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

Reviewed by: Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas by Céline Carayon Thomas Wien (bio) Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas céline carayon Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2019 456 pp. Colonial encounters were fraught with misunderstanding: what first reads like a colossal understatement becomes a testable proposition in historian Céline Carayon's stimulating, wide-ranging study of how the French and Indigenous Americans conversed other than verbally before 1700. In the history of Euro-Native relations in the Americas, the prevailing impression, in recent decades, at least, has indeed been one of misunderstanding. By turns ethnohistorical, postmodern and postcolonial, skepticism toward self-congratulatory colonial narratives has carried the day. Even the "middle ground," which Richard White memorably defined as a fragile but lasting rapprochement between the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region and French colonizers, was based on misunderstandings, albeit creative ones (The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 [Cambridge UP, 1991]). That said, the progressive discovery of Indigenous agency and cultural influence in colonial relations has perhaps left more room for cultural overlap and implicit understanding in trade, warfare, diplomacy, and beliefs. The debate continues. Carayon at any rate argues for a goodly measure of mutual intelligibility, this time on the basis of shared recourse to the gestural. Sensitive to the complexity of individual encounters and to cultural diversity among the many Native peoples that discovered the French, she by no means rules out incomprehension. But in her view, scholars' default position should be to acknowledge that kinetic expression favored mutual understanding. In the scattered settings (Canada, Acadia, Florida, the Caribbean, Brazil, and eventually the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi valley) of Franco-Native interaction before 1700, she discerns "a human landscape rife with opportunities for communication rather than … a place marked by language barriers and misunderstandings" (40). Carayon defines the nonverbal broadly to include signifiers ranging "from ad hoc gestures and mimicry to elaborate conventional sign [End Page 313] languages, from purely kinetic-visual signals to multimodal paralinguistic expressive tactics" (13). While she certainly demonstrates that much information could travel without words, refuting the association of signed communication with imprecision is not her main concern. At most, she relativizes the nonverbal/verbal binary—after all, as she wryly reminds us early on, even "mutual linguistic fluency has never precluded misinterpretations" (7). On the whole, though, the book approaches its subject from another angle entirely, as two striking passages in the introduction show. Referring to nonverbal exchange between Samuel de Champlain and New England Algonquians, she suggests that "some things could be better communicated and experienced without words, and cultural differences softened through shared human physicality" (7). On intercultural communication in general, she argues that "whether the information made it from point A to point B without distortion is often irrelevant. What counts is that the information travelled, that it established a connection" (31n38). Highlighting "connection" of this sort—an intimate, bodily one, she specifies, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and a physical take on Bourdieu's notion of habitus—seems to place the bar of comprehension disarmingly low. But this interpretive move enables Carayon to think productively about the uses and status of bodily communication. The accounts she subjects to close reading were mostly published soon after their writing by commissioned explorers or missionaries: Cartier, Champlain, Laudonnière, Le Jeune, Ribault, Sagard, et al. (all of them are men, leaving one to wonder whether nuns, for example, left written testimony of nonverbal communication with Indigenous people). Carayon relies as well on writings produced on the margins of the official sphere or outside it, by a shipcaptain, a soldier, a flibustier … The study also draws on the period's visual archive, especially the work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues showing French and Timucuas getting to know one another in 1560s Florida. Eloquence Embodied is an exercise in rehabilitation. From the beginning: in the two initial, scene-setting chapters, Carayon presents Native American and European paralinguistic practices before contact, finding them equally complex—and equally...

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