Interview with Jay Courtney Fikes

An Interview with Jay Courtney Fikes by Sandy McIntosh

Bio

Jay Courtney Fikes graduated cum laude from the University of California at Irvine in 1973, obtained a master’s degree (with honors) in bilingual education from the University of San Diego in 1974, and completed his doctorate in cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1984. Since 1985 he has taught courses in cultural anthropology, policy research, and social science research methods at the U.S. International University, Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey, and the New Mexico Highlands University. He is president of the Institute for Investigation of Inter-Cultural Issues, in Carlsbad, CA, and has been active as a consultant, educator, speaker, and advocate for Native Americans for over ten years. His books include, Step Inside the Sacred Circle, Reuben Snake, Your Humble Serpent, and Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties.

Introduction

“After passionately absorbing the nuances in Carlos Castaneda’s first four books, I decided to become a professional anthropologist and study the ritual cycle of the Huichol Indians of Mexico,” Jay Courtney Fikes writes in Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties. He imagined that he might become a shaman while earning his doctorate at the University of Michigan. “Castaneda’s strategy of disclosing his own uncanny experiences, and implying that they were integral to correct interpretation of the ‘Yaqui way of knowledge’ he was learning … motivated me to supplement orthodox anthropological research methods.” Castaneda’s accounts of his extraordinary experiences as an apprentice of don Juan convinced Fikes that “in order to comprehend fully the meaning of Huichol rituals I should participate in them and make pilgrimages to sacred sites, just as aspiring Huichol shamans do.”

With the assistance of the Mexican government, Fikes was able to study the Huichol language and religion in the remotest, least-western-influenced part of the Chapalagana Huichol territory. During his first visit he was adopted by a Huichol healer and singer and was allowed to observe the shaman healing patients, to witness numerous rituals and to record sacred songs. On subsequent visits, Fikes’ posture of detached observer gradually gave way to a deeper personal involvement in Huichol life. At a funeral ritual where he had been tape recording the singing of his adoptive shaman father, he suddenly turned off the recorder. “I felt compelled to join the relatives who were preparing to bid farewell to the deceased woman for whom the ritual was being performed. I was astonished when a small, blue fly (which for traditional Huichols represents the deceased person) suddenly appeared. The blue fly was hovering near her human relatives who were standing outside their village god-house in front of a wooden platform on which sacred paraphernalia had been placed. I offered the blue fly the same beverages and foods her relatives were offering. While the fly hovered in our midst both her grieving relatives and I wept profusely. They cried, convinced that this was the last time they would communicate with their departing loved one. I cried because I knew I was crossing a mental frontier, embracing emotionally a world-view I had been taught to consider only intellectually plausible and symbolic.”

Interview

Q. For millions of Carlos Castaneda’s readers, our understanding of anthropology and of Native American culture has been shaped, at least in part, by the first three or four don Juan books. When speaking of the difference between traditional Native and Western cultures, don Juan repeatedly talks about the necessity of building a bridge. For example, at one point he tells Carlos, “I am trying to build a bridge, a bridge you can walk on between those ancient seers and the modern world.” One gets the impression that this bridge must be incredibly long, and that the possibility that Westerners could ever understand Native American shamanism is almost nil. Has that been your experience?

A. For contemporary non-Indians there are many obstacles to understanding “shamans” or perhaps becoming one. Establishing trust is the most basic prerequisite. Why should an authentic shaman, a person dedicated to serving his/her own native community, teach a non-Indian his esoteric knowledge? Will that non-Indian serve the community with such knowledge? Yaquis, the group from which don Juan allegedly emerged, were brutally treated by Spaniards and their successors, the Mexicans. Thousands of Yaqui men and women were deported and sold into virtual slavery during a campaign against them, which peaked between 1900 and 1910. As that period of persecution peaked, many of them fled from Sonora to Arizona (where they now have a reservation).

Given the legacy of violence, deportations and slavery, a living nightmare which don Juan and his family allegedly endured (Fikes 1993: 58), the question arises: why should don Juan trust a perfect stranger, Castaneda? What does a non-Indian have to do to earn the trust of an authentic shaman? Castaneda’s answer is that Mescalito, taking the form of a black dog, was a special sign that prompted don Juan to accept him as his apprentice.

Why He Rejects Castaneda’s Description of Mescalito and the Peyote Ceremony

My own experiences at Huichol sacred sites and ceremonies and at numerous Native American Church meetings led me to reject Castaneda’s claim as preposterous. Castaneda’s narrative of his first meeting with Indian peyotists contains so many significant anomalies and important omissions that scholars familiar with bona fide peyote meetings should immediately have doubted its authenticity.

