‘Transgressive Objects’ in America: Mimesis and Violence in the Collection of Trophies during the Nineteenth Century Indian Wars

Abstract

Based on my own earlier theorising of ‘mimesis at war’, and taking up Simon Harrison's suggestion that trophies made from human body parts are best explained as ‘transgressive objects’, the article focuses on a particular trophy, a nineteenth century Cheyenne finger necklace. Its history illustrates that trophy-taking was part of a broader circulation of practices of war among native warriors and the American military in the West. Finally, trophy-taking made its way into the academic and scientific institutions that provide the discursive frame for present debates about war in anthropology and archaeology.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Felicia Pickering, museum specialist at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, MD, for her competent assistance during my research at the Smithsonian in December 2007. Thanks also to the participants of the workshop ‘Social Figurations of Violence and War beyond the State’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in February 2008 for a fruitful discussion, and to the issue editors, Jutta Bakonyi and Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, for their patience during my writing process and their and my anonymous reviewer's valuable comments on an earlier draft of the article. Still, all faults are mine.

Notes

 1. Keith F. Otterbein, ‘A History of Research on Warfare in Anthropology’, American Anthropologist 101/4 (2000) pp.794–805; see also Anna Simons, ‘War: Back to the Future’, Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999) pp.73–108.

 2. Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza (eds) North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2007); see also Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza (eds) Latin American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2007); and Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye (eds) The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians (New York: Springer 2008). Elizabeth Arkush, ‘Warfare and Violence in the Americas’ [Review], American Antiquity 73/2 (2008) pp.560–75; see also Stephen H. Leksen, ‘War in the Southwest, War in the World’, American Antiquity 67/4 (2002) pp.607–24.

 3. This article is part of an ongoing research project on the construction of the body in the intercultural exchange between indigenous societies and mainstream American culture in the three realms of bodily exchange: sexuality, disease, and violence ‘in its most brutal and most collective, most pure and most social form: war’; Pierre Clastres, Archaeology of Violence (New York: Semiotexte 1994) p.139. In part, it goes back to my longstanding interest in the biographies of nineteenth century native and military leaders involved in the so-called ‘Indian Wars’, especially Captain John Gregory Bourke; see, for example, Cora Bender, John Gregory Bourke: Zwischen Indianerbefriedung und Mimesis [John Gregory Bourke: Mimesis and the Pacification of the American Indian], M.A. Thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Cologne (1994); and Cora Bender, ‘A Man Made Matter out Place: Captain John Gregory Bourke (1846–1896) as a Source for Aby Warburg's Schlangenritual’ in Cora Bender, Thomas Hensel and Erhard Schuettpelz (eds) Schlangenritual: Der Transfer der Wissensformen vom Tsu'ti'kive der Hopi bis zu Aby Warburgs Kreuzlinger Vortrag [Snake Ritual: The Transfer of Forms of Knowledge from the Hopi Tsu'ti'kive to Aby Warburg's Kreuzlingen Lecture] (Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2007) pp.153–86.

 4. Original workshop title; cf. Acknowledgements section.

 5. Steve P. Reyna, presentation at the University of Bremen, 25 April 2008.

 6. C. F. Feest, ‘European Collecting of American Indian Artefacts and Art’, Journal of the History of Collections 5/1 (1992) pp.1–11.

 7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage 1995).

 8. Simon Harrison, ‘Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: Transgressive Objects of Remembrance’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12/4 (2006) pp.817–36. On the notion of transgression in anthropology, see Klaus-Peter Koepping, Shattering Frames. Transgressional Transformations in Anthropological Discourse and Practice (Berlin: Reimer 2002).

 9. Chacon and Dye (note 2) p.648; emphasis added by author.

10. Candace Greene, Bonnie Richard and Kirsten Thompson, ‘Treaty Councils and Indian Delegations. The War Department Museum Collection’, American Indian Art Magazine 33/1 (2007) pp.66–80.

11. Chacon and Dye (note 2) pp.15–22.

12. Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 1865, cf. Robert M. Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848-1865 (New York: Macmillan 1967) p.297.

13. Harrison (note 8).

14. Pierre Clastres, Archaeology of Violence (note 3) p.145.

15. Brian R. Ferguson, ‘Blood of the Leviathan: Western Contact and Warfare in Amazonia’, American Ethnologist 17/2 (1990) pp.237–57.

16. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Myth of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Press 1973).

17. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1986).

