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Moving in time, out of step: mimesis as moral breakdown in European re‐enactments of the North American Indian Woodland
Author(s) -
Kalshoven Petra Tjitske
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9655.12251
Subject(s) - variety (cybernetics) , dilemma , context (archaeology) , amateur , aesthetics , feeling , sacrifice , transformative learning , sociology , woodland , environmental ethics , history , epistemology , art , philosophy , archaeology , ecology , pedagogy , computer science , artificial intelligence , biology
What constitutes a dance step executed just right? Does its success reside in its faithfulness to an ‘original’ model or script or in a feeling experienced by the dancer interpreting the model in a new context? This is the kind of epistemological, and moral, dilemma that was often voiced during my fieldwork amongst Indianists, amateurs involved in re‐enactment of Native American lifeworlds on European soil. In Indianism, museum‐quality replicas made by and worn on European bodies function as heuristic tools in exploring ‘what life was really like’ in other times and places. Focusing on Woodland Indianist performances and replicas in a variety of European settings, I suggest that Indianism, as an amateur engagement with re‐imaginings and reifications of the North American Indian, faces constant moral breakdown because of its unease with the transformative nature of mimesis.