| Book Review | Western Historical Quarterly, 32.1

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| Book Review | Western Historical Quarterly, 32.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal. By James Taylor Carson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. xiv + 185 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $40.00.)

In this monograph James Taylor Carson examines the interplay between persistence and change in the people who became the Choctaws. The study is grounded in the work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Geertz focuses on the human meaning through which all action is filtered; consequently, Choctaw culture, like all culture, "can be thought of as a grid that individuals [carry] in their heads and hearts and into which they [feed] received customs, personal knowledge, and perceptions of the present in order to determine appropriate and proper courses of action" (p. 5). In contrast to Marxist approaches that see change emanating primarily from the realm of technology and economy, Carson rightly places emphasis upon individual actions, albeit within the backdrop of the "long duration" of the French Annales school, that is, the "slow processes of geographical, environmental, and social change that occur across generations" (p. 6). . . .

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