18. Bender, ‘A Man Made Matter out Place’ (note 3) passim. See also John Gregory Bourke, On the Border With Crook (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1891); John Gregory Bourke, ‘The Medicine Men of the Apache’, 9th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office 1892) pp.451–617; John Gregory Bourke, Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (Washington, DC: W.H. Lowdermilk 1891).

19. Bourke, ‘On the Border With Crook’ (note 18) p.394.

20. Joseph C. Porter, Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press 1986) p.17.

21. John Gregory Bourke in his diaries, cf. Porter (note 20) p.10.

22. John C. Ewers, The Horse in Blackfoot Indian Culture, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 159 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press 1955); John C. Ewers, The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press 1958); George Bird Grinnell, ‘Coup and Scalp Among the Plains Indians’, American Anthropologist 12/2 (1910) pp.296–310; George Bird Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1915); George Bird Grinnell, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1923); Oscar Lewis, The Effects of White Contact upon Blackfoot Culture, Monographs of the American Ethnological Society (New York: J.J. Augustin 1942); Francis Paul Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783–1846 (New York: Macmillan 1968); John M. Coward, The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820–90 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press 1999).

23. Robert M. Utley, ‘Cultural Clash on the Western North American Frontier: Military Implications’ in James C. Bradford (ed.) The Military and Conflict between Cultures: Soldiers at the Interface (College Station: Texas A&M University Press 1997) p.92.

24. Bender, ‘John Gregory Bourke’ (note 3) pp.29–38. On the concept of mimesis in anthropology, see Fritz Kramer, The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa (London: Verso 1993); and Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge 1993).

25. William A. Ganoe, The History of the United States Army (New York: Appleton 1924) p.329.

26. John Gregory Bourke, ‘General Crook in the Indian Country’, The Century Magazine 5 (1891) pp.643–60; emphasis added by author.

27. Douglas B. Bamforth, ‘Indigenous People, Indigenous Violence: Precontact Warfare on the North American Great Plains’, Man 29/1 (1994) pp.95–115.

28. The eyewitness account given by Saukamapee who had lived most of his life among Piegan (Blackfoot) reveals some similarities to the type of battle documented in Robert Garder's critically acclaimed film ‘Dead Birds’ (1983) about Dani warfare in New Guinea, see Bamforth (note 27) p.99.

29. Jeffrey P. Blick, ‘Genocidal Warfare in Tribal Societies as a Result of European-Induced Culture Conflict’, Man 23/4 (1988) pp.654–70; R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press 1992).

30. Bamforth (note 27) p.97. His meticulous and cautious reconstruction of the background to the Crow Creek massacre site sounds, at least to a non-archaeologist like myself, like a convincing plea in favor of the existence of extremely violent modes of warfare in pre-contact America. However, his suggestion that we are looking at a classic example of tribal war over farm land, i.e. territory, does not explain the case. Why should, during a season of extreme food-shortage, one scurvy-afflicted, starving band of have-nots waste their energy on attacking another band of equally scurvy-afflicted, starving have-nots? What would be the motif, and what the perceived benefit of the perpetrator?

31. Douglas W. Owsley, Karin S. Bruwelheide, Laurie Burgess and William T. Billeck, ‘Human Finger and Hand Bone Necklaces from the Plains and Great Basin’ in Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye (eds) The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians (New York: Springer 2007) pp.124–66.

32. Douglas W. Owsley, Karin S. Bruwelheide, Laurie Burgess and William T. Billeck, ‘Human Finger and Hand Bone Necklaces from the Plains and Great Basin’ in Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye (eds) The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians (New York: Springer 2007) p.124.

33. Bamforth (note 27) pp.101, 107.

34. Owsley et al. (note 31) p.125.

35. John Gregory Bourke, Mackenzie's Last Fight with the Cheyennes. A Winter Campaign in Wyoming and Montana [Governor's Island, N.Y.H., 1890] (New York: Argonaut Press 1960).

36. Bourke (note 35) p.41.

37. Bourke, ‘Medicine Men of the Apache’ (note 18) pp.30–3.

38. Owsley et al. (note 31) p.128.

39. Denig, cited in Owsley et al. (note 31) p.127.

40. Bourke, ‘Medicine Men of the Apache’ (note 18) p.31.

41. Porter, ‘Paper Medicine Man’ (note 20) p.263.

42. Catherine Lutz, ‘Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis’, American Anthropologist 104/3 (2002) pp.723–35.