12 Validity Is Not Authenticity
Distinguishing Two Components of Truth
Richard de Mille
Editor’s Note
While he was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Carlos Castaneda reported ten years of Sonoran field work, not in scholarly journals but in three best-selling popular volumes, the third of which was accepted in 1973 as his formal dissertation for the Ph.D. in anthropology. In 1975, Richard de Mille, psychologist and writer, was reading Castaneda’s volume, about “don Juan,” the now-legendary Mexican Indian teacher of universal wisdom, when he was struck by a stupendous scientifio-literary realization: Castaneda’s sage of the sagebrush was an imaginary person, and those eclectical metaphysical conversations in the desert were academic allegories. For the next six years, de Mille pursued Castaneda up and down library stacks and across the realms of discourse, until he had produced Castaneda’s Journey and The Don Juan Papers. These books, well received by scholars and public alike, drill the bones o/Uclanthropus piltdunides castanedae and everywhere strike baloney—though of course many of Castaneda’s fans, with or without Ph.D., still like to believe that Carlos and don Juan roamed Sonoran sands together, catching jack rabbits with their bare hands while discussing Husserl and Wittgenstein. Some credit Castaneda with telling the “truth” because they like his ideas, others because in his fables they recognize some of their own or others’ ethnographic findings. The following essay explains why truth in anthromancing is not always what it seems.
Time’s 1973 cover story raised serious questions about Castaneda’s truthfulness. Where had he really been born and when? How solid a being was don Juan? Were the books fact or fiction? Rebuking Time for setting its “hired leeches” on Castaneda’s works and person, a reader declared the don Juan story “no less true or honest” if wholly invented. Should don Juan prove imaginary, wrote Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard, “then spurious ethnology becomes a great work of the imagination; whether borrowed or not, the teaching rings true.” “The most vividly convincing documents I have read,” Carl Rogers told fellow psychologists, “come from one man, Carlos Castaneda.” “He may be lying,” hedged New Age, “but what he says is true.” Truth, apparently, is not a simple matter.
When a Los Angeles Times book reviewer said Castaneda’s Journey (de Mille 1976) had offered evidence “strong enough to sow seeds of doubt in the firmest bedrocks of belief,” an exasperated reader charged him and me and skeptics in general with missing the point, which was that Castaneda had provided a system of thinking meant precisely to break readers out of the bonds of having to ask whether metaphysical books are based on fact. “If the system is valid,” our correspondent said, “its source is rather irrelevant.” I answered that philosophy is not the only game in town; some people wish instead to play anthropology, where sources are not only relevant but sometimes crucial (see chapter 11).
“Either Castaneda is recording an encounter with a master ... or else he is himself that master,” wrote Joseph Margolis, a professional player of the philosophy game; “in this sense, it makes no difference whether the books are a record of an actual encounter or whether Castaneda is the author of a clever fiction.” I gladly grant Margolis his point if strictly confined to the teaching of metaphysics, but in the game of science it makes a big difference whether or not a field report is based on actual trips to the field.
Psychoanalyst Elsa First distinguished naive skeptics who reject the don Juan books simply because they report anomalous or apparently supernatural events from more knowledgeable skeptics who find Carlos’s desert novitiate simply too good to be true—don Juan too much the oriental guru, his teachings too close to Sufism, Tantric Buddhism, or the Hindu chakra system. “This could well be explained,” First countered, “by the fact that the ‘natural mind’ everywhere perceives similarly” (see chapter 9). The point was well made, and the explanation in terms of worldwide mysticism must be seriously considered, but in the end, after further conceptual analysis and an examination of particular evidence, it will definitely be rejected.1
When poet Robert Bly wrote in the New York Times that Castaneda “ransacks the work of genuine researchers like Michael Harner” to prepare his “spiritual goulash” and that his “thefts” are convincingly documented in Castaneda’s Journey, Harner emphatically protested what he said was the mistake “of assuming that similarities between Castaneda’s material and that published by others on shamanism is due to plagiarism by Castaneda”; “apparently,” Harner continued, Bly and de Mille “are unaware that remarkable parallels exist in shamanic belief and practice throughout the primitive world.”
In keeping with Harner’s wish that those who write about Castaneda should be better informed, I have by this time read several books beyond Harner’s own outstanding works on the Jivaro—books by such authorities as Bean and Saubel, Furst, the Leightons, Myerhoff, Opler, Petrullo, Sharon, Steward, and Underhill—and I think I have now grasped the general outlines of shamanic belief and practice. While I was writing Castaneda’s Journey I had barely dipped into Eliade, who tells us, for example, that “the shamans lay the novice on the ground and cover him with leaves and branches.” Don Juan did the same to Carlos, of course, covering him first with branches, then with leaves, and then with earth. Such a parallel Harner no doubt had in mind to illustrate his conception of Castaneda as a source of valid ethnographic ideas, and there is certainly nothing in the example to raise anyone’s suspicions, but other parallels are more richly textured.
In her 1968 dissertation, Barbara Myerhoff described the ritual peyote hunt in the sacred land of the Huichol ancestors. After the baskets had been filled, the shaman told his party of hunters they must all leave as quickly as possible, for it was dangerous to remain there. “We were puzzled,” Myerhoff wrote, “but fell into our places at the end of the line and found ourselves barely able to keep up, for the group was nearly running.”
In his 1973 dissertation, also know as Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda described a night spent in the hills practicing the “gait of power.” Having frightened Carlos sufficiently with ghost stories and bird calls, don Juan announced he was ready to leave. “Let’s get out of here,” he said and began to run. Carlos wanted to stay in the hills until dawn, but don Juan retorted “in a very dramatic tone” that to stay there would be suicidal. “I followed him,” wrote Castaneda, “but ... I could not keep up with him, and he soon disappeared in the darkness ahead of me.”
Harner would surely have no trouble with this example. Fear of holy places, he might say, is universal. When people are afraid, they run. The less fleet have a hard time keeping up with the more fleet. It’s really quite simple, if you’re not blinded by a passion for turning honest reporters into clever hoaxers.
Very well, then, the example is not evidential. But what about don Juan’s “gait of power”? Where did that come from? In Magic and Mystery in Tibet (published in 1932, reissued in 1971) Alexandra David-Neel described the lung-gom-pa trance walker: “The man proceeded at an unusual gait and, especially, with an extraordinary swiftness.” In Journey to Ixtlan (published in 1972) Castaneda averred: “He then proceeded to demonstrate a special way of walking in the darkness, a way which he called the ‘gait of power.’”
“Sunset and clear nights,” David-Neel wrote, “were favorable conditions for the walker.” “The gait of power is for running at night,” don Juan whispered in Carlos’s ear.
Commenting on David-Neel’s account in his 1971 book, The Way of the White Clouds, Lama Govinda added: “The feet seem to be endowed with an instinct of their own, avoiding invisible obstacles and finding footholds, which only a clairvoyant consciousness could have detected in the speed of such a movement and in the darkness of the night.” Castaneda went on to say (in 1972): “My body seemed to be cognizant of things without thinking about them. For example, I could not really see the jagged rocks in my way, but my body always managed to step on the edges and never in the crevices, except for a few mishaps when I lost my balance because I became distracted.”
“There is no greater danger,” Govinda concluded, “than the sudden awakening to normal consciousness. It is for this reason that the lung-gom-pa must avoid speaking or looking about, because the slightest distraction would result in breaking his trance.” “The degree of concentration needed to keep scanning the area directly in front had to be total,” concluded Castaneda; “as don Juan had warned me, any slight glance to the side or too far ahead altered the flow.”
