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Eloquence embodied : nonverbal communication among French & Indigenous peoples in the Americas / Céline Carayon.

by Carayon, Céline.

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Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture ; University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Indigenous peoples -- America -- Communication.

Nonverbal communication -- America -- History -- 17th century.

France -- Colonies -- America -- Social life and customs.

9781469652627 (pbk.)

Alternate title:

Nonverbal communication among French and Indigenous peoples in the Americas

xii, 456 p. : ill., maps ; 25 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- Part 1. Signs of the times. "Acquainted by some signes" : communication, knowledge, and sign language in Native America ; "Civil in any country, if they are so in the fashion of France" : nonverbal communication, civility, and the language of signs in early modern France -- Part 2. Signs of change. "Many friendly signs" : French-Indian communication during sixteenth-century encounters ; "The most thorough traitors and deserters" : embodiments of trust and deception in the seventeenth-century French Atlantic -- Part 3. Speaking of signs. "A thousand gesticulations and affectations" : embodied multilingualism and the question of culture change in seventeenth-century America ; "The greatest speech-makers on earth" : oratory and the symbolic language of diplomacy in the mature French Atlantic -- Conclusion.

Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, this book answers the long-standing question of how and how well Indigenous Americans and the Europeans who arrived on their shores communicated with each other. French explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century noticed that Indigenous peoples from Brazil to Canada used signs to communicate. The French, in response, quickly embraced the nonverbal as a means to overcome cultural and language barriers. Céline Carayon's close examination of their accounts enables her to recover these sophisticated native practices of embodied expressions.

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