Colonial Encounters, European Kettles, and the Magic of Mimesis in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century Indi
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Colonial Encounters, European Kettles, and the Magic of Mimesis in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century Indigenous Northeast and Great Lakes Meghan C. L. Howey
Published online: 1 July 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract Copper kettles, in high demand among indigenous communities of the Northeast/Great Lakes, became prominent items in the exchange repertoires of early Basque, French and Dutch traders. Kettles’ origin with these “Others” and its connection to a medium (copper) that had held symbolic significance for millennia led them to be used in an indigenous ‘metaphorical’ value regime influencing trade during the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century. An artisan living on the threshold of colonial encounter in Northern Michigan between 1470 and 1660 CE—having seen European goods but not having access to them—harnessed the mimetic faculty to make a small, miniature, ceramic imitation or skeuomorph of a European trade kettle. Rather than the sincerest form of flattery, I suggest this imitation was made to acquire the power of the original to fend off the colonial danger and to connect to this symbolic value regime. I suggest the “magic” of mimesis offered personal and organizational power in the indigenous Northeast/Great Lakes during early contact. This specific case speaks more broadly to how mimesis can provide a robust framework for exploring the material cultures of colonial encounter. Keywords Colonialism . Material Culture . Mimesis . Indigenous Northeast and Great Lakes . Fur Trade . Kettles The “Wonder of Mimesis” Is imitation really the sincerest form of flattery or can it be something very different? In this paper I argue that indigenous communities of the Northeast and Great Lakes region actively materialized the mimetic faculty, the faculty to copy, not to flatter Europeans but to assert control over their colonial encounters with them during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. M. C. L. Howey (*) Department of Anthropology, University of New Hampshire, 73 Main Street, 313 Huddleston Hall, Durham, NH 03824, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Int J Histor Archaeol (2011) 15:329–357
Scholars have long recognized that encounters between people with different traditions, like colonial encounters, have material ramifications. Early anthropological tales of colonial encounter tended to position Native communities as following some kind of predictable path of cultural destruction on account of Western influence (Taussig 1993, p.129). Within such acculturative frames, frames which were in fashion in the discipline until ca. 30 years ago, material dependency and technological acculturation were considered de facto outcomes of colonial encounters, whereby indigenous material cultures were both inevitably and rapidly abandoned for European ones. Recent scholarship has highlighted shortcomings with this tidy view of colonial encounter, exposing colonialism for the dynamic, non-linear and downright messy process it is (O’Malley 2009, p. 69; cf. Bhabha 2004;
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