Those of us who judge the don Juan books a hoax will see obvious literary influence working in these passages, but those for whom don Juan remains authentic will see instead the workings of the universal mystic mind. Psychologist Michael Gorman, for one, found it fascinating that “a Polish count, an Indian philosopher, and a Yaqui sorcerer” all took the central human error to be confusing one’s own way of looking at the world with the way the world actually is. Don Juan, you may recall, said one’s view of the world arises from “a description, which is given to us from the moment of our birth.” What I find more fascinating here than don Juan’s sharing of an abstract idea with Korzybski and Krishnamurti is his sharing of concrete language with Edward Sapir, who said that one’s view of personal conduct arises from “arbitrary modes of interpretation that social tradition is constantly suggesting to us from the very moment of our birth.”
Apparently deaf to such verbal resonances, numerous writers have marveled at don Juan’s traditional mysticism or psychodelic lore. “Interestingly enough,” comments Marlene Dobkin de Rios, “many of the insights Casteñeda gleans from his teacher seem to have widespread application in other societies where plant hallucinogens are used. This is perhaps due to the limiting parameters of the drug itself, insofar as they effect man’s central nervous system in a patterned way.” A plausible hypothesis, if one has confidence in the authenticity of Castaneda’s reports. Lacking such confidence, one suspects the common psychodelic themes arose not from characteristics of drugs administered by don Juan but from the contents of books read by Castañeda. Does this suspicion make any difference to the validity of don Juan’s teachings? Does it matter whether they came directly from don Juan to Castaneda or directly from a book to Castaneda? Unfortunately it does make a difference. An observer who cannot be trusted to tell us where and how he got his information cannot be trusted to preserve the integrity of that information either. Don Juan may not only be imaginary, he may also be handing us a line. An expert on plant hallucinogens will no doubt recognize some valid elements in don Juan’s psychodelics, but an expert who trusts don Juan’s authenticity may go beyond expertise to accept invalid elements invented by Castaneda, such as the famous smoking of the mushroom.
If anthropologists can be misled, what will happen to non-anthro-pologists? Elmer Green, psychophysiologist of yoga practices at the Menninger Foundation, found it “interesting” that don Juan’s teachings paralleled those of Sufist Jacques Ramano, who taught that truth is to be lived, not merely talked about. He thought it “entertaining” that Eastern metaphysics had been succinctly expressed in the independent teachings of a Mexican Indian, don Juan. He was intrigued by don Juan’s idea of “the double” and thought his calling the true self “a cluster” was “remarkably similar” to Gordon Allport’s idea of “functional autonomy.” I agree that if an actual curandero came up with a series of ideas also found in books by Robert Ornstein, Otto Rank, D.T. Suzuki, and Gordon Allport, his sources would be worth looking into. The correspondence, noticed by Green, between the solar-plexus chakra and don Genaro’s tentacles would surely make scientists sit up and take notice, if they believed don Genaro existed. When one believes the two dons to be imaginary, however, what one finds interesting and entertaining is Castaneda’s remarkable success in pulling the wool over otherwise sharp professional eyes. At one point Green ponders the similarity between don Juan’s “path with heart,” the Tibetan heart chakra, and Jesus’ comment that a man is as he thinketh in his heart. Suddenly one wishes for don Juan’s own reflections on such reverence.
“Don Juan,” I whispered, “did you know that according to Jesus a man is as he thinks in his heart?”
Don Juan forgot about stalking the rabbit and stared at me in amazement.
“You must be kidding!” he said.
“I’m not kidding, don Juan.”
Sadly he shook his head. “It’s very clear to me,” he said, “that Jesus didn’t see. Otherwise he would have known that a luminous being doesn’t think in his heart. He thinks in his tonal.” He looked at me suspiciously. “Have you been going to mass again?”
I laughed. “You know better than that, don Juan. It’s something I read in Elmer Green’s book.”
“God damn it!” Don Juan threw his hat to the ground and stomped on it. “I knew it! If you’d stop reading those books and listen to me, nobody could say you were stealing ideas. Don’t you see that?”
“I see it, don Juan,” I said apologetically, “but many things in the books I read agree with things you say.”
“Is that so.” He squinted through the bushes looking for the rabbit, which had dragged itself away while we were talking.
“For example,” I persisted, “Green says the Sufis teach that truth is to be lived, not merely talked about.”
Don Juan nodded. “They’re right about that. Talk is cheap.”
I reached for my notebook. “Is that a sorcerer’s saying?” I asked.
“Is what a sorcerer’s saying?”
“Talk is cheap.”
Don Juan chuckled. “You heard a sorcerer say it, so it must be a sorcerer’s saying.”
I wrote it in my notebook.
“You want another one to go with it?” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Actions speak louder than words,” he said.
To me the most surprising support for Castaneda has come from Mary Douglas, whose “Authenticity of Castaneda” (de Mille 1990:25-31), exemplifies a widespread failure to distinguish two components of truth: authenticity and validity.
Validity, in this discussion, refers to the correspondence between the content of a scientific report and some established background of theory and recorded observation. A report is judged valid when it agrees with what we think we know. When people thought the world was flat, reports that the hull of a departing ship would disappear before its sail had to be ignored, denied, or explained away. When people thought the world was round, such reports would be accepted and cited to prove its roundness. The actual shape of the world, round or flat or cubical, does not come into the definition; only the correspondence between the report and the established theoretical and empirical knowledge about its shape.
Authenticity, in this discussion, refers to the provenance of the report. Did it arise from the persons, places, and procedures it describes?
Though these definitions are quite conventional in science, some scientists apparently do not keep them clearly in mind. An example may be useful. If (hypothetically) some anthropologists have reported, and most believe, that Ojibwa shamans use Amanita muscaria mushrooms in curing rites, then my report that I have participated in such a rite on MinissKitigan (Garden Island) in the Michi-Tchigamig (Lake Michigan) may easily be accepted as a true report, and any details I add to the current description of the rite may also be accepted and become part of the anthropological literature on shamanism. If, after a few months, it is alleged that the closest I have been to Garden Island was when I picked up my new Hudson Hornet in Detroit in 1953, a shadow of doubt will fall across my report, and my added details may be questioned. If I then write a letter to the American Anthropologist, admitting that I have never set foot on MinissKitigan but citing specific pages of the forthcoming Puhpohwee for the People for my added details, my original report will be judged wholly inauthentic, but my added ethnographic details may be judged wholly valid, on the authority of Keewaydinoquay, a well-recommended Ojibwa shaman, who is the author of the book I stole my ideas out of. Needless to say, any further reports I write will be treated with great skepticism.
Validity and authenticity, then, are substantially, though not completely, independent components of truth. Validity cannot be achieved without authentic observing and reporting, by someone, somewhere, some time, but when authentic-and-valid reports are available in a library, a clever pretender can put together a wholly inauthentic report (like The Teachings of Don Juan) containing many valid details (such as the idea that sorcerers try to steal each other’s souls). Since most people, including anthropologists, care more about validity (which is theoretical and therefore interesting) than about authenticity (which is a rather boring practical condition for obtaining valid information), they tend to take authenticity for granted whenever they read a report whose content seems valid to them. I believe this is exactly the error Mary Douglas fell into.
Not the only error, however, for she reasons that anyone who writes as naively as Castaneda can hardly be fooling us. Could such a bumpkin have invented don Juan? Of course not! Her attempt to assess Castaneda’s authenticity by analyzing his style, and through his style his character, fails because Castaneda’s style does not simply or fully reflect his character. He is not in fact naïve but merely writes that way when describing the thoughts and comments of the fictive character I call Carlos-Naïf.
