On September 18, 2003, I happened upon this historical marker in Crawford County, Ohio, on my way from Nevada to Mount Vernon. It’s where William Crawford’s army fought on its retreat from Ohio in 1782. Crawford himself had been captured the previous day, and was later tortured to death near Upper Sandusky. It’s a well-known story. The torture was largely a revenge for the Gnadenhutten massacre.

Andrew Frank’s excellent book about Creeks and Southerners reminded me of it. In tonight’s reading I came to a section (still in the Introduction) where he tells about four options the Creeks would choose from with those people they captured. These options were adoption into the tribe, torture to death, slavery, or ransom.

I have a bone to pick with the way Frank lists them, not because I want to pick on Frank in particular, but because he’s following a pattern that is used a lot by anthropologists and historians these days. He writes:

Barber [captured in 1818] failed to recognize the other two options available, slavery and ransom, but she did identify the two extremes of captivity: complete adoption and ritualized torture and death.

The bone is that word “ritualized.” Any time a modern anthropologist talks about torture, it seems s/he gets all defensive about it and puts that word “ritualized” in front of it. I suspect it’s because we all want to be cultural relativists (at least I do) but we shrink from the implications of torture. So we insert a word to make it seem mechanical, and to distance the practitioners from it — perhaps making them less responsible for the action. “Nothing against you personally, but this is the way we always handle cases like yours,” as they skin the captive and press burning coals on his genitals.

I don’t disagree that these torture precedings were ritualistic. But so were the adoption proceedings, and just about everything else. If anthropologists are going to use the word ritualistic for the one, they should use it for the other.

And even if the proceedings were ritualistic, that doesn’t mean the practitioners weren’t heavily involved emotionally. Frank quotes Barber on the subject of adoption:

If deemed adoptable, Eunice Barber noticed that each prisoner “was unbound, taken by the hands, led to the cabin of the person into whose family he was to be adopted, and received with all imaginable marks of kindness. He would then be “treated as a friend and a brother,” and the new families “appeared soon to love him with the same tenderness as if he stood in the place of their deceased friend.”

But this sort of intense emotional involvement was true for both adoption and torture. In fact, Frank makes my case better than I could.

One European American resident among the Creeks succinctly summed up the stark dichotomy between torture and adoption, “Hospitable and kind as these people are to friends, they are, if possible, still more inveterate to enemies.”

One of the reasons I am fascinated by these stories of Indian captives is because they demonstrates a type of intense interpersonal relationship that seems no longer to be possible in our modern welfare-industrial society. It’s a type of relationship that even back in the late 18th century made some white captives prefer life as Indians to life in the society where they had been born . I read these stories, wondering how we could get some of that back into our modern societies.

But there was also the torture. Whether the two somehow necessarily go together is an interesting question. One thing to note is that there wasn’t complete agreement among native peoples about the acceptability of torture, at least if we are to believe the stories about Tecumseh.

So although it’s best to at times step outside these stories and societies and analyze them dispassionately without imposing our own values on them, at other times we can’t help but be be drawn in, value systems and all, and get involved in the rightness and wrongness of what happened. Either way, the word ritualized isn’t particularly relevant, and isn’t going to do what I suspect anthropologists are trying to do with it.

(Minor edits, 7 hrs after posting)