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Editors’ Introduction JACQUELINE FEAR-SEGAL AND REBECCA TILLETT When working on the island of New Caledonia, the French missionary and ethnologist, Maurice Leenhardt (1878–1954), in conversation with his most trusted Native informant, Erijisi Boesoou, proclaimed: “In short, what we’ve brought into your thinking is the notion of esprit” [spirit or mind]. To which Boesoou retorted: “Spirit? Bah! We’ve always known about spirit. What you brought was the body.”1 James Clifford recounts this story in his classic biography of Leenhardt. Outlining how Leenhardt strove to comprehend the different structure of experience that could make such a response possible, Clifford presents Leenhardt’s subsequent ethnographic theorizing as a direct, or sometimes indirect, exposition of this rejoinder. He notes how “a dialog of interpretations is portrayed in the anecdote,” because it was “an exchange that turns upon Western mind-body dualism and finally unravels it.”2 The story, which has become apocryphal, presents us with a clear reminder of how the concept of “the body” has very specific cultural, historical, and ideological roots. It offers a powerful illustration of how the body’s meanings are unstable , open to contest, and can be interpreted differently in contexts where understandings of embodiment are fed from different cultural, or different historical sources. In Paul Rabinow’s words, “the intimate linkage between the two key symbolic arenas, ‘the body’ and ‘the person,’ ” would have to figure prominently on any list of distinctively Western traits.3 Acknowledging not only the power of this Western binary but also its dominance and endurance, the chapters in this collection unpack and interrogate this imposed construction, in order to challenge its presuppositions and review, relocate, and reclaim the density and complexity of traditional indigenous beliefs. This book is concerned with the indigenous body as a site of persistent fascination, colonial oppression, and indigenous agency, and the endurance of these legacies within Native communities. At the core of ix x Editors’ Introduction this collection lies a dual commitment to exposing numerous and diverse disempowerments of indigenous peoples, and to recognizing the many varied ways in which these same peoples retained and/or reclaimed agency. Of crucial importance to the contributors to this volume are the ways in which culturally diverse indigenous peoples were—and continue to be—forced to confront and engage with the imposition of the Western mind-body binary as part of a legacy of conquest. Western concepts of the body have not been static. The earliest split between mind and body derives from the writings of Plato (429–347 BC) and his separation of matter and form. Yet the prevailing modern medicalscientific discourse of the body, as Jonathan Sawday has convincingly argued, has its roots in two distinct but intertwined discursive strands—science and colonization—which simultaneously worked to map the physical body and the larger world, and assert dominion over both. Sawday draws a direct parallel between the dissections and discoveries that were taking place in the famous anatomy theatres opening across Europe—the first in Padua in 1594, followed by Leiden, Bologna and Paris—and European explorations of and encounters with the New World. Eschewing theologically-bound prohibitions on knowledge , he outlines how these scientists accepted no limits on the possibility of gaining understanding. They delved into the inner secrets and recesses of the physical body, which in a previous, church-dominated era, had been considered sacrosanct. “The process,” Sawday explains, “was truly colonial, in that it appeared to reproduce the stages of discovery and exploitation which were, at that moment, taking place within the context of the European encounter with the New World.”4 Sawday sees the scientist and the explorer as blood brothers, both intent on knowledge and exploitation, and impatient about notions of mystery and the sacred. The two interrelated strands of science and colonization came together most fully in the seventeenth century, where the overwhelming impatience to uncover the secrets of the sacred that Sawday describes anticipated René Descartes’ profoundly influential scientific philosophy, which separated minds from bodies and atomized each “whole” into its component parts. Emerging as it did alongside the settlement of the “New World” and the development of European empire, Descartes’ influence was unprecedented; his infamous cogito of 1637, “I think, therefore I am,”5 marks the moment when Europe rejected a more holistic worldview and embraced the notion that “the mind . . . is entirely distinct from the body.”6 Such concepts, which were subsequently a central feature of Enlightenment philosophy, had profound implications not only for political...

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