Ralph Beals made a similar error when he reasoned that don Juan must exist in some form or other because Castaneda had started talking about him way back in 1960. Could anyone keep up the charade year after year if there were no don Juan at all? Of course not! The inference failed because Beals did not guess the very wide difference between Castaneda’s character and that of persons he was accustomed to dealing with in the university. As Castaneda has said: “My life is weird—more weird than it looks.”
Such failures to read character may be expected. We normally assume other people are like ourselves. What I did not expect scholars to do was to infer don Juan’s authentic existence or Castaneda’s credibility from the validity of particular ethnographic contents scattered throughout the don Juan books. Douglas argues against judging the books bogus (inauthentic) on the ground that don Juan’s attitude toward life and death is (she believes) alien to our own (and therefore like the attitude an anthropologist might expect to find in a pre-literate Indian culture). This is clearly inferring authentic provenance from valid content: if don Juan says things we expect Indians to say, or things we expect non-Indians not to say, then don Juan must exist. It does not follow.
Don Juan’s “philosophy of ascetic mysticism,” Douglas says, “is enough evidence of truth in the tale.” Manifestly she infers don Juan’s existence from the quality of his teachings. Having accepted him as an authentic source of Indian lore, she invites her colleagues’ attention to his techniques for inducing different kinds of visual experience: techniques of squinting, focusing and unfocusing, and rapid sideways scanning. “From these ideas,” she says, “we are likely to get advances in anthropology.”
At the very least, Douglas fails to say which aspect of truth she is talking about and leaves the false implication that don Juan’s teachings came to Castaneda more or less as Castaneda said they did. It may be, as she says, that from ideas of squinting, scanning, or focusing, whatever their sources, one could get advances in self-development or spiritual training or even anthropology, but that is quite different from saying that these ideas arose in a particular Indian culture, perhaps a league of sorcerers, and that anthropologists should take them seriously as ethnographic findings.
Douglas dismisses “the temporary discomfiture of a few professionals” who get nervous when new approaches to fieldwork are proposed, but she overlooks a source of discomfiture more important to scientists than innovation, which is the well-grounded suspicion that one is reading fake field reports, which at least one respected colleague has called authentic.
Scholars for whom English is a second language are doubly unlikely to hear echoes of Opler and Petrullo, Suzuki and David-Neel in Castaneda’s prose. Correspondences between don Juan’s teachings and other people’s writings “cannot simply be plagiarism,” writes a German scholar, Dennis Timm, “because the worldwide correspondence of magical experiences is an ethnological banality.”2 De Mille, Timm says, should have assessed his own deficient personal power before trying to write about the power of don Juan; de Mille is so preoccupied with proving Castaneda a thief “that he falls directly onto the open knife of his own argument.”
I wrote to Timm that his disputatious knife cuts either me or him depending on whether one finds correspondences only of magical phenomena or correspondences also in the words describing the magical phenomena. I offered three examples. Timm replied that by trusting evidence of that kind Western scientists had trapped themselves in their own preconceptions. To support his position, he quoted Mary Douglas on the authenticity of Castaneda—which brings us full circle.
Don Juan’s teachings, Timm said, are an esoteric matter, to which scientific generalizations have no access. “Scientific verification of the ‘teachings’ is impossible,” he declared. “A confirmation of what Castaneda experienced can be established only by a ‘special consensus,’ which can be reached only by sorcerers.”
I suspect Timm is quite right about the difficulty of confirming Carlos’s experiences, but disconfirming Castaneda’s field reports is well within the power and scope of science and is a worthy end in itself. I hope Timm will eventually grant that point, and then go on to a realization of greater import to him, which is that an esoteric document is more likely to reward the spiritual or magical seeker if it has arisen from the experiences it describes rather than from the imagination of a fiction writer, no matter how much magical literature that writer may have read. If there is no background of experience for the teachings of don Juan (Paul Heelas wrote), then we must judge don Juan (or, I would add, Castaneda) to be “a charlatan engaged in indoctrination.”
Timm gives low marks not only to me but to Hans Peter Duerr, in whose much milder criticism of Castaneda he finds a betrayal of “alternative science.” In the summer of 1963, anthropology student Duerr made a trip to the Southwest to explore rock-caves at Puyé. While waiting for a Greyhound bus in the Albuquerque station, he fell into a conversation with a Tewa yerbatero, an Indian who was very learned about plants. After some small talk, Duerr asked whether the Indian could help him find a family in one of the pueblos north of Santa Fe that would take him in for a few months, because he wanted to learn about the ritual dances in the subterranean kivas. The Indian lifted his head, looked Duerr squarely in the eyes—Duerr does not say, “with a stupendous look”—then smiled and told him the most suitable pueblo for his learning would be “el pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles,” where the university libraries had plenty of information about kiva dances. Stung to the quick, Duerr hopped a bus going west and pursued his further studies of Indian lore “in the libraries of Los Angeles and other unfortunate places”: fit preparation for a critic of Castaneda.
Unlike Mary Douglas, Duerr did not take Castaneda’s arch naiveties for a sign of authenticity. “Even an American college student cannot be so foolish,” he told himself. The many passages portraying Carlos Naïf, Skeptic, Etic, Western-Rationalist he found “stylized for didactic reasons.” The talking animals belonged in fairy tales. Don Juan was too much the noble savage, Eastern guru, or grandfatherly superego. Once he had penetrated Castaneda’s style to glimpse the trickster-teacher beneath, Duerr went on to link validity and authenticity in a sounder way than Douglas had done.
Though he gave Castaneda the benefit of many doubts, Duerr found his magic half-baked at best. Having himself flown on the wings of the Datura plant, Duerr did not recognize Carlos’s affair with the devil’s weed.3 He challenged Carlos’s invincible stupidity in not ever being able to distinguish hallucinations from ordinary reality. He was suspicious of don Juan’s mushroom smoking. He criticized Castaneda for distorting and exploiting the ineffable experience one has at the borders of reality. “Coyote always spoils everything”—he quoted a Paviotso shaman.
Finding invalid content in the books, Duerr inferred their mauthen-ticity from that content. This is not a foolproof kind of inference but (for reasons I shall discuss) it is more likely to succeed than inferring authenticity from validity. The ploy was cutely capsulated in a letter I received from a poet who knew the books were fiction the minute she read don Juan’s statement that a sorcerer can go to the moon but can’t bring back a bag of rocks. “Don Juan would not have said that” she wrote. “He might have said a sorcerer doesn’t bring back a bag of rocks. The difference is crucial, if we are to believe don Juan is impeccable.” Here a poet’s intuition of impeccability cannot tolerate certain discrepancies; so she concludes Castaneda is making up the story. Inauthenticity inferred from invalidity.
Figure 12.1 Categories of Truthfulness
Since validity and authenticity are not wholly independent components of truth, we can try to predict one from the other but, as Mary Douglas has unintentionally shown, such prediction is hazardous. The figure Categories of Truthfulness represents the prediction problem by a four-fold table, in which I have classified eight well-known works as either valid-authentic (4- +), valid-inauthentic (+ -), invalid-authen-tic (- +), or invalid-inauthentic (- -). These assignments are not, of course, absolutely correct, since a work classified in one category may exhibit some characteristics of another category, but I think they are defensible.