To cite some examples: Castaneda’s assertion, that Mescalito selected Castaneda to be the recipient of don Juan’s knowledge is doubtful, most importantly, because Yaquis have never participated in peyote ceremonies. Moreover, the name that don Juan gave to the peyote deity, “Mescalito,” has never been mentioned by any of the three hundred thousand NAC members, who belong to some seventy distinct tribes within the United States, nor by members of Mexican Indian tribes such as the Tarahumara or Huichol, whose reverence for peyote is unsurpassed. Huichol Indian chronicles credit one of their deified ancestors, Tatei Yochahuima, with having taken the form of a black dog. Nobody has discovered anything analogous in Yaqui oral history (Fikes 1993, 61-62, 106). Nor has anyone except Castaneda ever claimed that playing with a black dog was an omen upon which an unorthodox intercultural relationship of guru/apprentice could be erected.

Neither the Yaqui, nor any of the other Indians inhabiting northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States, has ever had a system or religious instruction in which apprentices are initiated by masters (Fikes 1993, 56, 68-70, 111). Castaneda’s fundamental supposition, that he was the person chosen by the peyote deity to be taught by don Juan, might be more credible if other particulars of the peyote ceremonies he portrayed were consistent with the model of peyotism built upon over a thousand reports published by previous investigators. However, details of his purported peyote ceremonies are anomalous when compared to portraits of peyote meetings published by other scholars. Castaneda’s central claim is contradicted by impartial research.

The refugee Huichol Indians with whom Castaneda may have been associated are dependent on income from tourists. In April 1996 I arrived for the first time at a refugee Huichol settlement in Tepic, the capital city of the Mexican state of Nayarit, just as some 50 Huichols were starting a ceremony called Parching the Corn, which is ancillary to the Peyote Dance (Fikes 1997). Within a few minutes after arriving, I began filming that ceremony. In exchange for allowing me to film that ceremony the men in charge were given gifts of soda pop and beer.

The Tepic Huichols seemed eager to explain the meaning of ritual artifacts, including peyote, which I was filming. After years of working with secretive and sometimes hostile Huichols in Santa Catarina the openness of these Tepic Huichols truly amazed me. I have concluded, following Weigand (1985), that the primary reason that Tepic Huichols are more eager to host outsiders than are Chapalagana Huichols is that the former are much more dependent on earning money, as wage-laborers or producers of yarn-paintings and other crafts for the tourist market.

Refugee Huichols have some “shamanistic” practices or esoteric knowledge but their teachings are much less complete than those of the Chapalagana Huichols (a more conservative [i.e. traditional] group which Castaneda, Furst and Myerhoff neglected to study). Refugee Huichols will, for a fee, teach non-Indians some of what they know. Their willingness to teach might help build the bridge you mention, if only peyote was legal in Mexico. But given the drug-war mentality which surrounds this bridge I fear a tidal wave or hurricane is threatening to destroy the bridge which I and others (such as Juan Negrin) began crossing some 20 years ago with the aid of Chapalagana Huichol shamans.

But teaching in return for money is a motive distinct from teaching based on respect. Robert Zingg, the first American anthropologist to study the Chapalagana Huichols, earned their trust by becoming a political advocate for them. To help Tuxpan Huichols secure title to their land Zingg accompanied Tuxpan’s political officials to Mexico City to meet with the Mexican President, Lazaro Cardenas. It was only after Zingg volunteered to help them that he gained access to the “myths” which are recited in rituals by singing shamans. Zingg’s research did not include cultivating extraordinary experiences with the aid of Huichol shamans. He was content with describing their myths and rituals. But even that would have been impossible without his having proved himself trustworthy.

Juan Negrin was, for several years, a political advocate for the Huichols. His work on their behalf is, in part, how he gained enough trust to receive esoteric teachings from authentic Huichol shamans. He also became compadres with several Huichols. During many conversations with Juan Negrin I concluded that he knows much about Huichol esoteric or shamanic teachings but has refused to popularize them or himself. I admire him and James Slotkin, an anthropologist who was an official in the Native American Church. Slotkin ingested peyote at Native American Church ceremonies in the 1950s but didn’t publicly proclaim himself a shaman. I have tried to follow their example and also to obey what my Indian mentors told me—not to reveal certain aspects of what I have experienced.

Fikes Study of Huichol Shamanism

I gained access to Huichol esoteric teachings after I became an adopted son and a godfather. They trusted me after they put me into a kinship role. After our Supreme Court ruled in April of 1990 that our first amendment did not protect sacramental peyote use by members of the Native American Church (NAC) I was encouraged to participate in Native American Church rituals. But this invitation came only after I proved I was committed to passing a federal law to protect their religious freedom (see my book, Reuben Snake, Your Humble Serpent). Reuben Snake became my brother.

