(9 of 11)
For that was certainly Castaneda's situation in the summer of 1960: a young Peruvian student with limited ambitions. There is no reason to doubt his account of how the work began. "I wanted to enter graduate school and do a good job of being an academic, and I knew that if I could publish a little paper beforehand, I'd have it made." One of his teachers at U.C.L.A., Professor Clement Meighan, had interested him in shamanism. Castaneda decided the easiest field would be ethnobotany, the classification of psychotropic plants used by sorcerers. Then came Don Juan.
The visits to the Southwest and the Mexican desert gradually became the spine of Castaneda's life. Impressed by his work, the U.C.L.A. staff offered him encouragement. Recalls Professor Meighan: "Carlos was the type of student a teacher waits for." Sociology Professor Harold Garfinkel, one of the fathers of ethnomethodology, gave Castaneda constant stimulus and harsh criticism. After his first peyote experience (August 1961), Castaneda presented Garfinkel with a long "analysis" of his visions. "Garfinkel said, 'Don't explain to me. You are a nobody. Just give it to me straight and in detail, the way it happened. The richness of detail is the whole story of membership.'" The abashed student spent several years revising his thesis, living pff odd jobs as taxi driver and delivery boy, and sent it in again. Garfinkel was still unimpressed. "He didn't like my efforts to explain Don Juan's behavior psychologically. 'Do you want to be the darling of Esalen?' he asked." Castaneda rewrote the thesis a third time.
Like the various versions of Castaneda's life, the books are an invitation to consider contradictory kinds of truth. At the core of his books and Don Juan's method is, of course, the assumption that reality is not an absolute. It comes to each of us culturally determined, packaged in advance. "The world has been rendered coherent by our description of it," Castaneda argues, echoing Don Juan. "From the moment of birth, this world has been described for us. What we see is just a description."
Multiverse. In short, what men take as reality, as well as their notions of the world's rational possibilities, is determined by consensus, in effect by a social contract that varies from culture to culture. Through history, the road has been hard for any person who questions its fine print—especially if, like Castaneda, he tries to persuade others to accept his vision.
Anthropology by its nature deals with different descriptions, and hence literally with separate realities, within different cultures. As Castaneda's colleague Edmund Carpenter of Adelphi College notes, "Native people have many separate realities. They believe in a multiverse, or a biverse, but not a universe as we do." Yet even this much scholarly relativism is indigestible for many people who like to reassure themselves that there is only one world and that the "validity" of a culture's interpretations can and should be measured only against this norm. Any myth, they would say, can conveniently be seen as an embryonic form of what the West accepts as linear history; a Hopi rain dance is merely