Anthropological works will be assigned by most judges to the valid-authentic category, which should not surprise us, since the profession of anthropology is dedicated to producing honest reports that are theoretically correct. Assigning the majority of works to any other category would be an admission of general failure in the field, and so would be rather unlikely. This does not mean that most anthropological works are theoretically faultless or perfectly honest but only that they satisfy some explicit or implicit standard of theoretical correctness and repor-torial honesty. They pass inspection on both counts. How severe the inspection should be is another question, which I shall not address.
The first two works I have chosen to illustrate the valid-authentic category are ethnographic reports. The third, Return to Laughter, is a work of anthropological fiction based on the author’s professional experience in the field. All three are classified as valid, because their ethnographic content has been accepted as generally correct; all three, in other words, agree with what anthropologists think they know. All three are classified as authentic, because no one contends they did not arise from the persons, places, and procedures they describe. The first two claim to be ethnographic reports; the third claims to be a work of fiction, in which the persons and places are fictitious (though realistic) and the procedures combine field observation and fiction writing. All three have been used to teach anthropology. Students enjoy Return to Laughter because of its narrative appeal; professors do not hesitate to use it as a text, because they think it validly portrays experiences of fieldwork and validly describes features of a particular society.
Pseudo-anthropology is also a thriving field; so a great many books could be assigned to the invalid-inauthentic cell of the table. I have chosen one outstanding example, Erich von Däniken’s Gold of the Gods, a tale of archaeological discovery in South America. “To me,” writes von Däniken, “this is the most incredible, fantastic story of the century. It could easily have come straight from the realms of Science Fiction if I had not seen and photographed the incredible truth in person.”
In 1972, von Däniken claims, explorer Juan Moricz personally conducted him on a tour of some tunnels 800 feet below ground, where he saw a hoard of golden artifacts, of which some samples had also been collected at Cuenca, Ecuador, by a priest named Crespi. Challenging the authenticity of von Däniken’s story, Moricz himself later said he had never taken von Däniken through the tunnels but had only told him about them. Challenging its validity, archaeologist Pino Turolla said the eccentric Father Crespi’s “priceless artifacts” were junk made by local Indian smiths out of materials such as the copper toilet bowl float Turolla spotted in the collection. Moricz’s expedition to the caves had found stone carvings but none of the gold promised by a long-standing legend. If von Däniken did not visit the tunnels, his story is inauthentic; if there was no gold in the tunnels, his story is invalid as well (assuming a skeptical theory of El Dorado legends).
The ease with which one can assign many works to the like-signed (+ + and – —) cells of the table may give an impression of strong positive correlation between validity and authenticity, but I think the impression is wrong. Working against such a correlation is the general fallibility of theories and (to a lesser extent) of documented observations, both of which are frequently contradicted by accurate new observations they did not predict. More pertinent to an essay on Castaneda is the fact that any writer of an inauthentic report, whether he is a hoaxer or some less flamboyant cheater, does well to include as much valid material as he can, from whatever source, to make his report more plausible to such informed readers as professional colleagues or dissertation committee members. Conversely, an honest reporter is bound to make some mistakes and can easily make a lot of them. The weakness of theory, the existence of cheaters, and the ubiquity of error must reduce the correlation between authenticity and validity and may reduce it to the point where prediction of individual cases is at best a waste of time.
Honest errors in reports can arise from at least two sources: misperception of events, and unsound interpretation of events correctly perceived. Neither of these bear on authenticity; both bear on validity. I shall discuss them in order.
Misperception of events is no doubt less frequent than misinterpretation of events correctly perceived, but misperception raises questions more obviously relevant to the books of Castaneda, which offer tracts on social-science interpretation under the guise of stories about an apprentice’s perceptions and quasi-perceptions of at least two kinds of non-social worlds, an ordinary (though not realistic) desert world and a nonordinary world of sorcery or magical vision. Since Castaneda substitutes visualizing for conceptualizing, thus turning Edward Sapir’s social world into don Juan’s natural and visionary worlds, we are obliged to consider the hazards of misperception in social science.
A paradigmatic illustration of seeing what is not there and not seeing what is there comes reportedly from a Viennese psychiatrist, Alexander Pilcz, who documented the East Indian rope trick by recording it with a motion picture camera. As the camera turned, Pilcz and several hundred other witnesses saw the following sequence of events. A fakir and a small boy walked into their midst, and the fakir tossed a coil of rope up into the air. The rope stood by itself. The boy climbed up the rope and disappeared at the top, whence his arms, legs, trunk, and head soon fell separately to the ground. The fakir collected these remains in a basket, climbed the rope carrying the basket, and disappeared at the top. After a decent interval, the fakir and the smiling, reassembled boy descended the rope. The rope fell like a pole and shattered. The broken pieces formed themselves into a rope again. The fakir and the boy took a bow.
Like the rest of the audience, the previously skeptical Pilcz was very impressed by this performance, but when the film was later projected, it showed the following sequence of events. The fakir tossed the coil of rope up into the air, whence it promptly fell down again in the normal way. For the rest of the time, the fakir and the boy stood beside the fallen rope doing nothing at all.
In Castaneda’s terms, we have here two separate realities: a nonordinary reality experienced by Pilcz and the audience during the performance, and an ordinary reality experienced by Pilcz when the film was projected. We also have an opportunity to rank them or choose between them if we like. Players of the philosophy game may decline to choose, declaring their full satisfaction with the mere existence side by side of two kinds of reality. Occultists will no doubt say the fakir didn’t want his trick recorded on film, and so projected an alternative sequence of images into the camera by thoughtography; if they are well-read occultists, they will mention the name of Ted Serios, a documented thoughtographer. Scientists, including anthropologists, will be inclined to take the film version as the correct one and the experience of the audience as an hallucination; if they like vacuous explanations, they may say the hallucination was caused by mass hypnosis. Anomalists, such as parapsychologists, will take the film version as a normal standard, but they may suspect what the audience saw had some substance to it all the same, of a kind not understood by them or anyone.
Well, what actually happened? Did the rope stand stiff or fall down? Did the boy climb up or remain on the ground? To answer such questions one needs a reality framework, and one needs to prefer that framework to any other. Though metaphysicians may declare they cannot answer such questions, practical people have no difficulty answering them. First, however, one must subscribe to the reality framework that is most familiar to everyone, Castaneda’s ordinary reality, which philosophers William James and, later, Alfred Schütz called the “paramount reality.” I have called it the “boss reality,” because if you don’t do what it wants to do, it will knock you flat, and eventually it will knock you flat whether you do what it wants you to or not. Don Quixote’s giants were Sancho Panza’s windmills, but either way they unhorsed Quixote.
However much they may like to contemplate standing ropes, flailing giants, or heads turning into crows, scientists have to keep at least one eye on Pilcz’s film, Panza’s windmills, or the ordinary world of Carlos-Skeptic. The rules of science require them to ground any investigation in the ordinary, communicable reality, as Castaneda purported to do when he assigned calendar dates to the events in his imaginary fieldwork. Scientists are not forbidden to study or enter alternative realities but only required to tie their research at some points to the ordinary world. Apparent hallucinations like the rope trick and apparent anomalies or paranormal events like ESP and psychokinesis are quite acceptable objects for scientific study. Charles Tart even proposes that drugged or hypnotized experimenters might sometimes succeed where those in normal states of consciousness have failed. But whatever phenomena science approaches and whatever means it uses, its procedures and reports must to some extent be grounded in the ordinary reality. “The closed sub-universe of scientific reality,” wrote Alfred Schütz, “although necessarily different from that of common sense, of everyday life is, also necessarily, tied to the process of empirical verification within the com-mon-sense world in which we live and which we take for granted as our paramount reality” (Schütz 1964:152). If a report is to have any authenticity, the narrator must have known in the ordinary way who conducted the experiment or observation, where it was conducted, and what means where used. To take an extreme example, a report of a dream must include the information that it was a dream; a dream reported as fieldwork is not authentic.
