Crafting 'The Indian' Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist Reenactment [Hardcover]

In Europe, Indian hobbyism, or Indianism, has developed out of a strong fascination with Native American life in the 18th and 19th centuries. Indian hobbyists dress in homemade replicas of clothing, craft museum-quality replicas of artifacts, meet in fields dotted with tepees and reenact aspects of North American Indian lifeworlds, using ethnographies, travel diaries, and museum collections as resources. Grounded in fieldwork set among networks of Indian hobbyists in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Czech Republic, this ethnography analyzes this contemporary practice of serious leisure with respect to the general human desire for play, metaphor, and allusion. It provides insights into the increasing popularity of reenactment practices as they relate to a deeper understanding of human perception, imagination, and creativity.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1.Setting the Stage: Indianism and What It Is Not
Chapter2.Indian Hobbies, European Contexts: History, Historiography, Ethnography
Chapter3.Is This Play? Reframing Metaphoric Action on Indianist Playgrounds Buffalo Days Camp 2003: Journal
Chapter4.Amateurs in Action: the Makings of Knowledge through Improvisation
Chapter5.Shifting Selves around Authentic Replicas: Crafting the Past into the Present
Chapter 6.Matter, Metaphor, Miniature: Marvels of the Model

Appendix:Missouri River Story: A Tale of Playing for High Stakes

Petra Tjitske Kalshovenis a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has taught in McGill Universitys interdisciplinary Arts Legacy program and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Aberdeen from 20072009.

With her exlÃ(