REVIEW: Brokaw on Gray and Fiering, eds.,_The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492-1800_ (fwd)

[David L. Frye]

This review, and the book under review, seem relevant:

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Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 07:58:06 -0400
From: H-LatAm.FGCU <hlatam at tarpon.fgcu.edu>
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Subject: REVIEW:  Brokaw on Gray and Fiering, eds.,
                  _The Language Encounte r in the Americas, 1492-1800_

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Latam at h-net.msu.edu (September 2000)

Gray, Edward C. and Norman Fiering, eds.  _The Language Encounter in the
Americas, 1492-1800_.  European and Global Interaction, Vol. 1.  New York
and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000.  x + 342 pp.  Preface, introduction,
illustrations, bibliographical references, and index.  $49.95 (cloth), ISBN
1-57181-210-5; forthcoming (alk. paper), ISBN 1- 57181-160-5.

Reviewed for H-LatAm by Galen Brokaw, Department of Foreign Languages and
Literatures, Lafayette College. < brokawg at lafayette.edu>

The Communicative Dimension of Colonial Contact in the Americas

One of the most neglected phenomena in accounts of the New World colonial
period has been the processes of communicative interaction between
indigenous and European individuals and institutions.  _The Language
Encounter in the Americas, 1492-1800_ joins other recent works to help fill
that void by examining the complex interaction between indigenous and
Amerindian languages in the colonial Americas.  Many of the scholars
represented here have been influential in demonstrating the importance and
productivity of this line of inquiry.  The nature of this subject is
inherently interdisciplinary and the contributors to this volume come from
the fields of anthropology, art history, history, linguistics, and
literature.  Although the various essays focus on different sets of issues
and perspectives, the unifying theme of linguistic or communicative
interaction ties them together in complementary ways.

The essays that comprise the book were originally presented at a conference
organized by Norman Fiering and Edward Gray at the John Carter Brown Library
at Brown University.  As Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown
Library, which houses one of the most extensive collections of early
indigenous-language printed material, Fiering wished to promote a dialogue
that would help break down disciplinary barriers and allow a
cross-fertilization of insights and perspectives from different fields.  To
this end, Fiering and Gray brought together a group of scholars who were
working on similar issues from different disciplinary perspectives.  The
strength of this book is precisely its diverse and multi-disciplinary
nature.  The essays provide an introduction to many of the issues raised in
all the disciplines represented.  In this way, they further pave the way for
even more integrated approaches and foster a more complete understanding of
the cultural and linguistic encounter that took place in the Americas.

The book is divided into five sections:  Terms of Contact; Signs and
Symbols; The Literate and the Nonliterate; Intermediaries; and Theory.

I. The Terms of Contact

The first essay by James Axtell, "The Babel of Tongues: Communicating with
the Indians in Eastern North America," provides an historical overview of
the problems and solutions related to the language encounter along the coast
and the inland of Eastern North America.  He begins by discussing how
language problems reveal themselves in early colonial texts.  He then
surveys the various solutions to these problems, and their advantages and
disadvantages.  The article discusses the use of gestures and the
development of jargons and pidgins.  Of particular interest are the issues
and processes involved in the acquisition of European languages by Indians
and of Indian languages by Europeans who then served as interpreters.
Axtell demonstrates how these linguistic phenomena fit into the European
project of colonization and how native people reacted, accommodated, and/or
resisted these processes.  In so doing, he documents an often neglected
component of the colonial encounter.

In "The Use of Pidgins and Jargons on the East of Coast of North America,"
Ives Goddard discusses the "little known fact that a number of local pidgins
and jargons were spoken on the East Coast, in the Northeast and the
Mid-Atlantic region" (p. 61).  The article focuses primarily on the best
documented of the East Coast pidgins, Pidgin Delaware, but also briefly
deals with other East Coast Algonquin-based pidgins and pidgin English.
Goddard argues that the grammatical features of Algonquin-based pidgins
demonstrate that the Indians played the major formative role in developing
these media.  Thus, "the use of Algonquin pidgins furnishes important
insights into the attitudes of the East Coast Indians toward the Europeans
as they tried to control the impact of the European encounter" (p. 75).