The fact that these points need to be discussed at all shows the recent influence of phenomenology, reintroducing the old idea that private thoughts are data for social science. Contemporary phenomenologists may object to this simple characterization of their methods, but I think some such conception has rendered certain social scientists incapable of distinguishing—or has helped them to avoid distinguishing—Castaneda’s allegories from legitimate field reports. An erstwhile member of one of his graduate committees and still his stout defender, Theodore Graves said, “Castaneda’s purpose was not to write factual ethnography but to convey the subjective experience of confronting a radical challenge to his notions of reality” (in Strachan 1979:91). Does this mean, I asked, that the don Juan story is creative writing having no necessary connection with an actual old Indian? No, he replied, though Castaneda organized, interpreted, and presented his facts creatively, he is a factual reporter. A few more factual reporters like that, and social science will be finished. In offering his cultural materialism as the paradigm for social science, Marvin Harris found in Castaneda the perfect club with which to belabor phenomenologists. By doing fieldwork in his head for fourteen years, Castaneda became the phenomenologist to end phenomenology.
Despite a renewed interest in what is real and how to recognize it, a more likely source of error and target of criticism is still the misinterpretation of ordinary events correctly perceived. Colin Turnbull’s The Mountain People is a famous target, which I have assigned to the invalid-authentic cell of the table. Turnbull lived in Uganda with a starving tribe called the Ik, whose behavior he found utterly repulsive. The experience distressed him deeply, and he wrote a very successful book about it, which told the story of his distress and described the horrible life of the Ik.
The Mountain People is authentic because nobody has said Turnbull invented his observations. Fredrik Barth did accuse him of creating “a systematically false record” of his fieldwork, but Turnbull indignantly and successfully rebutted that charge, while Grant McCall wrote: “I do not wish ... to imply . . . that I believe it to be a fiction. I am not . . . questioning the observations that he makes, or his competence to record them. Where I differ from Turnbull is in the interpretation of these data.”
Turnbull admits he was baffled by the Ik. Their suffering laughter seemed bizarre to him. “I am simply not qualified to assess it,” he wrote; “all I have done is to attempt to describe it.” Having said, as an interpretation of the way he saw them living together, that the Ik had “no culture,” Turnbull then granted that their gregariousness and laughter might have been signs of culture he had failed to grasp. “I . . . have been in other pretty trying circumstances,” he said, “but have never quite lost my anthropological cool as I did with the Ik.”
Though Turnbull’s critics said his book painted an invalid portrait of the Ik, some of them praised him for giving a picture both authentic and valid of the trouble a fieldworker can get into and the emotional turmoil he may have to endure. More than that, some said all fieldwork is fraught with difficulties like Turnbull’s, if usually less severe, and they admired his courageous exposure of trials and shortcomings common to all fieldworkers. A. K. Mark gave Turnbull and Castaneda similar credit for examining the fieldworker as closely as the informant; Carlos-Skeptic’s perennial quandaries were likened to Turnbull’s frank confessions. On a less positive note, Vincent Crapanzano dismissed Turnbull and Castaneda as shallow popularizers duped by idioms of the age, Turnbull by “facile politics,” Castaneda by “the ‘heavy’ mysticism of the young drop-out.” Beyond such similarities Mark and Crapanzano over-looked an important dissimilarity. Turnbull’s fieldwork was conducted in the ordinary world, and a film of it by Professor Pilcz would have shown the Ik. Carlos’s fieldwork was conducted in a world of fantasy, and a documentary film of Castaneda’s life from 1960-1974 would not have shown don Juan. With the exception of those who will say don Juan could make himself invisible to Pilcz’s camera, this brings us to the fourth cell of the table, where Castaneda’s first three books are (perhaps too favorably, but necessarily for this discussion) classified as valid-inauthentic. I omit his fourth and fifth books, which are anthropologically less valid.
Castaneda’s inauthenticity has been, I think, conclusively established in various ways by me and Hans Sebald. Contradictions within the supposed field reports, and between the reports and the desert environment they claim, convince most readers that the story did not arise from the persons, places, and procedures it describes. Additional evidence comes from many instances of obvious foraging in other people’s published works. By now the more interesting question is how much and what kinds of validity the don Juan books have.
One has little difficulty finding valid ethnographic content in Castaneda’s initial trilogy, some of which apparently derives from the very books by Opler and Myerhoff that occupy the valid-authentic cell of the table. Looking at the name Opler in the Alleglossary (a list of published sources Castaneda apparently used to ground his fictions in other people’s facts)4 we see ten items listed, of which those titled Campfire and Place demonstrate literary influence, while those titled Enemies, Gesture, Guardian, Power, and Rule contain ideas found in the trilogy, though they may fall short of proving imitation. Anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt, who wrote the foreword to The Teachings of Don Juan, was very impressed by don Juan’s parable about the four enemies of a man of knowledge. While I think Goldschmidt should have felt more skepticism about don Juan’s authenticity, or should have been more frank about the skepticism he felt, I recognize that the similarity between Opler’s and don Juan’s treatment of fear, clarity, power, and old age, which readily confirms the suspicions of a skeptic like me, can equally bolster the confidence of a believer (perhaps like Goldschmidt) when taken as signs not of imitation but of cultural diffusion or universal mind.
Turning to the name Myerhoff, we see seventeen items listed, of which ten are common to Castaneda’s trilogy and Peyote Hunt. None is particularly evidential, which helps to explain why Myerhoff, before reading Castaneda’s Journey, found confirmations of her own work in the trilogy rather than imitations. When she read Tales of Power, however, Myerhoff was offended by what Castaneda had done with tonal and nagual, “two beautiful indigenous concepts” she thought he had utterly perverted. To Indians, tonal and nagual are fateful or metamorphic animals; to don Juan they are quasi-Buddhist notions of potentiality and actuality, or latency and manifestation. The nothing (nagual) that creates the something (tonal) is recognizably an East Indian idea. In Amerindian cultures, the world is explained as a product of transformation, not of creation ex nihilo; nature is fashioned out of dust by a superhuman potter,5, 6 not manifested out of nothing by an indescribable principle. Encountering don Juan’s oriental abstractions in Tales of Power, some formerly sympathetic anthropologists sadly concluded Castaneda had abandoned legitimate anthropology for phony mysticism, while at the same time mystically inclined readers were rejoicing over don Juan’s finally getting down to business and giving them the true teachings. Whether a report is valid or not depends on the theory to which it is referred.
Much earlier, skeptical anthropologists had discovered invalid ethnographic contents in the trilogy as well. Most obvious was the so-called Yaqui way of knowledge spuriously offered by the subtitle of The Teachings. Despite authoritative declarations by Yaqui specialists Edward Spicer, Ralph Beals, and Jane Holden Kelley that the don Juan story had nothing to do with Yaqui culture, the Yaqui misnomer refused to die. Non-anthropologists and careless anthropologists went on and on referring to don Juan as “an old Yaqui sorcerer,” and as late as 1977 the American Anthropologist complaisantly reproduced Simon and Schuster’s full-page advertisement calling The Teachings and A Separate Reality studies of “religious practices of the Yaqui Indians,” which they certainly are not. Castaneda’s disingenuous disclaimers of any intent to suggest don Juan’s way of knowledge was really a Yaqui way made the misnomer all the more inexcusable, both originally and in perpetuity.
