feature of her daily life. Borders, boundaries,
and frontiers had become, by the middle eighties, keywords of
new varieties of discourse from academic strains of postmodernism and feminism to mass media debates over multiculturalism.36
While Anzaldua's book grew out of the Tex-Mex border region,
its title troped more than land: "Borderlandsare physicallypresent wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under,
lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between
two individuals shrinks with intimacy."Psychological, spiritual,
and sexual as well as regional and ethnic, 'border" took up many
of the old connotations from Borderlandshistory,notably region,
interethnicity, and colonialism. It picked up the symbolic weight
la frontera carried for Mexican nationals and Chicanos/as. And
it swept through the range of meanings catalogued by writerslike
Forbes in essays on the frontier.37
The U. S.-Mexican border es una heridaabiertawhere the Third World
grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third
country--a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that
are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing
line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and
undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural
boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and
forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesadoslive here: the squint-eyed,
the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the
half-breed, the half-dead;in short, those who cross over,pass over, or go
through the confines of the "normal."
36. See, for instance, Frontiers:
AJournalof WomensStudies;boundary2; Maria
Herrera-Sobekand Helena MariaViramontes,eds., ChicanaCreativity
and Criticism:
in American
Literature
(Houston, 1988); and Annette Kolodny,
ChartingNewFrontiers
"LettingGo Our Grand Obsessions:Notes Towardsa New LiteraryHistory of the
American Frontiers,"AmericanLiterature,
LXIV (1992), 1-18.
37. GloriaAnzaldua, Borderlands/La
Frontera:
TheNewMestiza(San Francisco,
1987). See the discussions in Saldivar-Hull,"Feminismon the Border";Ram6n
Saldivar, ChicanoNarrative:TheDialecticsof Difference(Madison, 1990), 218; and
Saldivar, "The Limits of Cultural Studies."Gutierrez, "Significantfor Whom?"
includes This Bridgein the canon of Chicano history but leaves Borderlands/La
Frontera
in the footnotes.
205
206
PacificHistoricalReview
This was a long way from Turner, and yet enough history
glimmers through for us to recognize it as more than a trendy
"politically correct" inversion. Long before the appearance of
professional frontier history, the border had been understood as
the dangerous margin of country inhabited by social outcasts of
antagonistic worlds. And Anzaldua did not simply choose, as a
polemic against academic taste, the language of injury and pathology; that tradition had been passed down in good academic
words like "encysted."By the end of the sixties, boundaries and
frontiers had been taken up as markers of identity. Turner's
frontiers had inscribed themselves in blood and barbed wire
along the international divide, around the perimeters of the
Indian reservations, and in the psychic chasms crossing selves
and others. Still, Anzaldua's tone pointed toward a reclamation.
If the border grates, bleeds, hemorrhages, edges, distinguishes,
and divides, if it is what "Reagancalls a frontline, a war zone;' it
is also a place of intimacy, where two different identities touch,
merge, and form a third, in Anzaldua's example, the mestiza
consciousness, especially as embodied in the experiences of "the
queer,' the ultimate borderers.38
A long, strange trip carriesus from the frontiers of Victorian
America to those of multiculturalism. But the new, like the old,
join a fascinating cluster of meanings. Anzaldua's frontiers are
