Assimilation and Exoticism: The Dialectic of Diversity Management

Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern. By Joel Pfister. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. 340 pages. A monograph from New Americanists, a series edited by Donald E. Pease. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper).

In a recent presentation at the University of Iowa, Xavante videographer Caimi Waiasse was asked how difficult it is to exist in two worlds. Through an interpreter he said that while he is still a young man, he has been around long enough to know that there is more than one kind of white person, just as there is more than one kind of indigenous person. The world is full of all kinds of people. So, he said, to say that there are two worlds is too simplistic and limiting.

Too often, Indian identity is reduced to an untenable kind of essentialism. American studies traditionally defines Indian identity as that which is unchanging and consistent over time, operating in opposition to a non-Indian (and, it seems, normatively white) identity.¹ "The Indian," then, must somehow maintain an Indian identity while operating within unavoidable and increasingly important non-Indian roles. Les Field's more charitable definition highlights the transformative agency of Indian identity, whereby non-Indian roles and activities may take on Indian accents, values, or goals. More detailed ethnographic examination of Indian identity in action, such as Laura Graham's, may identify the influence of global discourses on indigenous rights, borrowings from environmentalist rhetoric, and, in the case of Devon Mihesuah, even parallels with the reactionary identity formation of black nationalism.² These definitions all approach a performative understanding of Indian identity, but underplay the emergent qualities between "performer" and "audience."³ In other words, all of these leave out any sort of responsibility on the non-Indian side of the performance relationship. The matter of authenticity is debated only among Indians, while non-Indian audience members are treated as mere consumers whose tastes must be catered to. The onus of identity performance is placed squarely and solely upon the Indians, as if only Indians have identities to perform.

Such definitions of Indian identity rely on the concept of Indians walking in two worlds. While these definitions may, to varying degrees, empower Indians to find agency in strategic use of both "worlds" in creative and flexible ways, they also build up the non-Indian "world" as a static, totalizing, and unrelenting phenomenon. Non-Indian identity, by this move, becomes the normal state of affairs. Further, any act that falls outside the realm of hegemonic mimicry is celebrated as an example of identity continuity, while any mixing of Indian and non-Indian attributes reveals strategic agency aimed solely at resistance or accommodation. Identity is thereby reduced to instrumental actions of the dominated Indian. In contrast, Joel Pfister's new book, Individuality Incorporated, is open to the flexibility of agents who embody dominant forces and fills the ethnographic void. Pfister still tells a tale of dominance, but this version finds more cogenerated identity formation between dominant agents and the Indians.

Pfister highlights how institutions sustain conformity to the needs of American society by providing for—and even creating—alternative identities that are sold as counterculture. With so much of our lives given over to wage earning, the avenues toward individuality are reduced to stylistic choices made in the commodified regimes of art, fashion, music, and cuisine. This situation contradicts dogmatic assertions of American individuality being evidence of liberty, and should disturb those who point to their conceptual, practical, or bodily multiculturalism as evidence of their cosmopolitanism and tolerance of diversity.

Pfister applies these concepts to two historical case studies of seemingly different orientations to Indian subjectivity. The first is the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians in Pennsylvania, which was operated by Captain Richard Henry Pratt from 1879 to 1904. The second includes the bohemian artist colonies of Taos and Santa Fe, and their connection to John Collier's Indian New Deal of 1934. Pfister's evidence...