Frank Hamilton Cushing

Frank Hamilton Cushing

Frank Hamilton Cushing (born July 22, 1857 , in the city of North East, in Erie County, Pennsylvania , † April 10, 1900 in Washington, DC ), an American ethnologist , was born in northeastern Pennsylvania, his family later moved to the western part of New York State. Early on, he became enthusiastic about Indian arrowheads, which one could easily find in the area, and learned how to make them. He was only 17 when he published his first scientific paper. He studied briefly at Cornell and at 19 became a curator in the anthropology department of the National Museum in Washington, DC, the Smithsonian Institution .

The first Stevenson expedition

There John Wesley Powell , the head of the Bureau of Ethnology founded in 1879 (later Bureau of American Ethnology ) became aware of him and Cushing took part in the first expedition of the newly founded authority, which was led by James Stevenson . It lasted from August to December, 1879. The destinations were the Pueblo Indians in the southwestern United States, Zuñi in New Mexico, and Hopi in Arizona. Participants were Stevenson and his wife Matilda Coxe Stevenson , Cushing and the photographer John K. Hillers . The Stevensons and Hillers returned to the Southwest the following fall and later.

Cushing in Zuni

Cushing stayed with the Zuni and lived there for five years (until 1884). He was one of the first participating observers in the history of ethnology. Bronislaw Malinowski , who is usually said to have invented this idea, first lived with the Trobriandians during the First World War , more than thirty years later .

Cushing overcame hardships and illnesses, learned the language and the customs and traditions.

Initially, the Zuni under their governor Palowahtiwa (Patricio Pino) ​​did not like his presence at all, also because he obviously wanted to discover their deepest secrets, but after a while he was accepted and integrated into the Zuni community.

In 1881 he came into possession of a war trophy, an Apache scalp, and was able to become a member of the warlike arch priesthood. Cushing was adopted by the governor and was named Tenatsali ( Medicine greenhouse ).

In 1882 he traveled with his adoptive father and five other arch priests to the eastern United States, to the Seneca on the Tonawanda Reserve, with stays in Washington, New York and Boston. In Washington they met with Chester Arthur , President of the United States. In December Cushing was with the brothers Victor and Cosmos Mindeleff and John K. Hillers in Oraibi with the Hopi .

This tour can also be seen as an attempt to turn the objects of the Western gaze into anthropological subjects, observers of our world, which is now referred to as "reflexive anthropology".

Cushing had married Emily Tennison of Washington, DC on this trip. He returned to the Zuni with his bride and her sister, but now lived outside and more comfortably than before.

A political intrigue

Political intrigue ended Cushing's life with the Zuni. The President of the United States, Hayes, had set the boundaries of the new Zuni Reservation in 1877, disregarding a piece of Zuni land, the Nutria Valley. Land speculators came to the Zuni in 1882 and claimed this land for cattle breeding. The Zunis asked Cushing for help, and he publicized the matter in Chicago and Boston. But a speculator's father-in-law was John A. Logan, the Illinois Senator. Logan was an influential politician who was slated to run for vice presidency in 1884. President Chester Arthur changed the Zuni boundaries in 1883 in favor of the Zuni, but Logan, whose reputation had suffered from the attempted land grab, retaliated and threatened the Bureau of American Ethnology and its director John Wesley Powell with budget cuts if Cushing stayed in New Mexico . Cushing had to submit and return to Washington.

The Hemenway expedition

In 1882 he had met the wealthy Mary Hemenway from Boston, who made him head of the Hemenway Archaeological Expedition . Cushing was able to return to the southwest for a short time in 1886, but his health deteriorated and the ethnologist and archaeologist Jesse Walter Fewkes had to relieve him as expedition leader.

More work and early death

In the spring of 1896 he led the Pepper- Hearst Expedition in Florida, an excavation on the island of Key Marco. In the same year he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society .

In his final years, Cushing met Stewart Culin of the Brooklyn Museum and the World's Columbian Exposition and worked with him on the subject of games and their history.