geographic space, political line, and social process. Theyjoin and
divide, for good and for evil. They are gendered, sexualized, and
erotically charged. We might ascribe these almost unbearable
polarities to creative license. Anzalduia,like any good poet, sets
unlikely meanings side by side. Seen this way,her frontier might
be just another example of fatuous postmodern word play. But
even a strong poet cannot create meaning ex nihilo,and we can
hear echoes of her usage in the most staid linguistic reference
works. If we open up the 1978 EverydayRoget'sThesaurus(scarcely
a radical authority),we find "frontier"indexed in two categories
listing some of its traditional associations. One, "Limit,'includes
boundary, bounds, confine, enclave, term, marches, Pillars of
Hercules, Rubicon, ne plus ultra,and turning-point. But the sec38. Anzaldua, Borderlands/LaFronter, 3, 11. See also Marcienne Rocard, "The
Mexican-American Frontier: The Border in Mexican-American Folklore and Elitelore, Aztldn, XVIII (1987), 83-94.
Reclaimingthe "F"Word
ond, "Contiguity,' includes contact, proximity, apposition, juxtaposition, touching, meeting, conjunction, coexistance, and a
string of related verbs: join, adjoin, border, graze, touch, meet,
and my favorite, kiss. In the depths of the word itself we find the
doubled patterns of inclusion and exclusion, assimilation and
differentiation, that Edward Spicer finds on the frontier ground
of the historic Southwest.39
Anzaldia's queer frontier highlights the amazing endurance
of frontier figures in late twentieth-century discourse and should
dispel the notion that we can find social justice in history only by
forgetting all our "F"words. How far we press "frontier" is another question. In 1987 William Cronon's "Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier" recuperated "wilderness" connotations by describing environmental history as a new form of frontier history. But
"culture" dominates most important recent definitions, from
Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson's "Comparative Frontier
History" (1981) and Paul Kutsche's "Borders and Frontiers"
(1983), to William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin's "Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western History"
(1992). Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin take the word through a list of
defining verbs, from species shifting, state forming, and market
making, to the Barthian processes of boundary setting and self
shaping. The 1986 Dictionary ofAnthropologyassociates it with the
study of "inter-ethnic relations" while also packing "colonization"
and "domination" into its brief abstract. And in Annette Kolodny's "Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American
Frontiers" (1990), Anzalduia's poetic constructions worked their
way into a thoroughly scholarly venue: "[I]n my reformulation
the term 'frontier' comes to mean what we in the Southwest call
la frontera, or the borderlands, that liminal landscape of changing meanings on which distinct human cultures first encounter
39. Roget'sThesaurusof Synonymsand Antonyms(London, 1978), n.p. To underscore the point, in 1975 a group of Women's Studies scholars centered at the
University of Colorado, Boulder, began a new periodical, Frontiers:A Journal of
Women'sStudies. Frontiershas become known in recent years for publishing multicultural studies, but the "Letter to Our Readers" (in the first issue), placed the
journal firmly on the frontier between academic and nonacademic feminists as a
way of dissolving those "barriers" which "seem unnecessarily to divide women."
Frontiersmeant to transcend difference and incorporate all women in the circle of
sisterhood. Just twelve years later Anzaldua could employ the same language to
legitimize division and difference.
207
208
one another's 'otherness' and appropriate, accommodate, or