Where did the misnomer come from? I should guess don Juan’s vague connection with the Yaqui tribe was a device for superficially imitating genuine ethnography while getting round certain requirements such as travel to the field and the burdensome labor of cultural descriptions. The Yaqui were not so far away that an impoverished student might not claim to visit them in his automobile. When his first committee chairman, Ralph Beals, grew leery of thousand-mile weekend round trips, Castaneda simply abandoned him and went looking for a less critical chairman. As for cultural incongruities, the Yaquis had been exiled from their homeland for many years, so don Juan might have picked up all sorts of non-Yaqui knowledge during his travels in other parts of Mexico. Tolerance of the Yaqui misnomer by the University of California Press is harder to explain, but I have tried to make sense of it in chapter 13 of The Don Juan Papers.
Next is don Juan’s so-called sorcery. If the old wizard wants to call himself a brujo (sorcerer) or even a stockholder, that is his idiosyncratic privilege, but when Castaneda calls him a sorcerer, that is a scholarly or perhaps anti-scholarly error. As Beals made clear, don Juan is not a sorcerer in any accepted anthropological sense. Sorcerers are feared and hated by other members of their community because they employ evil spirits or magical projectiles to make people sick; don Juan is a hermit who has no enemies and employs his plant allies to discover other worlds and ontological essences. Far from being a sorcerer, he is a rather benign, mystical magician.
Other errors can be listed. Indians do not “sew” lizards with agave fiber and cholla thorn. Before The Teachings, they refrained from smoking mushrooms. Indians do not quote Lama Govinda on trance running and, so far as anyone knows, have not learned to levitate beside waterfalls by means of tractor beams projecting from the solar-plexus chakra. They don’t bother to stalk rabbits bare handed, and they don’t call peyote “mescal.”
In view of such fallacies, the reader may think it unfair to classify Castaneda’s trilogy as valid while Turnbull must languish among the invalids. I justify this merely illustrative classification in the following way: considering Turnbull’s professional respectability and actual fieldwork, The Mountain People is surprisingly invalid; considering Castaneda’s hoaxing and don Juan’s insubstantiality, the trilogy is surprisingly valid, as a reading of the Alleglossary will show. The same cannot be said of Tales of Power or Second Ring, whose crude distortions of Indian culture belong with von Dániken’s priceless toilet float. Whether Tales or Ring deserve any credit as valid mystical writing is another question, which is answered in The Don Juan Papers, where Philip Staniford croons a mellow Yes, while Agehananda Bharati sounds a thundering No (de Mille 1990:147-153).
What are the hazards of prediction between authenticity and validity? Having no actuarial tables, I can offer only my common sense opinions. Within the constraints imposed by weakness of theory and ubiquity of error, a report accepted as authentic has a fair chance of being generally valid. Conversely, since hoaxers and other consistent cheaters who can produce convincing reports are greatly outnumbered by reasonably honest reporters, a report accepted as valid is likely to be authentic. This sounds reassuring, but it means that skillful hoaxers and cheaters will be accepted along with the honest reporters. Castaneda profited from this ambiguity.
A report judged inauthentic (from evidence bearing directly on authenticity) may be filled with garbage like Gold of the Gods or only larded with it like Castaneda’s trilogy. An inauthentic report is not likely to be generally valid; reporters who misrepresent their sources will not hesitate, when it suits them, to distort their sources’ information.
These three kinds of prediction, if made at all, have little utility. Maybe Indians smoke mushrooms, maybe they don’t. Neither certain knowledge that Castaneda is a hoaxer nor firm belief that he is not can give us the answer. Conversely, Castaneda may be an honest reporter, but his correct assertion that sorcerers try to steal each other’s souls does not prove him honest: he may have read about soul stealing in Michael Harner’s “Jívaro Souls.” The one prediction I put stock in is predicting inauthenticity from invalidity in those cases where many invalid observations (rather than interpretations) are found. In The Don Juan Papers, Robert Carneiro carries out this exercise while debunking a popular adventure tale called Wizard of the Upper Amazon. Carneiro succeeds because he has a lot of prior information that bears on validity and finds in the book many observations that contradict his prior information.7 He concludes the adventurer was a liar.
Owing to the general weakness of theory, even this fourth kind of prediction can lead one astray. Elsa First’s naive skeptics rejected the don Juan books because they reported paranormal events. If ESP and psychokinesis are self-evidently absurd, the books can be judged inauthentic (or perhaps merely invalid, where an honest observer may have been fooled) because of this absurd content. But if ESP and psychokinesis are not absurd, don Juan could be debunked for the wrong reason.
To help in such assessments, sociologist Marcello Truzzi systematically distinguishes narrators, narratives, and events. Narrators can be credible like Opler, Myerhoff, Bowen, and Turnbull or noncredible like Castaneda and von Däniken. Narratives can be plausible like (for the most part) The Teachings of Don Juan or implausible like A Separate Reality (which readers attuned to story-telling quickly recognized as fiction because of the manner in which the story was told). Events can be ordinary like Professor Pilcz’s film of the rope falling down or extraordinary like his vision of the rope standing up. The three dimensions are formally independent.
Applying Truzzi’s scheme to the don Juan books, one can say that in 1968 a credible Castaneda published a fairly plausible Teachings describing the ordinary existence of a rather unusual hermit. In 1977 a notoriously noncredible Castaneda published a somewhat implausible Second Ring of Power describing very extraordinary events, such as materializations, levitations, and out-of-body combat. During those ten years Castaneda grew less and less credible as more and more of his autobiographical anecdotes contradicted independent records and each other. His trilogy was widely reclassified as implausible when Castaneda’s Journey analyzed its internal contradictions. His tales grew more and more extraordinary as he turned away from anthropology and toward occultism. It is instructive to note, however, that Second Ring, his most occult book up to 1977, is implausible not because of its very extraordinary events but because of a few minor contradictions in the text. The trilogy, which contains many more contradictions that Second Ring, is therefore much less plausible, as an account. Application of Truzzi’s scheme should reduce errors of naive skepticism and naive subscription alike.
Discussing validity and authenticity for months with various Juanists and Castanedists, I have met some typical objections, which I shall now list, along with my answers.
Inventiveness is limited. Much of what Castaneda claims must actually have happened to him, because no one could invent such outlandish adventures. Answer: The objector is obviously not a reader of fantasy or science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke has not been to the moon, but he did write 2001; astronauts have been there but did not write it. A Voyage to Arcturus is far more outlandish than Tales of Power or Second Ring, yet no one believes David Lindsay went to Arcturus or had the visions he describes, except as a writer has visions. After reading the potsherd of Amenartas telling of the pillar of fire that brings eternal youth to the queen who stands in its flames, L. Horace Holley, fictive narrator of She, A History of Adventure, says: “My first idea [was] that my poor friend, when demented, had composed the whole tale, though it scarcely seemed likely that such a story could have been invented by anybody. It was too original.” “The idea that I concocted a person like don Juan is inconceivable,” Castaneda said. “He is hardly the kind of figure my European intellectual tradition would have led me to invent. The truth is much stranger. I didn’t create anything. I am only a reporter.” In the tradition of fantasy writing, Castaneda voices straight-faced doubts that anyone could invent the marvelous tale he has just invented.