Humility is important but sometimes we have to be bold. I debunked Castaneda’s early writing because I believe I learned more about authentic shamans and peyote ceremonies than he ever did and because I saw his reckless popularizing as a threat to Indian religious freedom. In October of 1994 we passed a federal law to protect the NAC.

My own experiences have convinced me that there is a spirit world to which authentic shamans direct themselves. I believe this realm is not necessarily the psychological world of images described by Carl Jung and Daniel Noel. Someday soon I may be willing to describe more of my spiritual experiences. I am encouraged to do so because a few anthropologists have finally come out of the closet. In 1998 at a symposium called “The Spirit Hypothesis: Scientific and Participant Validation” Michael Harner presented a paper. I recommend asking him for permission to post his paper on your website.

Building a Bridge between Westerners and Sources of Native Wisdom

So how do we build a bridge? I am reminded of the movie, The Karate Kid. In it the martial arts novice, a teenage boy, had to start serving his aged master by doing practical exercises: putting the wax on, taking the wax off. Similarly, Chapalagana Huichol young people serve their community as temple officers and thereby gain access to “shamanic” teachings. After centuries of violence and broken treaties I feel that we non-Indians must prove ourselves worthy of being accepted as novices, humble seekers of access to the world of spirit.

One way to show we can be trusted is to work diligently to secure Indian rights, e.g., to lobby for laws that will facilitate the return of sacred artifacts and human remains (which are held in museums and private collections) to Native Americans. We must also work to pass laws that guarantee that American Indians have access to sacred sites located throughout this country. Peyote, mushrooms, ayahuasca and other sacred plants must be protected, perhaps by international laws. It seems reasonable that we have to build at least half of the bridge, by serving as advocates for Indian rights, before we can expect to be shown how to follow the path across to the other side of the bridge.

After we prove ourselves trustworthy we face another obstacle, fear, one which Castaneda identified as the first enemy of the man of knowledge. Fear of going crazy is something it took me many years to overcome. But I don’t want to discuss that topic just yet….

Authentic Cultural Anthropology

Q. Castaneda asserted that he had perhaps failed as an anthropologist because he had crossed the line that divides objective social science reporting from subjective involvement in the culture he had set out to study. He asserted that for anthropologists, who are concerned with arranging and rearranging abstract taxonomies, such subjective participation with one’s informants and their culture was abhorrent. You yourself were adopted by a Huichol shaman and, later, became the brother of another one, and you participate in Huichol and NAC religious rites. Has your deep involvement with Native culture distorted your scientific objectivity? Or was Castaneda’s understanding of the aims and methods of anthropology flawed?

A. Scientists expect that research findings or knowledge must be verified and verifiable. They depend on an objective and impersonal way of knowing, one that is exemplified by laboratory experiments in which all significant variables can be controlled in order that proximate causes of behavior or disease may be determined. No matter who performs a scientific experiment, the results should be the same. Fraud is a serious misdemeanor.

Cultural Anthropology derives knowledge from interpersonal and intercultural relationships. There are virtually no independent or dependent variables that can be controlled by an anthropologist living in another culture. Much of what passes for anthropological knowledge is only partially verifiable. For example, I can witness the same Huichol harvest ritual (Tatei Neixa) that Robert Zingg saw in 1934 but each of us may report differences in the details of the ritual we observed. Such variation may be due to differences between ceremonial leaders and to regional variation and historical changes.

Accurate reporting of observable behavior (as in ritual) is essential to ethnography and cultural anthropology. Accordingly, fieldnotes, tape recordings and film footage of public demonstrations and ritual behavior are of vital importance to anthropologists. Failure to produce such evidence is a serious misdemeanor (which is why I became suspicious about the waterfall jumping episodes described by Castaneda, Furst and Myerhoff). Explanations of the meaning of ritual actions provided by one’s informants (or native teachers) should be meticulously recorded in writing, on audiotape or filmed.

I was also taught the value of carefully distinguishing between my native teachers’ beliefs and my own interpretations of ritual. I have concluded that anthropologists feel comfortable focusing on ritual behavior largely because it is publicly observable. Most rituals are repeated annually, or triggered by some recurring natural event, e.g., human illness or death.

Doing anthropological research becomes problematic when one’s “informants” insist on secrecy and when one’s explorations under their guidance involve activities that are singular, non-replicable and esoteric. For example, going on a pilgrimage or vision quest to a sacred site may be a once-in-a-lifetime event for an anthropologist. Moreover, perhaps no other anthropologist has or will ever visit that particular place.

