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Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

Online ISBN:
9781469652641
Print ISBN:
9781469652627
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

Céline Carayon
Céline Carayon
Salisbury University
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Published online:
21 January 2021
Published in print:
18 November 2019
Online ISBN:
9781469652641
Print ISBN:
9781469652627
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, this book answers the long-standing question of how and how well Indigenous Americans and Europeans communicated with each other during colonial encounters. French explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century noticed that Indigenous peoples from Brazil to Canada used signs to communicate. The newcomers, in response, quickly embraced the nonverbal as a means to overcome cultural and language barriers throughout French America. Céline Carayon's close examination of French accounts, combined with her multidisciplinary methodology, enables her to recover these sophisticated Native practices of embodied expression. In a colonial world where communication and trust were essential but complicated by the multiplicity of Indigenous languages, intimate and sensory communications ensured that colonists and Indigenous peoples understood each other well. Understanding, in turn, bred both genuine personal bonds and violent antagonisms. Nonverbal communication shaped Indigenous resistance to colonial pressures across the Americas just as it fueled the French imperial imagination and strategies. Challenging the notion of colonial America as a site of misunderstandings and insurmountable cultural clashes, Carayon shows that Natives and newcomers used nonverbal means to build relationships before the rise of linguistic fluency--and, crucially, well afterward.

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