Castaneda is in good company. Colin Turnbull writes imaginatively, but no one has accused him of making up his data. Answer: My point exactly: no one (except Barth, who was rebutted) has accused Turnbull, many have accused Castaneda. While both have been praised as bringers of truth and condemned as purveyors of falsity, Turnbull has been praised for authenticity and condemned for invalidity, whereas Castaneda has been praised for validity and condemned for inauthenticity. One is accused of honest mistakes, the other of slyly hiding his sources.
Fact is fiction. Since both informants and fieldworkers are rather unreliable, no ethnography is strictly factual. Answer. Error, misinterpretation, and fudging are not the same thing as gross fabrication. A tolerable degree of spuriosity can be distinguished from an intolerable degree. The don Juan books are accused not of being unstrictly factual but of being strictly unfactual.
Castaneda’s basic claims have not been disproved. We have no conclusive evidence that Castaneda has not experienced odd events. Answer: Neither have we conclusive proof that the mysterious white man who two-thousand years ago walked from tribe to tribe throughout America healing the sick, raising the dead, and teaching Jesus’ gospel in a thousand languages was not in fact Jesus. The objection puts the burden of proof not on Castaneda, where it belongs, but on the community of scholars, where it does not belong.
In some form or other, don Juan could exist. It doesn’t matter if don Juan was not exactly as he appears in the books. Castaneda could have had one or more teachers whose essence he portrayed in the figure of don Juan. Answer: The vaguer don Juan becomes, the more likely his existence. If he was just an ordinary man Castaneda met, then certainly he exists. The don Juan books, however, are not at all vague. They are exact, and for the purposes of science at least must be judged in their exactness. The only don Juan we know is the one Castaneda gave us. If he is really a combination of Maria Sabina, Suzuki, and Ramon Medina, one is better off reading Mushrooms, Russia, and History, What is Zenl and Peyote Hunt.
No coin has only one side. Insofar as the don Juan books are valid, they must have arisen from authentic observation and are, in that sense, authentic. Validity cannot be divorced from authenticity. Answer: Distinguishing wives from husbands is not divorcing them. Seed cannot be divorced from flower, yet anyone can sort seeds from flowers without error. To say, correctly, that authenticity and validity are not completely independent is not to say we cannot formally distinguish them as components of truthfulness and assess them by different tests. When information is sparse, we may not be able to test them, but that is not an excuse for discarding the categories or the tests. Error terms in mathematical prediction do not cause us to renounce predictions; on the contrary, they make us confident of prediction where error terms are small and cause us to look for more information where they are large. Predictions and judgments do not have to be perfect to be worth making. Counterfeit coins have two sides, too. The don Juan books do not acquire any authenticity of their own by incorporating the valid contents of authentic books by other writers.
All’s fair in samadhi and satori. Mystical experiences cannot be adequately described in factual reports. Castaneda was trying to communicate the ineffable, so he had to resort to novelistic interpretations. Answer: This objection confuses the ineffability of the mystical experience (which is a matter of validity, or how the experience is to be correctly described and understood) with the question whether the narrator himself actually had the experience (a matter of authenticity). However ineffable the experience, there is no intrinsic difficulty in saying whether one has had it. Saying one has had it when one has not had it is inauthentic reporting. Since so many of Castaneda’s falsifiable claims have in fact been falsified (such as the claim that his chronology was authentic or the claim that his adventures occurred in the Sonoran desert), we are ill advised to gratuitously credit his unfalsifiable claims (such as claims of having mystical experiences).
Fieldnotes are private. Never in all my years as a graduate student did a member of the faculty ask to see my fieldnotes. Fieldnotes belong to the person who writes them. Castaneda had every right to keep his fieldnotes to himself. Answer: Fieldnotes are private in the sense that they are the literary property of the writer and are not to be published without the writer’s consent. On the other hand, they are public in the sense that anyone who enters the scientific community to do research undertakes an obligation to preserve his data intact and unaltered, to submit them for examination when asked to do so by qualified colleagues with a legitimate scientific interest in them, and, if there is opportunity, to deposit them with a suitable common custodian, as in a museum or library, when he can no longer preserve them or no longer wants them. Fieldnotes are the primary data of anthropology. They are part of the scientific record. Refusal to submit them for examination violates the norms of scientific conduct and amounts to prima facie evidence of fraud. The fact the fieldnotes are sometimes (defensibly or indefensibly) taken for granted does not reduce the fieldworker’s obligation to serve as their custodian in the interest of science. While your committee obviously trusted you, as most committees trust most candidates, Castaneda’s first chairman grew suspicious. “I pressed him to show me some of his fieldnotes,” Beals wrote, “but he became evasive and finally dropped from sight.” Unlike some of his successors, Beals acted responsibly to forestall scientific fraud. Competent, responsible examination of Castaneda’s fieldnotes must have resulted in his disqualification from candidacy, or at least in the disqualification of Journey to Ixtlan as a dissertation reporting anthropological fieldwork, whether or not it might have been accepted on some other basis—say, as a literary work of interest to anthropologists. The committee members who did not ask to see the fieldnotes before signing what purported to be an account of fieldwork, or who examined them and found nothing wrong with them, were either negligent or, as Beals put it, naive.
9. Personal knowledge. All this talk about Carlos’s missing fieldnotes is asinine. I have seen them. They exist. Or did before they were destroyed when his basement flooded. I saw them in many notebooks and boxes during many wonderful hours in 1965 when Carlos and I were discussing both his apprenticeship to don Juan and my fieldwork among the Scotoma tribe, which Carlos always seemed to understand better than I did, though he said he had never visited the Scotoma. Wherever I had a blind spot, Carlos instantly helped me to see through it. I will always be grateful to him, and I resent these attempts by people who have never even met him to blacken the name of a sincere, studious, gifted man with accusations of fraud that must be motivated more by a desire to make a fast buck out of a bad book than to make any contribution to knowledge. Answer: By 1965 Castaneda had been working on his opus for five years. His habit was to write in notebooks, so by 1965 he had a pretty big collection of them. Since he was writing about imaginary fieldwork, his manuscript looked a lot like fieldnotes. As far as I have been able to discover, however, only twelve pages of those “fieldnotes” have ever been examined by a skeptic, the pages he sent to Gordon Wasson, which I examine again in chapter 40 of The Don Juan Papers. Here I need only say that those pages correspond with certain passages of The Teachings in just the way an early version of an invented story corresponds with a later version. No careful, informed examiner would have taken them for fieldnotes. You were inexperienced in those days and had no reason to doubt Castaneda’s sincerity, but now you have an opportunity to realize that you have known one of the great hoaxers of the century.
Subjectivity is science. Some who are convinced that Journey to Ixtlan describes imaginary events accuse Castaneda of professional malpractice in offering the book as a dissertation, but they do not understand the latitude of science. It would be malpractice only if he did not intend to give an honest account of events as he experienced them. The entire text could be the product of a psychotic episode and still be an acceptable phenomenological account. De Mille’s proof that the events are imaginary is, in my opinion, a purely speculative web of inference, but even if Castaneda’s committee had read the argument in 1972 and been convinced by it, they could not have proved an intent to deceive. Castaneda could still have believed he was telling the truth, and therefore, would have been telling the truth, about what he experienced. Answer: Phenomenological accounts may be useful in science, but their use does not abrogate the rule that a scientific report must somewhere be tied to ordinary reality. Though they may be of interest to scientists and may deserve academic recognition in some special category, subjective accounts that have no explicit objective framework at all are not scientific reports and should not be confused with, or endorsed as, scientific reports by doctoral committees. If Castaneda’s committee suspected he was a gifted madman, they should not have treated what they thought were his ravings as though they were simply another sober report from a sane fieldworker. Nor was it their duty to prove him either psychotic or dishonest; the burden of proof was on him. The contradictions between Teachings and Ixtlan were sufficient grounds for disqualifying the dissertation as a scientific report.