Most of Castaneda’s dramatic or momentous experiences allegedly involved precisely such singular and esoteric realities. In such cases, when and where verification is difficult if not impossible, we must demand accurate information about the social status of an anthropologist’s informants. Their reputation in the community becomes an index of reliability. Accordingly, if the existence of one’s primary informants cannot be verified (e.g., don Juan Matus) then it is blind faith rather than science that leads one to accept their teachings as authentic.

Regardless of whether one is reporting on ritual events and interpreting their meaning or going to a sacred site where no anthropologists have ever been before, building trust or establishing rapport with one’s “informants” is the first step to acquiring reliable information about religious practices of another culture. Obtaining informants who are highly esteemed in their community is also an essential step to gathering accurate data.

Retaining Objectivity as a Participant

My deep personal involvement with Huichol shamans and NAC ceremonies has not altered or distorted my commitment to truthful reporting about the social status of my informants nor the meaning of rituals they perform. On the contrary, my own esoteric and numinous experiences have helped me understand better the “meta-physical” explanations provided by my native teachers. Yet it seems obvious that we are talking about separate realities or ways of knowing. The impersonal aspect of doing scientific research precludes scientific investigation of esoteric teachings. Esoteric truth is simply not accessible to the general public. To gain access to it requires being accepted by a mentor from another culture. For anthropologists who assume truth must be derived scientifically this “subjective” or esoteric realm invites suspicion, if not scorn.

It is difficult to imagine how Franz Boas would react to reports derived from practitioners of esoteric anthropology (a name we might adopt for para-scientific accounts of our experiences with religious practitioners of other cultures). He was trained in the scientific tradition and might have felt uncomfortable evaluating reports by anthropologists doing para-scientific (or esoteric) research. Yet one of his students, Zora Neale Hurston, became an apprentice to a voodoo practitioner. Incidentally, I believe it is she rather than Castaneda who was the first anthropologist to be trained in esoteric lore of another culture.

In addition to doing physical anthropology (e.g., measuring the craniums of Native Americans) Boas recorded “myths” which recount singular events in the lives of his Kwakiutl Indian informants. One of my favorites, “A Shaman Called Fool”, is reprinted in my book, Step Inside the Sacred Circle. Boas was evidently not concerned in the least with investigating the nature of numinous experiences recited by Kwakiutl shamans. However, he respected them enough to record their extraordinary experiences accurately. That aspect of traditional or Boasian anthropology is something I still value. I also applaud his political activism. I am convinced that attempting to understand less public aspects of other cultures can enhance one’s interpretation of myths and rituals as well as contribute to political advocacy in support of one’s native teachers. I like to imagine that my efforts to investigate experiences that occur outside the purview of the anthropology practiced by Boas might have brought me his praise. [See below for more on Franz Boas.]

Assessing Castaneda’s Legacy and Impact on Cultural Anthropology

Q. By now, almost all anthropologists and even New Age historians accept as inevitable that much, if not all of Castaneda’s work is fiction. However, Castaneda himself was not fiction; and his writings, make-believe or otherwise, have exerted a powerful influence during the last three decades. In your book about Castaneda you point out the damage to Native American groups that Castaneda and his contemporaries provoked because of their fallacious depictions of religious rituals, including the ritual uses of peyote. However, Clifford Geertz, David Murray and other writers on anthropology have suggested that Castaneda’s books have actually been beneficial to ethnography because, by blurring genre boundaries, they expand its possibilities. On balance, how do you assess Castaneda?

A. I have hinted that the scientific and the esoteric approach in anthropology are non-commensurable. Nevertheless, I believe that they can be complementary ways of understanding religious practitioners and rituals. Of course it can be claimed that Castaneda’s writing helped the esoteric approach in anthropology gain acceptance. Even if that is true, wouldn’t it have been better to have had an authentic account of how an anthropologist learned first-hand from another culture’s ritual specialist? Perhaps Zora Neale Hurston provided such an account long before Castaneda.

Castaneda is a pivotal personality in cultural anthropology. The other celebrity anthropologist whose ethnographic findings have been debunked is Margaret Mead. It turns out that two of Mead’s female adolescent “informants” conspired to perpetrate a fraud about Samoan sexual practices. Mead uncritically accepted their stories as fact. Mead’s debunker, Derek Freeman, has not been well received by anthropologists. In fact, at the 1983 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) there was a symposium in which Freeman’s book, Margaret Mead and Samoa, was condemned. Nor did the symposium organizers invite him to attend their symposium and present a rebuttal. “At the annual business meeting later that day, a motion denouncing my [Freeman’s] refutation as ‘unscientific’ was moved, put to the vote, and passed” (Freeman 1997: 66).

