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  • Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Pennsylvania
  • Jane E. Calvert
John Smolenski, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 401 pp. Notes, illustrations, index. Cloth, $45.00.

John Smolenski's Friends and Strangers is a history of Pennsylvania's legal and political culture from its religious roots in Interregnum Quakerism to the 1737 "Walking Purchase." He describes what he calls the "creolization" of Quakerism and Quaker Pennsylvania, "the creative process through which individuals and groups constructed new cultural habits and identities as they tried to make Old-World inheritances 'fit' in a New-World environment" (4). Though not, as the book jacket claims, "the first history of Pennsylvania's founding in more than forty years," it is the first to treat it exclusively and effectively replaces Gary Nash's Quakers and Politics (Princeton, 1968). We have been long over-due for a thorough treatment of this period in Pennsylvania history.

In many ways this is masterful achievement. The level of detail and the breadth of primary sources Smolenski uses are impressive. I am inclined to agree with his analysis on topics such as the establishment of the Quaker meeting, speech acts, Quaker historical narratives, and much more, but take issue with the matters of whether Friends believed in a godly polity, whether they were political radicals, and when "Quaker" Pennsylvania was founded. Rather than treating details, however, this review will concentrate on Smolenski's methodological approach.

Smolenski's major premise is sound—that Quakers (and, by extension, Anglos and Europeans) had to adapt themselves to the New World every bit as much as the Spanish, Portuguese, or French (though certainly not as much as Africans) and that they created a distinctive culture which they then disseminated. Others have made similar arguments. Most significantly, Alan Tully's Forming American Politics (Johns Hopkins, 1994) describes how Friends "Quakerized" Pennsylvania and created "civil Quakerism." Without mentioning until the very end that "the [End Page 68] underlying dynamic shaping political and cultural struggles changed little" (291) between his period and Tully's, Smolenski discusses the same phenomenon and simply calls it by a different name—"creolization." Tully receives only scant, belated credit for his ground-breaking interpretation.

Leaving aside the matter of whether the etymological momentum of the word "creole" can be overcome, the "creolization process" at the analytical heart of Smolenski's study is problematic. It is a "multistep process," but the steps are sometimes vague and not applied methodically. They seem to be: the creation of a "cultural lingua franca," the "cultivation of specific social practices," the "creation of particular narratives of identity," and the "incorporation of more social groups into the province" (4-5). His prime example is the Kethian schism, when, in a rancorous moment, Quakerism adapted to American circumstances and brought in new adherents. In general, the creolization process seems to be any sort of conflict in a new locale that ends in adaptation and assimilation. Smolenski writes, "every instance of history making itself is an act of creolization" (291). If every kind of change, adaptation, or syncretism is "creole," then what isn't "creole"?

One of the fundamental aspects of creolization, it would seem, is groups working on each other and creating new cultural forms, not just in legal, civic, and political culture, but also in social realms—folkways, art, food, material things, family, leisure and recreation. It is syncretic, dialogical, and results in hybridity. Although Smolenski recognizes this, for him, there is "a culture" in Pennsylvania. The creolization he imagines in Quaker Pennsylvania is one-sided and limited, happening among Quakers as they "creolize[d] themselves" (8), by Quakers as they creolized others, and only in the public sphere. In Smolenski's telling, not only did Quakers resist and deny outside influences (which is right), they were successful. But if we granted this one-sidedness, then one might reasonably expect an examination of how Quakers "creolized" the non-Quaker inhabitants; yet, with the exception of Indians, we hear little about their influence on non-Quakers. We see their efforts and intentions in superb relief, but not the results.

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