Fiction is truer than fact. Fictionalized treatments add dimensions of truth that factual reports inevitably lack. Answer: This is a fashionable but tricky proposition. Rodney Needham urged fellow ethnographers to strive for the empathic penetration and literary discipline displayed in novels by George Eliot, Gorki, and Dostoyevsky. Thus, he said, their interpretations might partake of the humane significance imaginatively sought in art and metaphysics. Despite “professional misgivings on ethnographic grounds,” Needham at first found in The Teachings “a remarkable example” of such striving, exhibiting “a gift that is peculiarly apt” to the interpretation of alien forms of experience, but he later had second thoughts (1985:188-218). As the novelist needs to observe like an ethnographer, so the ethnographer needs to write like a novelist, if he is to capture the elusive, fragile, mythic cultural products of the archetypical unconscious mind. By seeming to fulfill such aspirations, Castaneda elicited praise from at least two outstanding anthropologists, first a rather reckless endorsement from Mary Douglas, later the circumspect and short-lived appreciation of Rodney Needham. Though I will readily agree that Dostoyevsky is a more sensitive interpreter of human behavior than the typical scientific anthropologist, many fiction writers distort behavior as much as they portray it. Bowen and Castaneda both wrote fiction, but we have no reason to assume their fictions are equally true to life. Castaneda’s cultural cargo is a collection of oddities whimsically adapted from several disparate traditions. His dramatic personages are broad caricatures synthesized “for didactic reasons.” Don Juan embodies not only the animistic, concrete thinker I call “don Indian” but also the academic abstractionist I call “the Indian don.” An allegorical struggle between direct knowledge and rational discourse is frozen solid for ten years, as Carlos-Apprentice and Carlos-Skeptic fail to merge into one person. While Castaneda offered this miracle play as a factual memoir, Laura Bohannan (writing as Elenore Bowen) turned her ethnography into fiction. If she had then published her novel as a factual report, she would have gained nothing in validity but lost everything in authenticity. Eventually her book would have wound up in a bin with many other novels masquerading as history. False true-stories are, of course, inauthentic by definition. Beyond that, as Clifford Irving, David Rorvik, and Jay Anson have amply shown, they are often also massively invalid: bad company for a good book like Return to Laughter.
While novels as well as ethnography can be both valid and authentic, novelistic ethnography raises questions about trustworthiness and utility. The reader is not sure what kind of information he is getting. If, for example, I toss off a few cocktail comments about babies playing with scorpions, your ears will prick up and you will immediately wish to be told whether I am novelistically evoking the fact that babies often engage in dangerous play, or trying to warn you without alarming the other guests that I can see your very own baby sitting this minute on the flagstones in the garden playing with something that looks to me very much as though it might be a scorpion. In the one case, you will sit back in your chair and hear the rest of my ruminations; in the other, you will leap to your feet and rush to save the baby. Such distinctions matter. If don Juan ever existed, some anthropologist besides Castaneda should look into his existence, or into the existence of similar novel sources of ancient wisdom. If don Juan is only a plastic medicine man, a literary device for our allegorical instruction, field trips to find him can be left to hippies and other new-age enthusiasts (see chapter 10).
Scientists need to know whether they are dealing with credible or non- credible reporters. “Is this writer a liar?” is neither a trivial question nor one that should be evaded by appeals to the ineffability of mystical experience, the universality of phenomena, cultural diffusion, the truthfulness of novels, or the problem of subjectivity in the philosophy of science. It is a question scientists must sometimes ask if they don’t wish to be led astray.
Castaneda is a fit object of such questioning, for though he collects valid ethnic elements, he likes to play around with them. For instance, his spirit-catcher, a loop of cord don Juan plucks to call out the spirit of the water hole, combines two devices described respectively by Furst and Meyerhoff (de Mille 1990:432): the soul-catcher, a loop of rope a shaman carries to collar wandering souls, and the bow drum, a musical bow and arrow with which a Huichol shaman warns the invisible ancient ones that a party of peyoteros was approaching. Such literary invention may be art, but it is neither science nor valid ethnography. The fact that a handful of specialists can see through don Juan’s spirit-catcher to the original elements beneath will not help a myriad of trusting undergraduates who learn from Castaneda’s books about a supposed community of mystical magicians quaintly miscalling themselves sorcerers and wandering around an air-conditioned desert positing koans and twanging their loops.
As validity comes originally from authenticity, so invalidity springs often, if unpredictably, from inauthenticity. Coyote is a tricky teacher. “In parts, at least, of California,” wrote Hartley Burr Alexander, “his deeds are represented as almost invariably beneficent in their outcomes; he is a true, if often unintentional culture hero” (1964:227). To keep the California faith, then, let me add that, intentionally or not, by forcing us to look anew into the subtle relationships between validity and authenticity, Castaneda has made a substantial contribution to social science. From these ideas, one might even say, we are likely to get advances in anthropology.
This essay was reprinted with the author’s permission from the new edition of his book, The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990). Complete sources and citations for this chapter are given in the references and notes for chapter 6 of the The Don Juan Papers (de Mille 1990). Here, as elsewhere, I distinguish Carlos from Castaneda. Castaneda is the author of best-selling books about Carlos and don Juan; Carlos is a young anthropology student, whose amazing story is told in books by Castaneda. They are not the same person. Carlos was born in Brazil in 1935, whereas Castaneda was born in Peru in 1925. Carlos’s father was a professor of literature named C. N. Castaneda, but Castaneda’s father was a goldsmith named C. B. Arana. Carlos’s native language was Portuguese; Castaneda’s was Spanish. And so on.
Notes
1 See Alice Kehoe’s thoughts about “the natural mind” and Euro-American fantasies about Naturvolker in chapter 10.
2 Modern anthropologists have more than a little reason to be wary of “worldwide ethnological correspondences.” See R. H. Barnes’s essay, Chapter 11, which stresses that knowing the special circumstances of key informants—like don Juan—is of critical importance in assessing the merits of raw ethnographic data.
3 Confirming Duerr’s impression, Siegel (1981) finds that Castaneda’s purported experiences with psychodelic mushrooms and Jimson weed (Datura, or Devil’s Weed) are psychopharmacologically invalid, and therefore not to be accepted as authentic.
4 See the Alleglossary in The Don Juan Papers.
5 An example of transformatory creation is offered by Sam Gill in chapter 8, where God, having no place to put his foot down in a watery world, scratches up sand from the bottom and makes the land and rocks.
6 See note 3 for Siegel’s similar inference.
References
Alexander, Hartley Burr. 1964. The Mythology of All Races. Volume X. North American. (First published 1916; reprinted in 1944 and 1964). New York: Cooper Square.
de Mille, Richard. 1976. Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory. Santa Barbara: Capra Press.
de Mille, Richard. 1990. The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Needham, Rodney. 1985. Exemplars. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schütz, Alfred. 1964. “Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality.” In Collected Papers II. Nijhoff. 135-158.
Siegel, Ronald K. 1981. “Inside Castaneda’s Pharmacy.” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 13:325-331.
Strachan, Don. 1977. Reviews of Castaneda’s Journey. Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 6.
Strachan, Don. 1979. “In Search of Don Juan.” New West 4(3):90-l.