If enforcing scientific standards is so important to anthropologists, why hasn’t the AAA passed a similar resolution condemning Castaneda’s “research” with don Juan Matus as unscientific? Probably because professional anthropologists take pains to protect their reputation and to avoid public controversy. Those anthropologists who celebrate positive aspects of Castaneda’s writing have not addressed the issue of how Castaneda’s writing may have contributed to the influx of non-Indians which has troubled the NAC and the conservative Chapalagana Huichols. In addition to publicly celebrating what they take to be the best in Castaneda’s writing I would be pleased if some of the anthropologists who recognize that most if not all of Castaneda’s work is fiction propose a resolution to be voted upon by the membership of the AAA, a resolution condemning Castaneda’s work as “unscientific”. Until they propose such a resolution, I prefer not to join their chorus of praise for Castaneda.

I believe that mainstream anthropologists need to be consistent with their criticism of “unscientific” work. If they are capable of doing that, I may join them in looking for the best in Castaneda. After they set the record straight about Castaneda’s “research” then the discussion can and should focus on what guidelines are needed for practitioners of esoteric anthropology.

Addendum on Frank Boas

The Boasian Tradition

Franz Boas (1858-1942) has been called the “shaper” of American anthropology. As a six-year-old growing up in Germany near the ocean, Boas had been fascinated by the color of seawater–why it was one color at the shore, another as you waded into the sea; and why it changed depending upon the intensity of the sunlight. Later, this fascination matured into a scholarly concern about the physical nature of perception. He took his doctorate in physics and, with a plan to go into the field to study human perception, he booked passage in 1883 on a ship headed for Baffin Island, near the North Pole. His idea was to live for a year among the Eskimo, who, he reasoned must be a simple people living plainly in their snow-world–unlike the complex and sophisticated people living in Boas’ native Berlin. But by the end of his year with the Eskimo, Boas concluded that he had been wrong. The natives of Baffin Island were not such a simple race. In fact, they were as culturally complex as Europeans. “It was with feelings of sorrow and regret,” wrote Boas, “that I parted from my Arctic friends. I had seen that they enjoyed life, as we do; that nature is also beautiful to them; that feelings of friendship also root in the Eskimo heart; that … the Eskimo is a man as we are; his feelings, his virtues and his shortcomings are based on human nature like ours.”

Having proved to himself the complexity and, therefore, intelligence of native cultures, Boas realized simultaneously that because of European expansionism, these non-industrialized (thus vulnerable) peoples were being relentlessly destroyed. From that point he dedicated his fieldwork, principally among the Indians of the Northwest, to preserving their vanishing cultures.

He lived for years at a time with the groups he studied, especially with the Haida and Kwakiutl Indians. He compiled dictionaries of their languages, translations of their poetry; virtual encyclopedias of their disappearing culture. While he wrote about his personal experiences during his life in the field, his dedication was always to the people he studied. He preserved their histories, and, as testament, brought together most of the significant paintings and carvings that are displayed in the Northwest Indian Hall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Always wary of theory and speculation concerning the development of the early cultural history of humanity, he emphasized the importance of collecting facts. He felt that the duty of his students (who included Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, and Ruth Benedict) was to do spade work and to help bring together a body of accurate source material upon which the science of anthropology could build.

Works cited

Fikes, Jay and Nix, Nelleke. Step Inside the Sacred Circle. Wyndham Hall Press (1989)
Fikes, Jay Courtney. Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties. Millenia Press (1993)
Fikes, Jay Courtney. Reuben Snake, Your Humble Serpent. Clear Light Publishers (1996)
Freeman, Derek. “Paradigms In Collision: Margaret Mead’s Mistake And What It Has Done To Anthropology.” In Skeptic, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1997: Pages 66-73.
Freeman, Derek. Margaret Mead and Samoa : The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. See also:
Freeman, Derek. The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research. Westview Press (1998)
Geertz, Clifford.“Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought,” reprinted in Geertz, Local Knowledge. Basic Books (1983)
Murray, David. Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts. Indiana Univ. Press (1991)

Copyright ©️ 1999, Sandy McIntosh and Jay Courtney Fikes

Related Links:

• Conjuring Brujos: Did don Juan and don Genaro Exist?
• Castaneda Meets Don Juan: Multiple Takes
• Native American Elders’ Reactions to Castaneda and ‘don Juan’
• Excerpt from Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. New York: Random House, 1979, pp. 315-324
• Mark J. Plotkin, Ph.D. Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches For New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest. Viking (1993).