The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown by Seth Mallios (review)

REVIEWS 254 Seth Mallios, The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan , Roanoke, and Jamestown (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 2006) 168 pp. The new book by anthropologist and historic preservationist Seth Mallios, The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown, is a well-researched and useful study. It asks how cultural assumptions of what constitutes just and proper exchange of material goods aided in and to a certain extent determined Native American and European interaction in three late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century North American settlements . While the tribes that made up what we know of today as the Algonquian Indians, who dominated the Mid-Atlantic region of the North American continent , conformed their cultural assumptions of exchange to what Marcel Mauss has described as the “gift economy,” Spanish and English missionaries and settlers stepped on shore with a commercial, commodity-based understanding of trade rather than the indigenous practice of gift giving and receiving. The many cases of violence between natives and settlers in the period can best be described, so the argument goes, as attempts to achieve reciprocity relative to these different cultural logics of exchange. In particular, Native Americans experienced the failure of European settlers to understand and thus sufficiently participate in complex rules of gift exchange as cultural insult and demotion of social status. Thus were retributive attacks on settlements “culturally justified and effective” in removing the offending parties , registering significant discontent with the present state of relations between natives and settlers, or achieving reciprocity through the taking of valued goods (including people). Working from previous scholarship on the rules and character of gift economies, most foundationally Mauss’s The Gift, Mallios summarizes for his readers briefly but sufficiently the scholarly attempts at the reconstruction of gift exchange. What principally separated gift from commodity exchange practices was the inculcation of mutual debt and obligation that exchangers of gifts sought to gain from their interactions. The merchant in a commodity system, on the other hand, seeks only to profit from the sale or gain a singular item through mere purchase, with very little connection to wider networks of relationships within which trade inevitably took place (29). While the Native Americans sought measures of mutual benefit and social status through the calculated rituals of gift giving and reception, white settlers sought economic necessities and gains within a more utilitarian framework. Reconstructions of exchange in each of the three settlements are based on heavy documentary research from previous work by the author that catalogued instances of exchange and categorizes them according to a three-part analysis: exchange-partner relationship, the continuity or discontinuity of an item along lines of exchange through multiple partners, and the form of exchange (31). The failure of Jesuit missionaries in Ajacan, a mission outfit that was destroyed in 1571 just north of where Jamestown would be decades later, illustrates the failures of even non-merchant Europeans to understand the depth of the relationships they engaged in with Indians. Spanish settlers, who had taken the volunteer neophyte Don Luis (his original name is unknown) to Spain and brought him back to his people as an aid in the efforts to convert them, found themselves in a dire situation when Don Luis abandoned the clergymen in the REVIEWS 255 Chesapeake wilderness. The Jesuit missionaries were miles away from armed Spanish provisions further south, and they scraped out an existence until Don Luis himself returned with a small contingent of his fellow Algonquians and unhesitatingly massacred all of the Jesuits in the settlement. Such behavior, argues Mallios, can only be understood as a reaction by natives to the leading Jesuit missionary, Father Segura, and his effort to focus the settlement on conversion by heavily regulating and even banning exchanges with outlying Algonquian communities, in effect cutting the relationships that had been established between the Jesuits and the Indians and between Indians within and outside of Jesuit missionary contact. This reflected a fundamental ignorance of the vital role that rules of gift exchange played in defining and confirming relationships in the Algonquian communities. Cut off from gaining or solidifying social status within a network of interdependent relationships constituted by gift...