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

A sweeping and extensively detailed volume with voluminous sources and citations, Carayon's Eloquence Embodied is a close examination of French colonial accounts of the elaborate and sophisticated modes of nonverbal expression or kinetic communication that Native peoples from Brazil to Canada employed in order to communicate and overcome language barriers within Native communities and with the foreign French, nonverbal expressions that lasted centuries. Present from first encounter, efficient and accurate communications via nonverbal means and "controlled and decipherable signs that suggest …the signers had some previous experience with this medium," were the norm among the peoples described in the sources that Carayon examines throughout this work (2). Rather than a land of confusion, "defined by incommunicability and incapacitating linguistic barriers," Carayon argues that "colonial America was the site of rich intersections between effective traditions of embodied expressiveness." That's not to say that it was not difficult nor were there no misunderstandings, however: throughout three sections and six chapters, Carayon highlights the "extremely effective intercultural communications independent of spoken language" (7). Central to the success of her interpretation of the sources, Carayon does not rely on older translations of the originals; rather, she bases her analysis on sources in the original language to avoid "faulty, older translations that can obscure the intended meaning and nuances of colonial word choices," choosing instead to provide her own translation of sources, "mindful of the of the evolving meaning of words" (26).

The first section details nonverbal traditions in the early modern period both in Europe and Native America, while the second goes into the heart of French and Native colonial encounters through the seventeenth century. Finally, the last two chapters focus on the crucial role that nonverbal communication and Indigenous modes of multilingualism played in public oratory of French claims to North America, challenging scholars to reconsider and highlight the importance of Indigenous forms of knowledge not only in the French encounter but to Spanish and English colonists as well. Indigenous forms of knowledge included nonverbal signs, mapping practices, and directional markers "such as bent trees, memory cairns, Abenaki directional sticks, and Mandan trail signs and stick bundles" (51). Detailed examples are abundant throughout the work, including an analysis of the uniform ways Indigenous peoples of the Americas expressed time and distance: "Days were expressed through reference to the course of the sun (index and thumb forming a circle and positioned in an upward position towards the sky); to express months, many Natives used an iconic gesture for 'moon,' for instance by forming a crescent shape by the thumb and index, moved across the backdrop of the sky" (62). In finding connection between nonverbal exchanges, Carayon's work is in concert with the recent scholarship of Alejandra Dubcovksy, highlighting vast networks of communication across the Americas with long term commercial societies trading throughout the continents in these prestige societies where "mastery of communicative techniques such as sings and mixed-media oratory was a marker of authority" (103).

By taking her research back to early modern Europe, Carayon deftly illustrates the role of communicative gestures and nonverbal discourse in European dialogue, a point whose importance scholars of the Atlantic World have often downplayed. While there was certainly room for grave misunderstandings, "complex culture of nonverbal, especially signed, communication that existed in Europe and America at the time of first colonial contact offered remarkable platforms for mutually meaningful cross-cultural exchanges between the groups" (156). Taking that in mind, the next several chapters include remarkably detailed analysis of encounter and the primary records from South America north to La Florida and the Great Lakes of North America. Early French travel narratives highlight that "Indigenous behaviors and practices, despite their variety, were easier to understand, learn, emulate, classify, and participate in than Native languages" (161).

Using the failed Huguenot settlement in Florida as the backdrop for a chapter on physical...