Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication Among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

Abstract

In most narratives of contact between Native Americans and European newcomers, communication begins with gestures, pantomime, and rudimentary sign language before increased familiarity enabled speech. Céline Carayon's Eloquence Embodied shows how this familiar sequence of events oversimplifies—and often ignores—the rich variety of nonverbal communication that occurred in the early modern Americas, including signs, ceremonies, gestures, and performances. Instead, this study of the first two centuries of French colonization in the Americas from 1500 to 1700 argues that, rather than evolving from “basic” nonverbal to more “sophisticated” verbal communication, “colonial America was the site of rich intersections between effective traditions of embodied expressiveness” (6–7). Furthermore, far from fumbling from one misunderstanding to the next, French colonizers and the Native Americans they met generally managed to understand each other quite well.Carayon's chronological framing means that French encounters with Indigenous people in Florida, Brazil, Guiana, and the Caribbean receive significant attention alongside the more frequently studied St. Lawrence Valley and Illinois Country. As a result, Carayon's account of Indigenous experiences with French colonizers includes Beothuc, Guale, Yao, and Tupi-Guarani speakers as well as Iroquoians and Algonquians, a choice that greatly strengthens the book.Each chapter in Eloquence explores a different theme while also proceeding in chronological order. The first surveys the use of sign language in the Native America, using a vast array of imperfect French sources to detail “complex” nonverbal communications systems across the hemisphere, including “what might have been a full-fledged sign language system in the circum-Caribbean region” (104). The next chapter examines traditions of nonverbal communication in early modern France against the backdrop of elites’ interest in “civility” to achieve refinement and unity of a linguistically and culturally diverse kingdom and is followed with an exploration of how Indigenous people chose to greet and communicate with French newcomers, mediated through the Europeans’ depictions of these encounters. Chapter four shifts attention from expressions of friendship to cross-cultural expressions (and interpretations) of trustworthiness and deception in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and five probes French and Indigenous attitudes towards language learning and multilingualism, with knowledge of unspoken cultural values and taboos as valuable as spoken tongues. Chapter six argues for the ongoing importance of nonverbal communication as an accompaniment to diplomatic oratory in the late seventeenth century. Carayon's conclusion briefly compares seventeenth-century English nonverbal exchanges with Native Americans before suggesting avenues where other scholars might fruitfully use “nonverbal features of Early American encounters to shed light” on various aspects of colonization (433). While making clear that she views the French as more adept than their European rivals—especially the English—in nonverbal communications with Indigenous people, she rejects the idea that such skill “produced a uniquely benevolent style of colonialism” (433).Carayon draws on a broad tranche of evidence, and her choice to include French colonization efforts in Florida, the Caribbean, and South America in her analysis gives added weight to the book's contributions. Overall, Carayon's argument—that French colonizers and Native Americans drew upon deep traditions of nonverbal communications to bridge their linguistic divide with less trouble than previously thought—is persuasive. Eloquence Embodied makes clear that scholars should jettison the idea that spoken language obviated the importance of ritual, sensory, and other embodied communication in later colonial counters. For all these reasons it will be a standard work in the field for some time.