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Foreword Colonial Mediascapes is a bold and ambitious project that proposes new ways of thinking about books, technology, and American Indians. When the old ways of thinking are filled with rusted and corroding words, sometimes the new ways require new words. New words are usually off-putting, and in fact the clumsy word for new words (neologism) is itself a perfect example. However, the argument in the pages that follow is so groundbreaking, and so profound and disorientating , that it justifies the creation of new names for new things. Let me crudely characterize the existing discourse.The winter count calendar is (kind of) like a book. The quipu is (kind of) like a computer . The petroglyph is (kind of) like words. The subtext is not so buried; what we’re really talking about is this: Indians are, on a good day, (kind of) like Europeans. Just as the structure of these sentences about books and computers embeds a clear point of view on what is understood to be superior, the underlying assumption applies to the users of these things as well. As a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, I always felt these well-intentioned comparisons were a trap. I never thought it was quite believable that some ugly ball of yarn was really an indigenous univac, or at least an abacus.That isn’t to say I thought it wasn’t those things; just that in an exhibition format , no text label making such a comparison would be convincing. Yet even if one had the expertise and real estate to build a compelling, xii Foreword smart exhibition that would persuade skeptics that those ratty-looking Peruvian strings contained mathematical genius, what did that really get us? Since a microscopic fraction of Indians who ever lived used such a device, I suggest we get the exception that proves the rule, that’s what. The chapters that follow demonstrate how these things are not approximately similar but fundamentally different, and they begin to explode the notion of technological determinism that shapes much of the current discourse about the past five centuries of American history. True,“objects of knowledge transfer”doesn’t roll off the tongue, and time will tell if “mediascapes” gains traction as a way to think about these questions, which is just fine.The ideas, though, I am certain are going to be around a long time. Paul Chaat Smith September 2010 ...

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