Keith Basso

Keith Basso, the author of Wisdom Sits in Places, is a professor of cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Basso first visited Cibecue, Arizona in 1959 and devoted his career to studying the Western Apache people that lived there, their geography, language, culture and history. Basso's book won the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing in 1997 because Basso's work was regarded as an exemplar of a human-oriented anthropology. Basso's work on the Western Apache ranged over four decades. He maps the "semiotic" space of place-making among the Western Apache and its link to moral imagination.

Basso's main role in the book is as an observer. He primarily tells stories about the characters he encounters, like Dudley Patterson and Nick Thompson, in order to illustrate his main arguments in each of his three essays. Basso's character comes through primarily through his admiration for Western Apache...