domesticate it through language."40
We do not need more programmaticagendas or definitions
of frontier as a basis for a "model"of the past. Whether or not we
call any particular narrative a "frontier"or 'western" history
depends on the possible advantages we might gain from the
label. A frontier history in one context may be something else in
another. We may even read Legacyof Conquestas frontier history
and find a new meaning in PatriciaLimerick'sacute observation
that, "In the second half of the twentieth century, every major
issue from 'frontier' history reappeared in the courts or in
Congress."41
Frontier is a word with a past, but it is not an unsubtle

concept. And while we have barely hinted at how centuries of
usage have interwoven it with its sometime synonym, West, we
will not fully disentangle them. Regionalistshope that ifwe tip the
"West"upside down, shake it hard, and empty it of its history,
40. HowardLamarand LeonardThompson, "ComparativeFrontierHistory,
in TheFrontierin History:NorthAmericanand Southern
(New Haven,
AfricaCompared
16-19;
Sourcebook,
1981), 3-13; Paul Kutsche,"Bordersand Frontiers,in Borderlands
William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, "BecomingWest:Towarda New
America's
WsternPast
Meaningfor WesternHistory,'in Underan OpenSky:Rethinking
in CharlotteSeymour-Smith,ed., Dictionaryof
(New York, 1993), 3-27; "Frontier,"
(Boston, 1986), 125;WilliamCronon, "Revisitingthe VanishingFronAnthropology
tier: The Legacy of FrederickJackson Turner, Western
XVIII
(1987), 157-176; Kolodny,"NotesTowarda New LiteraryHistoryof the American
Frontiers, 9. See also Clifton, "AlternateIdentitiesand CulturalFrontiers";Robert
F Berkhofer,Jr., "The North American Frontier as Process and Context;' in The
Frontierin History,43-75; Peggy Pascoe, "WesternWomen at the Cultural Crossroads, in Trails,40-58; DavidJ. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, eds., WhereCultures
Meet:Frontiersin Latin AmericanHistory(Wilmington, Del., 1994), xiii-xli; and
Kathleen M. Brown, "The Anglo-AlgonquianGender Frontier,"in Nancy ShoeHistorical
on NativeAmerican
Women(New
maker,ed., Negotiators
of Change:
Persepcties
York, 1995), 26-48. And while Lamarand Thompson'sdefinition fairlydemands
that at least half of a frontier equation be Europeanor EuroAmerican,that usage
is hardly universal. Forbes, Kutsche, and Kolodny all employ the word for any
interethnic or interculturalcollision. See, among others, Igor Kopytoff,ed., The
TheReproduction
AfricanFrontier:
of Traditional
AfricanSocieties(Bloomington, 1987);
Alice Schlegel, "AfricanPolitical Models in the American Southwest:Hopi as an
Internal Frontier Society"AmericanAnthropologist,
XCIV (1992), 376-397; and A.
Endre Nyerges, "The Ecology of Wealth-in-People:Agriculture,Settlement, and
Society on the PerpetualFrontier,"ibid.,860-881.
41. Limerick,Legacyof Conquest,
31.

we can escape all the old ethnocentric meanings the word has
acquired over a millennium. This is a strangely unhistorical view
of language for a historian to adopt, but it has a history all of its
own. Twentieth-century academics have been caught up in a
series of events collectively known as the linguistic turn, and one
of those events has been the attempt by scholars to purify their
language of emotion, metaphor, and metaphysics.42 Produce a
language sufficiently scientific and we can finally get reality right,
or so the story goes. As George Pierson put it back in the forties,
Turner's metaphorical language had "opened a Pandora's box."
For Henry Nash Smith, figurative words like frontier placed a
'"eil" over the harsh face of reality, a mystifying effeminate garment of myth, metaphor, and social theory which the rational
historian needed to rip away. In 1973 Francis Jennings, in a
paper entitled "Legacy of Conquest;' castigated the "mythic;'
"ideological" language of "frontier historians" and praised the
"rational" linguistic "instruments" of anthropology. Limerick's
own Legacy of Conquestassociated "frontier" with "emotions;' "sentiment,' "nostalgia' and "myth,' and contended that only West-asregion could dissolve our "conceptual fog."43
Strangely, New Western Regionalists do not believe we could
42. The linguistic turn is legion, and historiansoften use the phrase to refer
to poststructuralismor postmodernism (as in John Toews, "IntellectualHistory
after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreduciblityof
Experience;'AmericanHistoricalReview,XCII (1987), 879-907). But the acceptance
of these vocabularieswasfacilitatedby earlieranalyticturns,from logical positivism
and ordinary language philosophyto New Criticism.And the phrase was popularized by Richard Rorty,ed., TheLinguisticTurn:RecentEssaysin Philosophical
Method
(Chicago, 1967), to describe the revolutionin philosophyleading to "theview that
philosophical problemsare problemswhich maybe solved (or dissolved) either by
reforming language, or by understandingmore about the language we presently
use."See Rorty,"Introduction;'3 and throughout.
43. George W. Pierson, "The Frontierand Frontiersmenof Turner'sEssays,"
andHistory,LXIV(1940), 465; Henry Nash Smith,
Pennsylvania
Magazineof Biography
VirginLand:TheAmericanWestas Mythand Symbol(1950; reprint,Cambridge,Mass.,
1970), esp. 237, 249; FrancisJennings,TheInvasionof America:
Indians,Colonialism,
and theCantof Conquest
(1975;reprint,New York,1976).The firstchapter,3-14, was
delivered as the presidentialaddressto the AmericanSociety for Ethnohistoryin
October 1973 "underthe title "Legacyof Conquest";Jennings, "VirginLand and
Savage People, AmericanQuarterly,XXIII (1971), 519-541; Limerick, Legacyof
23-25. See also Limerick,"PersistentTraitsand the PersistentHistorian:
Conquest,
The American Frontier and Ray Allen Billington" in WritingWesternHistory,
277-310; and Limerick,"Makingthe Most of Words:VerbalActivityand Western
America,'in Underan OpenSky,167-184.
209
210
purify "frontier."That term, apparently,is too compromised to

