Chapter 1, Quoting the Ancestors Summary and Analysis

Places include a social aspect; they are created by means of historical imagination, through many acts of remembering, imagining and their interaction. The locally imagined history must be lived as well; place-making also involves creating history around the place and revising and augmenting them. Place-making occurs easily even in cultures where there is no writing or record-making. Reinterpreting the past is easy even without a written history. What people make of places are often repositories of such knowledge. Place-making helps construct social traditions and even social and personal identities. Place-making is also a kind of cultural activity.

Basso will illustrate these points in the Apache Reservation of Cibecue in Arizona with the person of Charles Henry, sixty years old, an herbalist, uncle and created of place-words. The story begins in May of 1979. Basso stands with...