Diana DiPaolo Loren

Social skins: Orthodoxies and practices of dressing in the early colonial lower Mississippi Valley

While current anthropological interpretations employ notions of agency to interpret social practices in contact and early colonial period contexts, the interplay of doxa, orthodoxies and heterodoxies is often overlooked. When doxic (or unquestioned) beliefs were challenged during culture contact, attempts were made to reestablish colonial order through the creation of orthodoxies - laws and mandates - meant to police the daily routines of colonial subjects, many of which were viewed as heterodoxies (or inappropriate practices). Implicated in this discourse was the body and practices of dressing, which implied status, race and gender, as well as political, social and sexual interactions. In the case study presented here, I consider how both Native American and French subjects in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century lower Mississippi Valley created social identities at the intersection of doxic beliefs, orthodoxies regarding clothing and actions and the practices of dressing.

The intersections of Colonial policy and Colonial practice: Creolization on the eighteenth-century Louisiana/Texas frontier

By the mid-18th century, the population that lived on the Louisiana/Texas frontier was comprised of French, Spanish, Native American, African, and creoles (or mixed-bloods). French and Spanish colonial policies dictated the kinds of social and economic relations that were to exist between people of different racial and ethnic groups on the frontier. Colonial practices often ran counter to official policies, however, as individuals crossed social and racial borders created by the Crown to construct not only multiethnic communities but also multiethnic households. This process of creolization resulted in the negotiation of new colonial identities for those that did not fit into neat colonial categories. Using ethnohistoric and archaeological data, the process of creolization that occurred within multiethnic communities and households along the colonial Louisiana/Texas border is considered.

Writing for Many: Interdisciplinary Communication, Constructionism, and the Practices of Writing

Though each of us works in different geographical areas (Ghana, the Lower Mississippi Valley, and the Great Lakes), our research is unified by our use of multiple sources to explore the history of colonial encounters and commitment to demonstrate the value of archaeological sources in exploring the materiality of those encounters. Yet, each of us has struggled with writing about these encounters, particularly as we publish in a variety of venues serving multiple audiences of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and lay people. We examine the “split literatures” that develop from our efforts to write for a variety of audiences and assess how tensions between scientific discourse and narrative shape these literatures. The interdisciplinary collaboration that is celebrated as part of a rapprochement among history, anthropology, and archaeology requires new approaches to writing, which we explore here.

Refashioning a Body Politic in Colonial Louisiana

This article examines the boundaries of clothing and the body in constructions of political identity in French colonial Louisiana. The study situates constructions of political identity among regulatory demands over the bodies of colonial subjects and the practices of taste and social distinction. It is argued that dress allowed colonial subjects to move into political spaces usually occupied by European colonizers. Archaeological, ethnohistoric, and visual data are used to investigate how French colonizers attempted to construct a body politic by regulating dress and the bodies of colonial subjects, while colonial ‘others’ attempted to constitute themselves as political bodies through self-fashioning.

Corporeal Concerns: Eighteenth-Century Casta Paintings and Colonial Bodies in Spanish Texas

Eighteenth-century casta paintings from northern New Spain depict the ethnic and racial combinations resulting from mestizaje, such as mulatto. Casta paintings offer rich insights on the quotidian practices of colonial individuals, including dress, diet, and household practices; this is information that archaeologists desire. Experiences, however, often differed drastically from the world represented in images as individuals reworked colonial categories in identity formation. These paintings represent a static image of a supposedly highly structured and regulated colonial world that was imposed on colonial peoples through their bodies. Visual and archaeological evidence provide different stories, drawn from official versions and lived experiences. Casta paintings, ethnohistorical documents, and material culture are used to explore how the imagined, ordered world depicted in casta paintings meshed with daily life in colonial communities in Spanish Texas and the place of the body in the Spanish colonial world.

Keeping Up Appearances: Dress, Architecture, Furniture, and Status at French Azilum

Situated in northern Pennsylvania, French Azilum was a late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century community of elite French refugees escaping the French Revolution. Inhabitants of the isolated community expressed the need to reconstitute themselves as the privileged class of the ancien régime by attempting to dress, build their homes, and furnish them in a certain fashion to distinguish themselves as elites and to reestablish the social hierarchy of the ancien régime in a frontier outpost. In this paper, we explore how the settlers at French Azilum used architecture, furnishings, and dress in an attempt to “keep up appearances.”