reclaim. It is not clear why this should be so. Of the two words,
frontier is better structured to lead us into multicultural dialogue. Even in its Latin origins, frontier troped a space where
one culture fronted another. It suggested a place where one
cultural, tribal, or national identity faced the threats of others,
but the sense of duality was built into the word itself. West is, if
anything, more resolutely ethnocentric. As Loren Baritz has
shown, from Virgil to Thoreau, the West has been a region of
truth, beauty, and hope towardswhich Hellenic (later European)
cultures should move. West, even as a particular arid region of
the United States, always also harks back to "The West" as a
cultural tradition from ancient Greece to modern Europe, a
tradition whose claims of superiorityare too familiar to rehearse
here. Western Civilization and the West remain keywords of
popular and scholarly discourse, and we will not escape them.
Worse, as Edward Said's Orientalism(1978) demonstrates, "West"
has historically defined itself through exclusion.44
Consider one of the cornerstones of New Regionalism,
Donald Worster'sRiversof Empire(1986). The book inverts Lord
Bryce'sdictum, "The West is the most American part of America"
(which Turner took to mean the most democratic part of America). Worster uses KarlWittfogel's"OrientalDespotism" thesis to
argue that development of the arid West demanded the hierarchical central state typicalof "hydraulicsocieties."To critique the
West, Riversof Empiredeploys the key Orientalist stereotypes deconstructed by Said: "despotic:'"stagnant,'"corrupt,'"fearfulof
change"'and "encased in the past."For Worster,the West cannot
be the most democratic part of America, because it is the most
Orientalpart of America. Despite its radical intent, RiversofEmpire
inadvertently reproduces the bad, old racial codes of Orientalism. And the problem lies deeper than an occasional unhappy
adjective. In Worster'scultural materialism, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality remain epiphenomenal to matters of "Man"
and "Nature."As he put it in his 1987 essay, "New West, True
West,' "[E]thnic history [read also gender, sexual, etc.] and regional history are often conflicting endeavors.... Many ethnic
44. Loren Baritz, "The Idea of the West," American HistmricalReview LXVI
(1961), 618-640; Edward Said, Orientalism(1978; reprint, New York, 1979).
Reelaiming the "F' Word
groups have come to live in the American West, of course, but