II. Signs and Symbols

In "Pictures, Gestures, Hieroglyphs: 'Mute Eloquence' in Sixteenth-Century
Mexico," Pauline Moffit Watts analyzes the various forms of non-verbal
communication -- what she labels "mute eloquence" -- utilized by
missionaries in sixteenth-century Mexico.  She discusses rhetorical
gestures, visual images, the influence of monastic sign language, dramatic
representations, and the pictographic testerian catechisms.  Although Moffit
provides little direct evidence for the influence of some of these forms of
representation -- rhetorical gestures and monastic sign language, for
example -- they certainly formed a part of the cultural resources available
to European priests.  Some may disagree with Mofffit's extremely expanded
notion of literacy, but her analysis raises provocative questions about
communicative interaction between Spanish and indigenous cultures in the
early colonial period.

In "Iconic Discourse: The Language of Images in Seventeenth-Century New
France," Margaret J. Leahey discusses the response of Hurons to the images
introduced by the Jesuits as aides in catechization.  Leahey explains that
the disparity between the cultural background of the Hurons and that of the
Europeans necessarily produced a very different interpretation of religious
imagery.  In support of this argument, she analyzes the Huron reaction to
disease and the stylistic changes in ceremonial masks.

The final essay in this section, "Mapping after the Letter: Graphology and
Indigenous Cartography in New Spain" by Dana Leibsohn, analyzes the
convergence of indigenous pictographic cartography and alphabetic script in
sixteenth and seventeenth-century land _merced_ documents.  Leibsohn
emphasizes the materiality of painting and alphabetic writing -- something
that historians and literary critics often ignore -- and analyzes the
relationship between these two media in such documents.  Leibsohn's own
critical performance is a creative combination of art criticism and textual
analysis that deserves attention in its own right.

III. The Literate and the Nonliterate

The sixth essay in the collection, "Continuity vs. Acculturation: Aztec and
Inca Cases of Alphabetic Literacy," by Antonio Mazzotti is a brief overview
of colonial texts that represent the appropriation of alphabetic literacy by
indigenous writers.  Mazzotti argues that texts written or compiled by
writers such as Sahagun and Ixtlilxochitl from Mexico and Titu Cusi
Yupanqui, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and Guaman Poma from Peru exhibit,
to varying degrees, attributes derived from indigenous perspectives and
modes of representation, with a particular emphasis on orality and
structures of ritual.  Although Mazzotti himself recognizes that his
treatment is very general, his discussion has important theoretical
implications that are sure to produce more in-depth analyses of specific
traditions and individual works.

In "Native Languages as Spoken and Written: view from Southern New England,"
Kathleen J. Bragdon discusses the relationship between language and
colonization through an examination of seventeenth-century linguistic
descriptions from Southern New England.  She explains that contact
situations demand the establishment of a shared communicative practice.
Although ostensibly the English controlled the formation of that practice in
both English and native languages, texts produced by native speakers of
Massachusett preserve many of the attributes of native discourse.  Bragdon
argues that the alphabetic communicative practices of New England natives
both complement indigenous oral traditions and contest the imposition of
colonial authority.

In "The M'ikmaq Hieroglyphic Prayer Book: Writing and Christianity in
Maritime Canada, 1675-1921," Bruce Greenfield traces the use of literacy in
the history of European evangelization among the M'ikmaq Indians.  The
French catholic missionaries originally emphasized the rote memorization of
prayers, hoping for an understanding over time.  As an aide in this
memorization, they introduced a hieroglyphic prayer book that the M'ikmaq
adopted and preserved for 250 years even during extended periods with no
European presence or supervision.  Greenfield points out that the French use
of this hieroglyphic script represents an attempt to control the
dissemination of knowledge that is analogous to the situation in France as
well.  The ease with which the Indians adopted and preserved this script,
along with other evidence, attests to the pre-existence of a hieroglyphic
system of representation that the M'ikmaq were able to adapt conceptually to
the new context of European religion.  Greenfield argues that the
preservation of this tradition along side alphabetic literacy introduced
later by English Baptist missionaries reveals the ideological nature of
literacy practice and demands an approach that considers the hieroglyphic
prayer book as an artifact with symbolic properties used in specific social
contexts.

