Can someone please explain what happened to Gutiérrez’s idea!!!
Ramón Gutiérrez’s When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 is a compilation of ideas that while having good intentions went horribly wrong somewhere along the line. As I was leading discussion for this week’s book I got the chance to read more information namely the reviews of the book, which I found puzzling. But before I get into that lets talk about the book itself. When I starting reading the introduction I began thinking to myself “what is wrong this all these people who hate the book” judging by the introduction it had the makings of great book that I very much wanted to read, but then it stopped. After the introduction Gutiérrez just took a major downturn and the Pueblo people were finally just lost along the way. It he had stuck to the original concept it would have worked but instead he fixated on the Spanish and tried to cram as much information he could into the paragraph he was on and often failed to connect his concepts. If the purpose of the book was to give a voice to the silenced or the forgotten I sure didn’t find it in his pages but ended up loosing it even more. And let’s not forget the statistics. By the time I got to that chapter the research he was using had lost all validity. In anthropology they train us to use statistics and one thing my professor always taught us was just because there is a statistical correlation between two things does not mean it equals a relationship and Gutiérrez’s work is a prime example of how you can manipulate statistics to prove your point. That is why I could not understand why every review I came to praised his groundbreaking research only a few which were written a few years later dealt with the obvious flaws. I know this not really supposed to be a platform for bashing the work, but even comments from Pueblo people were opposed to his ideas. After reading the commentaries that Steven posted on the blog page from people form Pueblo communities they were outraged by how their culture had been represented. And I have to say I am with them Gutiérrez may have done his research on something but he very much limited what he was using in order to make his point which is not only offensive to historical scholarship but also to the people you are making accusations about claming to be bring a voice to their past. In the end all I can say is that Gutiérrez did have a good concept in the beginning as seen by his introduction but something happened and he failed to live up to that, and I know see why every anthropologist who comes across this book is sent into a screaming fit.