the fact of their being in the West is not necessarily the same as
their being of the West' Worsterleft to his readers the depressing
task of guessing which groups are in, but not of, the West.45
West is alwayswest of something. Traditionally,the "Orient"
has defined all that the West is not, giving it an alterego, a sort
of absent content that determines the semantic paths "West"can
follow. Where "frontier"at least points up that duality, "West"
hides it between the lines.46
Regionalists believe that if we nail the word to the map, all
those "other"meanings will not creep back in. But the hope is
forlorn. Wayback in 1931 Webb's GreatPlains declared that only
the arid West was really the West. It also described the blood of
Mexicans as "ditchwater"And we can name contemporary regionalists, Gerald Nash, for instance, whose narrativepolitics fall
far to the right of Limerick and Worster.Defining West-as-region
will not automatically empty historiography of evil. Nor will it
hold nationalism at bay. West-as-regionhas no meaning apart
from a map of the U. S., and more specifically, the images most
of us learn from our very Eurocentric maps with Canada at the
top of the page, the Atlantic on the right, the Pacific on the left,
and Mexico symbolically subordinated at the bottom of the
frame. Frontiers, from Turner to Wallerstein, are transnational
events; West-as-regionwill never escape national history.And like
Said's West-as-tradition,West-as-regionpoints back to a hidden
counter-referent for its true meaning.47
What absent other defines the region? What is the word of
power fixing the content of "West"?What, in Los Angeles, Tucson, or Seattle, are we west of? The Yangtzee?Europe? Yale?
45. Worster, Rivers of Empire,passim; Worster, "New West, True West," 148.
46. In what seems a fairly representative construction, Richard White, in "Race
Relations in the American West, AmericanQuarterly,XXXVIII (1986), 396, 397, said
that "Aslong as Turner's frontier thesis dominated the study of the West, minorities
could not seem significant because the importance of the West was contained on
the frontier-the place where whites met the 'wilderness'" But compare with Antonia
Castafieda's essay, "Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the
Historiography of Frontier California, Frontiers,XI (Nov. 1990), 8-20.
47. Webb, The GreatPlains, 126. For Nash's views, see his Creatingthe West,but
also Faragher's criticisms in "Frontier Trail" On maps and meaning, see Gregory H.
Nobles, "Straight Lines and Stability: Mapping the Political Order of the AngloAmerican Frontier,Journal of AmericanHistory, LXXX (1993), 9-35.
211
212

Historiographers often tell Whiggish tales of how we have
overcome error. Their stories ascend from a dismal past toward
an enlightened future. In conclusion, the historian calls for a
new paradigm, as modestly revealed in one's own forthcoming
monograph. I have no desire to reproduce this practice, and I
am not calling for some new narrative "paradigm" or some special new way of writing. I do not imagine our story as a sequence
of rising stages: Old, New, Greater, Post. And we do not need a
western history police-new,
old, post, or otherwise-to
patrol
our linguistic borders. We do not need, and should not wish for,
a final solution that will fix the disciplinary boundaries of the
West. However, I would like to suggest some possible futures.
1. Happy symbiosis. Perhaps regionalists and frontierists can
exist in a state of productive tension, their work complementing
rather than conflicting, even in the work of a single historian.
(Richard White seems an obvious example despite himself. Many
of his best western histories are set in eastern frontiers, and they
fit seamlessly into his histories of trans-Mississippi Wests.)48
2. Complete divergence. Western history may divide into
two subspecialties, regional and frontier history, with different
scholarly allegiances. This has been, traditionally, the way in
which new specialties have emerged.
3. Postwestern history. I mention this category with some
reluctance, although we should credit (or blame) Virginia
Scharff for coining the term.49 "Post" is a popular prefix. In
the fifties we became postmodern. In the sixties we became
posthumanist. By the mid-seventies we were postindustrial and
poststructural. Now we may be postethnic, postfeminist, and
posthistory. Our "postability"reflects modernity's insatiable desire
for novelty, a desire not lacking in historians. We have had New
Social History, New Economic History, New Indian History, New
Labor History, New Cultural History, and, of course, New Western History. We make ourselves "post" and "new" at every turn,
48. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the
GreatLakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); White, TheRootsofDependency: Subsistence,Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws,Pawnees, and
Navajos (Lincoln, 1983); White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The
Shaping of Island County, Washington(Seattle, 1980).
49. Virginia Scharff, "Getting Out: What Does Mobility Mean for Women?,' 19.
Paper presented at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Symposium,
"American Dreams, Western Images: Mapping the Contours of Western Experience, January 1994.
Reclaimingthe "F"Word 213

