Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas by Celine Carayon (review)

Celine Carayon has written a very impressive, heavily researched, and sweeping history of non-verbal communication between early French explorers and settlers and Native Americans (1500–1700). Carayon gives most of her attention to French-Native American interactions in North America, particularly in the Great Lakes Region, relying heavily on Jesuit Relations translated and edited by Reuben Gold Th waites. However, she gives some space to the mostly forgotten French colonization efforts in Brazil and the Caribbean.

Carayon, associate professor of history at Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD, specializes in the French Atlantic World and Native American History. It is her contention that, "Scholars over emphasized the difficulty, or even the possibility, of intercultural communication in early America, owning to early modern Europeans' frustration with linguistic barriers in the Americas as well as a robust modern skepticism toward positive assertions of communicative success through other-than-verbal means." (4)

Nonverbal communication, Carayon argues, was fundamental to French colonial endeavors. She traces the huge role nonverbal communication played, not only in the most basic forms, such as asking for directions or for food or shelter, but in complex diplomatic and religious conversations. In her research for Eloquence Embodied, Carayon writes, "the study reveals the importance of interpersonal embodied communication and how Indigenous communication traditions played in the making of the colonial world." (8)

In Eloquence Embodied, Carayon proves the early American continents were not a "Babel of tongues," but rather, "a site of rich intersections between effective traditions of embodied expressiveness." (7) Notably, Native Americans had a long history of using sign language, props, and gestures while communicating, long before the arrival of Europeans.

Although an important work, which students of Native American history, the history of the Early Colonial Period, and the French Atlantic World will want to read, Eloquence Embodied is not without its flaws. The annotations within the footnotes, many a half a page long or longer, distract from the reading of the text. Over time, the constant going back and forth between the text and the notes, leaves the reader confused and disoriented. Although all notes are important, and a great deal of Carayon's notes are an "interesting divergence," their length are a distraction to reading Eloquence Embodied in a constructive manner. Reading the notes in their entirety while reading the text is like reading two books at once.

Another issue: there is no bibliography, although the notes do, in some respects, serve as the bibliography. Any reader, wanting to consult a list of works cited will have to content themselves with thumbing through the entire book. This, of course, makes tracking down sources frustrating and time consuming. This, I admit, may not be Carayon's fault, but one still wonders how the publishers of a scholarly book would allow a work to be published in a form that hinders scholarly use.

In addition, there are other problems with the text, which could have benefited from a little tighter editing. Some of the sentences in Eloquence Embodied are convoluted and hard to follow. One example: "I investigate the results of the coincidental intersections between the nonverbal traditions described in the first part of the book, with a special attention to the role of local Indigenous communicative contexts in determining colonial outcomes as well as French author's' literary representations of the people of the America." (29)

Carayon is to be lauded, however, for her extensive use of original sources, the vast majority written in French and some of which she translated herself. Her multidisciplinary approach using sources as varied as sociology, psychology, linguistics, ethnohistory and cultural history lay weight to her arguments.

Carayon divided Eloquence Embodied into three parts of two chapters each, arranged in more or less chronological order. In part 1, "Sign of the Times," Carayon writes about the very nature of non...