He choked on a fish bone at a meal in Maine .

Thomas Eakins painted him as Zuni and John Karl Hillers photographed him.

The importance of Cushing

Cushing was an early proponent of the idea that all peoples have culture . He was a pioneer of participatory and empathic observation, albeit far more spectacular than his academic successors: Frank Cushing, 1st War Chief of Zuni, US Ass't Ethnologist , signing letters to Washington.

Works (selection)

• Jesse Green et al. Sharon Weiner Green: Cushing at Zuni: The Correspondence and Journals of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1879-1884 , University of New Mexico Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8263-1172-5
• FHC, Randolph Jay Widmer (Introduction): Exploration of Ancient Key-Dweller Remains on the Gulf Coast of Florida, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, Fl., 2000.
  • Reprinted from Cushing's monograph from American Philosophical Association, Proceedings , Volume 35, No. 135, 1896.
• Sylvester Baxter et al. Frank H. Cushing, My Adventurers in Zuni: Including Father of The Pueblos & An Aboriginal Pilgrimage , Filter Press, LLC, 1999, paperback, 1999, 79 pages, ISBN 0-86541-045-3
• My Adventures in Zuni , pamphlet, ISBN 1-121-39551-1
• Frank Hamilton Cushing et al. Barton Wright, The Mythic World of the Zuni , University of New Mexico Press, 1992, ISBN 0-8263-1036-2
• Outlines of Zuni Creation Myths , AMS Press; Reprint edition, 1996, ISBN 0-404-11834-8
• Zuni Coyote Tales , University of Arizona Press, 1998, paperback, 104 pages, ISBN 0-8165-1892-0
• Zuni Fetishes , Pamphlet, ISBN 1-199-17971-X and ISBN 1-122-26704-5
• Zuni Fetishes (Design: KC DenDooven, photographs by Bruce Hucko, notes by Mark Bahti) KC Publications, 1999, paperback, 48 pages, ISBN 0-88714-144-7
• Zuni Fetishes Facsimile , Pamphlet, ISBN 1-125-28500-1
• Zuni Folk Tales , ISBN 1-125-91410-6
• Zuni Folk Tales , University of Arizona Press, 1999, trade paperback, ISBN 0-8165-0986-7
• Jesse Green (ed., Introduction), Fred Eggan (foreword): Zuni: Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing , Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1978, hardcover, 440 pages, ISBN 0-8032-2100-2 ; trade paperback, 1979, 449 pages, ISBN 0-8032-7007-0
• Zuni Breadstuff ( Indian Notes and Monographs , Vol. 8), AMS Press, 1975, 673 pages, ISBN 0-404-11835-6

literature

• PBS article from New Perspectives on the West series. "Frank Hamilton Cushing"
• Frank H. Cushing, Jesse Green (Ed.), Foreword by Fred Eggan , Introduction by Jesse Green: Zuni: Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing University of Nebraska Press , 1978, ISBN 0-8032-2100-2
• Jesse Green: Cushing at Zuni: the Correspondence and Journals of Frank Hamilton Cushing 1879-1893, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. 1990.
• WJ McGee, William H. Holmes, John Wesley Powell , Alice Cunningham Fletcher , Washington Matthews , Stewart Culin , et al. Joseph D. McGuire: In Memoriam: Frank Hamilton Cushing, in: American Anthropologist , Vol. 2, No. 2, 1900, pp. 354-380.
• Trikoli Nath Pandey: Anthropologists at Zuni, in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 116, No. 4, 1972, pp. 321-337.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Green, 1990: 166
2. ↑ Trikoli, 1972, p. 325
3. ^ Member History: Frank H. Cushing. American Philosophical Society, accessed July 3, 2018 . 

Web links

• PBS article from New Perspectives on the West series. "Frank Hamilton Cushing"
• Works by Frank Hamilton Cushing in Project Gutenberg