denying a past too burdened with guilt or error to be carried
into the future, and then are mystified that so many of our
students find history irrelevant. Who wants to be "Old"?Who
wants to be "Pre-"?Who wants to be "Historic"?We should not
speak lightly of the postwestern.There are several arguments for
the word, though, and I will play devil's advocate for two.
First, many historians and their subjects find little value in
imagining some western essence in their lives. From bicoastal
Asian-American artists to Compton rappers we can imagine an
entire sweep of 'westerners"who do not partake of a '"western"
regional consciousness. There is no western Mind. And to tell
these subjects that they are more oppressed in the hydraulic
society of San Francisco than they would be in Little Rock seems
more than slightly abstract. For such histories, the broader horizons of western history may provide, at best, a mediate space en
route to a grander national or transnational narrative. Postwestern here might suggest the end of western history as a necessary category of inclusion for all those stories told west of the
Mississippi. For some histories set in Arizona, it may be useful to
seek a specifically western meaning and historiographic context.
For most, it probably will not be necessary.
Second, postwestern might liberate historians of the West
from the margins to which specialization threatens to consign us.
The title, "Being and Becoming Postwestern,' suggests what I
have in mind. FrederickJackson Turner'sfirst professional essay
carried the modest title, "The Significance of History"He stole
its crux aphorism fromJ. G. Droysen and placed it at the center
of American memory. "History,"said Turner quoting Droysen
glossing Hegel, "is the 'Know Thyself of humanity.... It is humanity being and becoming conscious concerning itself."We
should remember that his essays took the rise of national consciousness for their central subject. Young Turner was not a
western historian. He was an American historian who saw the
imperial occupation of the West as the grand story of American
history. Only in later decades did his history become specifically
western and, in the process, restrict itself to ever narrower-and
whiter-horizons.50
50. FrederickJackson Turner, "The Significance of History" (1891), reprinted
in Early Writings,53. The quotation comes fromJ. G. Droysen's GrundrissderHistorik
(1858-1882), reprinted in Peter Leyh, ed., Historik: Historisch-kritischeAusgabe von
PeterLeyh (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1977), 442, 443, 444. Turner later acquired the
214
When western history became a specialty, it became one

more specialty in a world of specialties, something "mainstream"
historians could ignore with impunity,and we can date its death.
Sometime between 1967 and 1969, western history slunk off to
the dusty edge of the professional imagination. In 1967 Turner's
beloved MississippiValleyHistoricalReviewbecame the Journal of
AmericanHistory. In 1969 the Western Historical Association
began publishing its specialtyjournal, Western
and sank the last nails in the coffin. Each new and selfconsciously '"western"
monograph, each hopeful stab at fixing the
boundaries
of the West, carried the field further from
specialized
its earlier position of dominance. Depressingly,and perhaps not
coincidentally, the shift became institutionalizedjust as the competing voices of other frontier experiences, of Natives, Chicanos,
Chicanas, Asian Americans, began drasticallytransforming frontier tales.51
Today,to define a work as a '"westernhistory"is to engage in
a process of exclusion. A western history is somehow not quite
fully "American."Imagine the absurdity of describing Edmund
Morgan as an "eastern historian" and we begin to sense the
potential limitations of "western"history. "American"history still
largely defines itself through the experiences of the eastern
United States. From this perspective, postwestern optimistically
imagines a return to the big frontier tales of the European
occupation of Native America as a central event in our past, and
a future in which histories set in California or (dare we say it)
Sonora are as "American"as those set in Massachusetts and
Virginia.52
While bracketing these morals as a devil's advocacy may look
like a failure of nerve, it reflects a genuine ambivalence. "Postwestern" may be too optimistic. As Carl Abbott has pointed out,
it is no accident that the majority of universities offering courses
and programs in "regional" history lie west of the Mississippi and
English-languageedition. See Droysen, Outlineof thePrinciplesof History(Boston,
1897), 44, 45, 46, 47, 48.
51. See WilliamD. Aeschbacher'sobituary,"TheMississippiValleyHistorical
Association, 1907-1965, Journalof AmericanHistory,LIV (1967), 339-353.
52. See CarlAbbott, "UnitedStatesRegionalHistoryas an InstitutionalField:
The Practice of College and UniversityHistory Departments, WesternHistorical
XXI (1990), 197-217.
Quarterly,
Reclaiming the "F" Word
south of the Mason-Dixon. If local schools do not teach the

