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

the early colonial period in America has long attracted scholars interested in the history and theory of communication. The complexities of communication across cultures and encounters of speakers of languages with divergent syntactical and conceptual underpinnings offer a challenge to semiotic theories and an inspiration to thinking beyond the idea that language is the most important communicative dimension. For those who recover American Indigenous histories, such inquiries are crucial: so much of what is known of this era comes to us through the haze of colonial textual projection and the alienating distance of historical time. Céline Carayon's ambitious book Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas offers both a breathtakingly broad picture of intercultural communication in French colonial America and a simple claim about communication techniques with profound implications for any study of colonization.

"In early French-Indigenous America," Carayon declares, "communication consisted of much more than words, and there were no insurmountable linguistic barriers" (30). Despite linguistic differences, French explorers, traders, and men of the cloth navigated the Indigenous Americas, built trading posts, negotiated political alliances, and established missions. In turn, Native communities encountering the French quickly deciphered newcomers' designs and maneuvered them into physical, emotional, and political positions that served the needs of the people. Much of this, Carayon argues, was accomplished through nonverbal communication rather than rapid or widespread mutual language acquisition. Against the image of either a chaotic or a happily tolerant landscape rife with misunderstandings, Carayon posits a French colonial realm in which real and at times long-standing relationships—alongside a distinctly French sense of cultural mastery—were generated more through gestural signs, touch, dance, and other physical demonstrations than through language.

Carayon persuasively begins before encounter, with illuminating chapters first on Indigenous and then on French sixteenth-century gestural cultures that would have shaped expectations across cultural lines upon a first meeting. Indigenous communities had well-developed sign-making traditions within and across groups that expressed sacred meanings, cemented rituals, and eased trade and politics; the same was true of the French. Proceeding chronologically but dilating geographically, Eloquence Embodied then traces French and Native somatic communication from far North America to Brazil, with careful attention to cultural differences among Floridian, Caribbean, Canadian, and South American communities. Subsequent chapters trace colonial relationships forward in time to the late seventeenth century, revealing the surprising extent to which, despite some mutual linguistic acquisition and increasing familiarity, embodied communication continued to affect the political and economic fates of French endeavors in America. Carayon consults an astonishing range of sources—often performing translations herself and providing original text in footnotes—to give access not just to the experiences of captains, sachems, and priests but also to everyday French adventurers and Native community members.

The scope of this book gives heft to its claims about the centrality of the nonverbal and the need for those who study colonialism to look beyond spoken and written language (with their associated regimes of verifiability) when making sense of European-Native relations. Carayon provides a precise definition of the kinds of gestural interactions she analyzes: "By 'nonverbal,' I chiefly mean finger, arm, hand, and other bodily gestures … that bore explicit communicative qualities; I am also referring to sonorous and visual signals that possessed fixed meaning and communicative intent" (18). Actually, the book casts a wider net, and productively so, carefully sketching how Native signs depended on multimedia semiotics and sometimes proposing inspiringly speculative interpretations of signs latent in the written record. The argument is informed by leading studies of Indigenous communication from across the Americas, making a powerful case for how French colonial history exhibits features both distinct from and common to the broader European invasion.

There are a few moments when the book's celebration of the power of the nonverbal eclipses a longer view of what all this...