Feathered Identities and Plumed Performances: Tupinambá Interculture in Early Modern Brazil and Europe
- Format:
- Dissertation
- Year:
- 2007
- University:
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- University URL:
- Thesis type:
- Doctoral Dissertation
- Place published:
- Santa Barbara, Calif.
- Language:
- Abstract:
The material and ritual culture of the Tupinamba peoples of early modern Brazil centered upon elaborate featherwork capes, of which only eleven survive today. Within Tupi villages, colonial missions and European courts, these ritual vestments played a key role in the creation of a pan-Atlantic colonial interculture. Produced from feathers of the scarlet ibis, these capes played an important role in Tupi corporeality and community. My dissertation attends to the physical qualities of the extant capes and examines the discourses that early modern chroniclers and modern anthropologists constructed around them. Letters by Jesuit missionaries in Brazil surprisingly reveal the continued manufacture and use of Tupi feathered capes within the aldeia (mission) system in both indigenous and Christian rituals. Jesuit missionaries also shipped the capes to Europe, where with other artifacts they extended the conceptual space of colonialism to the Old World. They traveled along social, mercantile and political networks, and entered scholarly and princely collections, where they were studied for their technical mastery and redeployed within court pageantry. "Brazil" and the "Tupinamba" were concepts mediated by missionaries, merchants, slaves and indigenes in the spatial realms of ports, plantations, missions, marketplaces and courts. The financial incentives of the brazilwood and sugar industries drove European involvement with Brazilian peoples and coastal forests. The Tupi and their plumed artifacts traveled alongside these exported commodities, tangible indices of European economic interests in the New World. By constructing a socio-cultural "biography" of the Tupi feathered capes, I trace their changing functions and value as they move from place to place. As ritual vestments, they contributed to the social coding within and among Tupi kinship groups and colonial intermediaries, including early modern merchants, scholars and princes. A reification of the process of social construction, the capes were instrumental in the performance of identity and agency in the colonial nexus. By examining the intersection of these objects with a series of early modern places, people, and institutions I contribute to our knowledge of colonial indigenous traditions within Brazil and of the institutional and economic basis of European engagement with the New World.
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- When (Centuries):
- Worldcat URL:
- Number of Pages:
- 440
- ISBN:
- 97805493627150549362711