A Body Is Worth a Thousand Words: Early Colonial Dress-Scapes in Guam

Abstract

This article explores how dress became a fundamental “civilizing” item in the 17th-century Jesuit missionization of Guam, a small island in the western Pacific that was then inhabited by oral societies with low levels of socioeconomic complexity. The article analyzes the multiple dimensions of changing corporeal habits for native CHamoru people, and, most specifically, the interrelationships that arose from the construction of new selves, values, material culture, landscapes, labor, and technology in the configuration of new colonial “dress-scapes.” Forcible transition to dress and to alphabetic culture arrived at the island together as part of disciplinary processes that sought to “convert” CHamoru people to new lifeways and modes of being. Such processes were part of an engendered colonial transmodernity that initiated/accelerated a trend toward both similar understandings of the body and the ways it should be materially constituted and displayed.