IV. Intermediaries

The next essay, "Interpreters Snatched from the Shore: The Successful and
the Others" by Frances Karttunen, examines the qualities necessary for the
survival of interpreters who were forced to gain their linguistics skills in
a foreign and often hostile environment.  Karttunen surveys the lives of
several colonial interpreters and the diverse paths that led them to this
career:  victims of kidnapping, castaways, missionaries, ritual kin, etc.
She concludes that among the most important attributes for success were
flexibility, youth, sharp intellect, and good luck.

In the second essay of this section, "Mohawk Schoolmasters and Catechists in
Mid-Eighteenth-Century Iroquoia:  An Experiment in Fostering Literacy and
Religious Change," William B. Hart analyzes the use of native leaders as
schoolmasters and catechists in eighteenth-century evangelization efforts
and the introduction of literacy and the translation of texts into
alphabetic Mohawk.  He explains that although  this made Christianity a
viable, indeed essential, part of indigenous religion, it supplemented
rather than supplanted native beliefs and practices.  Furthermore, literacy
and the use of native leaders fostered a sense of local ambition and
autonomy that led the Iroquois to adapt and adopt Christianity in unique
ways.

In "The Making of Logan, the Mingo Narrator," Edward C. Gray uses the case
of the Revolutionary-era Indian orator Soyechtowa, also known as Logan, in
order to examine the eighteenth-century notion that the speech of indigenous
Americans had a unique and natural eloquence.  Gray explains that Logan's
reputation was based on an address allegedly given in 1774 after being
defeated by the Virginia militia.  First, Gray argues that both biographical
details and what little we know of northeastern Indian speechways, which
valued silence over verbosity, seem to contradict the popular image of Logan
as a respected indigenous leader.  Gray also places the "myth of native
eloquence" in the context of eighteenth-century theories of language,
translation, and society as well as the ideology of the Revolutionary-era
North American colonies.

V. Theory

In, "Spanish Colonization and the Indigenous Languages of America," Isaias
Lerner provides a brief overview of Spanish colonial policies and practices
concerning the study and use of indigenous languages.  This history is
inherently related to the linguistic interaction between Spanish and
indigenous tongues, and Lerner discusses how this interaction reveals itself
in literary texts from the period, from Ercilla to Cervantes.

Lieve Jooken's essay, "Descriptions of American Indian Word Forms in
Colonial Missionary Grammars," examines eighteenth-century grammatical
descriptions of Amerindian languages and their relationship to
pre-Enlightenment European language theory.  Jooken demonstrates how the
"European criteria of universality and appropriateness, relying on a model
of classical languages, impeded in many cases a truthful description of
Indian speech" (p. 299).  He goes on to show that although a few writers
were able to produce empirical linguistic descriptions free of the
preconceptions based on classical grammars, they did not "yield a
theoretical separation between the structure of a language and its
connection with evaluative cultural categories" (p. 307).

While Jooken's essay focuses on instances of linguistic description and
their relationship to the theory of language, the final chapter of the
collection, "'Savage' Languages in Eighteenth-Century Theoretical History of
the Language" by Rudiger Schreyer, examines the debate that was taking place
between competing theories of language origin and evolution.  America became
the battleground where these theories vied for position by attempting to use
evidence from indigenous languages to support their claims.  On the one
hand, "Christian doctrine viewed linguistic change as a deterioration from
the God-given and perfect language of Paradise" (p. 318); on the other, the
new science of the eighteenth century posited that language evolved in
conjunction with civilization from primitive chaos to sophisticated
structure.  The history of this debate sheds light on European attitudes
toward indigenous languages and societies.

In reviewing a collection of essays, it is difficult to be specific about
the merits of the entire work.   The diversity of disciplinary approaches
represented in this book makes the task doubly difficult.  The editors and
authors, however, have done an excellent job of avoiding esoteric
methodologies that would have limited the audience. This is a very
accessible interdisciplinary book that will be essential for anyone
interested in European and indigenous contact in the colonial period.

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