Material translations: Cloth in early American encounters, 1520--1750.

摘要

Exploring the mutability of cloth and dress in determining one's place in early American society is at the heart of this investigation. In intricate cultural calculations, Indians could be both encouraged to accept and paradoxically prohibited from wearing European textiles. Their desire for and access to these articles in the larger trade goods complex became a function and focus of colonial governments from contact through the mid-eighteenth century. Textiles functioned as devices for the creation and re-creation of identity, relationships of exchange and kinship, political and social power---all forms of cultural production---on the early American frontier. This dissertation explores the role of cloth in exchange relationships and identity formation through a close examination of the American southeast. Other regions of intense inter-colonial conflict, such as the mid-Atlantic or the Great Lakes regions, provide excellent occasional opportunities for comparative analysis of the intensely layered textile interactions occurring between Europeans and southeastern Natives. Rather than present analysis using a Eurocentric framework, I focus on Native access to and use of European-produced textiles, which fell into one or more themes. Natives themselves would not have classified their perception of or use of wovens using these categories, but analysis of treaty records, archaeological remains, swatches, account books, prints and paintings reveal that Natives consumed textiles in one or more of these methods.