• Los Angeles rediscovers Carlos Castaneda

Cultural anthropology icon of the 1970s, and subsequently discredited, Carlos Castaneda rises again. The Los Angeles Times reviewed an exhibit at the Fowler Museum at UCLA displaying a collection of twelve masks from the Yaqui people of Sonora, Mexico that Castaneda put together as a graduate student at the university. They are on view in The Yaqui Masks of Carlos Castaneda along with five others and accompanying accessories used in Yaqui ceremonies for celebration and commemoration. These pahko’ola masks are made of carved wood, mostly painted in vivid red, white and black, with goat hair added for bushy eyebrows and beards. Sometimes they resemble goats, most important of Yaqui domesticated animals, or monkeys, which were seen as tricksters in the wilderness.

David Delgado Shorter, associate professor and vice chair of the World Arts and Cultures/Dance department at UCLA, who has done extensive field work with the Yaquis of Sonora, Mexico, acknowledged the problems in Castaneda’s books: “Much of it seems completely fabricated and not based at all in Yaqui traditions…There are also ways of talking about speech and mannerism that are undeniably Yaqui.” For him, the masks themselves, which would have been very difficult to obtain outside of Mexico in the 1960s, are the clincher. “It attests he was right there,” Shorter said, “in that specific area where he said he was doing field work.” Continue reading “Anthro in the news 6/2/14” →