A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America

Abstract

A Centre of Wonders provides early Americanists with an illuminating introduction to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field. While most historians of the body concentrate on gender, essays here also engage questions of conquest, strategies of colonization, and constructions of race. In an excellent and refreshingly brief introduction, Janet Moore Lind-man and Michele Lise Tarter provide a crash course in the analytical paradigms grounding the history of the body. Following the trajectory established by Anthony Pagden, among others, they point out that this transitional period saw not only changes in scientific knowledge and religious theology but also a new, concrete knowledge of other worlds and other peoples. The relationship between the new, particular knowledges and the construction of the body “universal” frames explorations of the social and political decisions impacting the bodies of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans in North America. Cultural theory is important to these scholars, and a few writers allow their engagement with theory to obfuscate their points. Most, however, build upon a theoretical base to address questions of science, religion, politics, and social structures. While social historians may be inclined to dismiss such scholarship as smoke and language, they might well remember that little is as material as the body. Bodies reproduced and engaged in sexual contact; they experienced disease and starvation; they endured pain and death at the hands of warriors, masters, and the colonial state. Trudy Eden, for example, sees the starvation of Jamestown colonists as an ideological resistance to the consumption of indigenous foods for fear that such foods would make them less English, less civilized. Within that nexus of materiality and cultural production lies the excitement.