"A bridge is simple movement"

pp. 163-178

in: Jim Keller, Writing plural worlds in contemporary U.S. poetry, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

James Thomas Stevens introduces his 2007 collection of three series and lyrics, called A Bridge Dead in the Water, by submitting to poetic investigation the anthropological theory of the land bridge that spanned the Bering Strait during the last ice age, across which Homo sapiens migrated from Asian to North American continents: "A dead bridge. A dead theory. The Bering Strait theory, dead to Native peoples, whose hundreds of creation accounts dispel those of anthropologists."¹ Stevens is not concerned with the empirical validity of the theory, but demonstrates that, in applying it, anthropologists make sense of the world and of non-European others "objectively," allocating populations within taxonomies and subjecting unknown historical worlds to their discursive control. If Western colonial activity is obsessed with the location of borders, the bridge theory nicely extends the boundary of the colonizer's world across the boundary of another, making both appear familiar. The colonial desire for a universal discourse preempts plural, local worlds and their values by alleging already to share the ultimate value of scientific truth-claims with all peoples. In this light, and only in these terms, does anthropological discourse understand the origin of indigenous peoples. Together, science and colonialism bridge incommensurate worlds, guided by a deductive theoretical approach to indigenous populations, rather than inducing from particular worlds the shared elements and conflicting values that open one world to another.