history of Santa Fe, Las Vegas, or Banning, then it will never be
taught. And this, rather than any well-meaning attempt to rationalize historical discourse, is the best argument for western history
as a specialty and even as an exercise in regionalism. We might
profit from the cultivation of what Josiah Royce called 'wholesome provincialism."53As Royce would caution, however, the
language of history is not something we simply invent, or construct, or choose from a free market of narrativeand conceptual
forms. Our history and our selves are handed down in waysboth
obvious and obscure. He would have agreed with Wilhelm
Dilthey that we are historical beings first, and only by virtue of
that situation do we distill collective memory into historical scholarship. We will not emancipate the West by forgetting the words
and speakers that gave it to us. We will not create a livable history
by denying the historicity of our language. It would be tragic if
we were to achieve an unbroken past for the American West at
the cost of breaking our own.
53. Josiah Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems
(1908; reprint, Freeport, 1967).
215

Klein Reclaiming The F-Word

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Klein Reclaiming The F-Word

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Pacific Historical Review, 65:2 (May, 1996): 179-215

Reclaiming the "F"Word,

With the nation still adrift in the sea of words devoted to

Pacific Historical Review

Reclaiming the "F' Word

Pacific Historical Review

Rerlaiming the "F" Word

picture by claiming that only recently have scholars begun to

Pacific Historical Review

What had long been read as a civil boundary could now be

Mood, "The Concept of the Frontier,1871-1898:Commentson a List of Source

(London, 1965), 9-55; and Lucien Febvre,"Frontiere"Rivuede Synthese

85-182 (quotation on p. 90). See also Turner'smaster'sthesis, "TheCharacterand

account of Turner and his legacy remains RayAllen Billington, Frederick

of writings on Turner, see Vernon E. Mattson and William E. Marion, Frederick

Reclaiming the "F' Word

(1893), Turner described the frontier as a boundary between

We should treat them with care. RichardWhite has said that

Pacific Historical Review

wild people, a construction with roots in the medieval figure of

bridge, Mass.,1952); EdwardDudleyand MaximilianE. Novak,eds., TheWildMan

1972); Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness:The Archaeology of an Idea"

Essays on Major WesternHistorians (Albuquerque, 1991), 82.

9. See the overviewsin George W. Stocking,Jr., Race,Culture,and Evolution:

Essays in the History of Anthropology(New York, 1968); Stocking, The Ethnographer's

Reclaimingthe "F' Word

Pacific Historical Review

Reclaimingthe "F' Word

The conventions of field work reinforced this frontier tragAs

16. Redfield, Linton, and Hersokovits,"Memorandumon the Study of Ac-

Reclaiming the "F' Word

the anthology's theoretical chapters. Cultures were "adaptive

Pacific Historical Review

ular, but Linton's conflation of acculturation and assimilation

Acculturation studies helped to open the space for a new

1969); Hallowell, "The Backwashof the Frontier:The Impact of the Indian on

Rerlaiming the "F" Word

In its introduction, "Cultural Frontiers,' Cyclesof Conquest

Pacific Historical Review

sidedness" of meaning in writerslike Paxson and Billington, and

Reclaimingthe "F' Word

Pacific Historical Review

In 1972 Edward Spicer edited an anthology, PluralSocietyin

The work of anthropologists like Spicer, Barth, Hallowell,

Pacific Historical Review

too diverse for us to summarize, but we ought at least to hint at

Reclaiming the "F' Word

historical heritage but also of the brutal "gringo"invasion of our

Reclaimingthe "F' Word

Pacific Historical Review

Reclaiming the "F' Word

forms. Borderlands/LaFrontera:TheNewMestiza(1987), part autobiography,part historical essay,part literarycriticism,part poetry,

Pacific Historical Review

one another's 'otherness' and appropriate, accommodate, or

Frontier is a word with a past, but it is not an unsubtle

Reclaimingthe "F' Word

Pacific Historical Review

purify "frontier."That term, apparently,is too compromised to

Reelaiming the "F' Word

groups have come to live in the American West, of course, but

Pacific Historical Review

Reclaimingthe "F"Word 213