Material Manipulations: Beads and Cloth in the French Colonies

Few can deny the impact that European-manufactured material had in the history of colonization of the Southeastern United States. Objects produced in Europe for trade with the New World, such as iron knives, copper kettles, wool cloth, yarn and blankets, glass beads, and silver jewelry, made their way into Native hands and transformed the lives and economies for many people living in the New World (Bradley, 2007; Calloway, 1997:42–45; Waselkov, 2004). Archaeological focus in recent decades on the production of commodities for the growth of mercantile economies in North American colonies has given rise to more textured interpretations of the social lives of objects in colonial contexts, not only in the Southeastern United States, but throughout colonial North America (Appadurai, 1986; Wolf, 1982; see also Given, 2005; Gosden, 2004; Lightfoot, 2004; Nassaney and Brandao, this volume; MacLean, this volume; Silliman, 2005; Thomas, 1991). In the French colony of Louisiana, which is the context for this discussion, Native and French individuals integrated newly acquired items into daily practices, putting them into use in households and communities, animating them and infusing them with meaning.

Seeing hybridity in the anthropology museum: Practices of longing and fetishization:

Hybrid colonial objects are potent. Simply stated, hybrid colonial objects in museum contexts are defined as those items that contain material characteristics of both colonizer and the colonized. These objects are constituted in complex colonial contexts, resulting from the adoption and fusing of elements of style, manufacture, material, and meaning from distinct intellectual and cultural legacies, which were themselves hybrids. While hybridized material culture was used alongside more familiar, perhaps non-hybrid objects, archaeologists encounter hybrid colonial objects differently. They seemingly encapsulate in material form a certain lived experience of colonialism, allowing validation that the concepts of hybridity we argue were real and tangible in the past. In this paper, I turn a critical mirror on collections of colonial material from eastern North America at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University to discuss not only how hybrid artifacts from the colonial world were ...Hybrid colonial objects are potent. Simply stated, hybrid colonial objects in museum contexts are defined as those items that contain material characteristics of both colonizer and the colonized. These objects are constituted in complex colonial contexts, resulting from the adoption and fusing of elements of style, manufacture, material, and meaning from distinct intellectual and cultural legacies, which were themselves hybrids. While hybridized material culture was used alongside more familiar, perhaps non-hybrid objects, archaeologists encounter hybrid colonial objects differently. They seemingly encapsulate in material form a certain lived experience of colonialism, allowing validation that the concepts of hybridity we argue were real and tangible in the past. In this paper, I turn a critical mirror on collections of colonial material from eastern North America at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University to discuss not only how hybrid artifacts from the colonial world were documented, cataloged, and preserved, but also to interrogate the processes of longing and fetishization that impact the collection and interpretations of these objects.

Bodily Protection: Dress, Health, and Anxiety in Colonial New England

In colonial America, as in many colonial contacts, human bodies were at the center of most discussions of self and others. In this paper, I explore how the disciplines of body, intellect, and soul were entangled at colonial Harvard College. Early Harvard was fashioned to be a bastion of Puritan ideology, where English and Native students were trained in “knowledge and godliness.” Adherence to this ideology was regulated through the production of College laws, modeled after the laws of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, regarding comportment, action, and dress of the students and tutors of the College. Colony and College laws underscore bodily anxieties that abounded in Puritan New England regarding the dangers of witchcraft, overt sumptuous behavior, and pleasures of the flesh. I ground my discussions in current theoretical perspectives on embodiment and materiality to explore how anxieties regarding one’s body impacted embodied practices relating to dress and protection of the physical and spiritual flesh. To what extent (if any) did Puritan notions of morality and health impact the lives and material culture of students living at seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Harvard?

Dress, Faith, and Medicine: Caring for the Body in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Texas

In the eighteenth century, new theories of human anatomy, disease, and illness intersected with Christian doctrines regarding spiritual well-being, Spanish imperial understandings regarding race and dress of colonizer and colonized, and culturally distinct medicinal practices for treating physical and spiritual sicknesses. To explore these admittedly complex entanglements of bodies, souls, and clothing, I place the physical and spiritual body at the center of analysis. My intent is to obtain a fuller understanding of the complete colonial body at the eighteenth-century Spanish presidio of Los Adaes. Located along the easternmost border of Spanish Texas, how did the multiethnic inhabitants of Los Adaes treat, mend, and cover their bodies through dress, practices of faith, and medicine? What artifacts (clothing, amulets, religious medals, and medicines), texts, and images were embodied when people from disparate backgrounds and life experiences cared for themselves and others at Presidio Los Adaes?