"The dance commonly begins about the middle of the afternoon or later, after sundown. When it begins in the afternoon, there is always an intermission of an hour or two for supper. The preliminary painting and dressing is usually the work of about two hours"
About this Quote
Mooney’s prose performs a kind of laboratory calm in the presence of spectacle. A “dance” that might register to outsiders as ecstatic, spiritual, even threatening is rendered as logistics: start times, supper breaks, the two-hour “preliminary painting and dressing.” The intent is not lyrical immersion but administrative clarity, the tone of a field report designed to travel back to institutions that reward order, measurement, and repeatability.
That’s the subtext: by translating ceremony into schedule, he makes it legible to a late-19th-century scientific audience primed to treat Indigenous life as data. The insistence on “commonly,” “usually,” and “always” signals classification. It offers the reassurance that this isn’t chaos; it has rules. Yet that reassurance comes at a cost. The language flattens meaning into procedure, turning embodied practices into a timetable. “Intermission” is especially telling: it borrows the vocabulary of theater, quietly recasting participants as performers and the ritual as entertainment, even if Mooney doesn’t say so outright.
Context sharpens the stakes. Mooney worked during an era when anthropology was entangled with salvage ethnography and federal projects aimed at controlling Native communities. In that climate, meticulous description could be a form of preservation and a form of possession. His attention to the “work” of painting and dressing reveals genuine observation, but it also frames cultural expression as labor that can be clocked, segmented, and ultimately managed. The passage works because it shows how power can hide inside neutrality: the sentence structure doesn’t argue, it inventories.
That’s the subtext: by translating ceremony into schedule, he makes it legible to a late-19th-century scientific audience primed to treat Indigenous life as data. The insistence on “commonly,” “usually,” and “always” signals classification. It offers the reassurance that this isn’t chaos; it has rules. Yet that reassurance comes at a cost. The language flattens meaning into procedure, turning embodied practices into a timetable. “Intermission” is especially telling: it borrows the vocabulary of theater, quietly recasting participants as performers and the ritual as entertainment, even if Mooney doesn’t say so outright.
Context sharpens the stakes. Mooney worked during an era when anthropology was entangled with salvage ethnography and federal projects aimed at controlling Native communities. In that climate, meticulous description could be a form of preservation and a form of possession. His attention to the “work” of painting and dressing reveals genuine observation, but it also frames cultural expression as labor that can be clocked, segmented, and ultimately managed. The passage works because it shows how power can hide inside neutrality: the sentence structure doesn’t argue, it inventories.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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