Abstract
This is a good and valuable book but it will not appeal to many cultural geographers. There is no explicit theory, no conceptual framework, no review of literature, and no engagement with debates currently animating any academic discipline. But it is cultural geography nonetheless, of an intensely empirical and mobile kind. And it is a very local one, if a span of 35,000 square miles in the Copper River basin of southeastern Alaska can be considered local. It can, because it is known intimately by the Ahtna. In fact, by their own account, it is their favorite subject.
The book indirectly puts forward an Ahtna theory of place that is integrative, heavily historicized, and mapped. At its heart are five written representations comprising a total of 102 minutes of what may be called pedo-itineraries or travel narratives spoken by five nonagenarian Ahtna elders. One narrative alone recounts 313 different toponyms as it transits 1200 miles of Alaska. The narratives are inscribed in the accepted Roman orthography for Ahtna. English translations are given line by line. Numerous footnotes, photographs, and maps, the provenance of which are Ahtna in some instances, flesh out the verbal text. The result is distinctive, a set of descriptions rich with toponymic density, complicated riparian directional terms, and other aspects of the Ahtna grammatical and lexical system that the transcriber strives to make clear.
First and foremost, this book is a gift to Ahtna of all ages from their ancestors. James Kari is the academic conduit through which this information travels. The premier student of Alaskan Athabaskan toponyms, Kari has been working with the Ahtna since 1973. The inclusion of a CD containing audio files of all five narratives, which can be uploaded to an iPod, is indicative of Kari’s commitment to a highly mobile population.
Kari claims this is one of the most detailed accounts of hunter-gatherer foot travel ever amassed. This is undoubtedly true, although much of it is reminiscent of other northern peoples: commemorative toponyms are absent or rare; kinesthetic expression contains crucial information in oral geographies; there is little reliance on concepts of ‘right’ and ‘left’; and deictic terms are not based on earth-sun geometry (e.g. cardinal directions) but instead refer to earthly bodies of water. A fascinatingly rich example of the latter is included in the last chapter, where readers can understand how land, water, lexicon, and grammar all interpenetrate in Ahtna speech via 69 riparian directional terms with nine root phonemes opposed along seven sets of orthogonal axes, each with differing rules for correct grammatical usage. One of these roots appears as part of a binary pair in three different oppositional relations.
The concept of linguistic relativity, sometimes termed Whorfianism, implicitly undergirds this book. Most linguists agree that the vocabulary and grammar of languages significantly influence how people conceptualize the world, particularly our spatial cognition. In geography, we term this area of study geolinguistics. There are not many such geographers in the USA, which is a shame because narrative structures and vocabulary reveal much about common geographical practices and the ideas that underpin them.