TheBlessingWay/KarlMarx/HappyPeople

Today I read the next fifty pages of Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way. The tension between Leaphorn’s identity as Navajo and his identity as a policeman takes a concrete form in his investigation of witchcraft, which, according to white law, is not a crime. In other words, before he can do anything he must be able to prove that a ‘real,’ i.e., white, crime has been committed. Meanwhile, McKee is confronted with a figure he thought was only a scapegoat in a very concrete form when the witch comes to his camp and then tries to track him down, having already done something to Canfield, McKee’s friend and colleague. In a way, this incident resolves the tension between material and supernatural—when someone’s trying to do you harm, it doesn’t really matter whether they’re real or imaginary! Hillerman goes into great detail about Navajo ceremonies and rituals in this book, which makes his choice of an anthropologist as one of his characters very appropriate. The anthropological feel of the book raises interesting questions about Hillerman’s intended audience.

I also read the next fifty pages of Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx. In this section of the book, Sperber discusses the last episode of Marx’s political activism, organized around his involvement with the International Working Men’s Association from 1864 to 1871. Because the IWMA was headquartered in London, Marx could exercise a considerable degree of (mostly behind the scenes) control over it. The organization’s focus was mostly on labor disputes, but Sperber also devotes space to analyzing the conflict between Marx and Bakunin over the issue of the participation of secret societies in the IWMA (something to which Marx was adamantly opposed) and Marx’s response to the 1871 Paris Commune. His support of the Commune (albeit overdetermined and qualified in many respects, at least in private) was articulated most forcefully in print in The Civil War in France, the publication of which marked the end, to all intents and purposes, of Marx’s association with the IWMA, and with it, the end of his involvement with direct political activism, ushering in a period of Marx’s life that Sperber puts under the heading “Legacy.”

I love Werner Herzog’s documentaries, not least because they are as much about him as they are about their ostensible subjects. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010), tells the story of the inhabitants of a village called Bakhtia in the middle of Siberia. In the midst of harsh conditions, these people eke out a living off the land, especially through trapping sable and other animals in the depths of the taiga. Herzog clearly admires the subjects of his film tremendously, but never more so than when the trappers leave their families and spend the winters alone (except for their dogs) in the wilderness. At that point, Herzog can barely contain his rapture for the way the trapper embodies the essence of the free man: self-reliant, in harmony with nature, and answering to no one except himself. The film contains one very odd and striking tangent—a brief section on the Ket, the native people of the region, driven to virtual extinction in cultural terms through alcoholism and other problems. Another story lurks here that is about dissonance rather than harmony, but Herzog passes over it quickly to get back to the celebration.