Indianism

Welcome to Anthropology of Gender and Age!

Contrary to the prevalent reification of gender as a sovereign domain of power relations, I treat gender in conjunction with age. One of the identifying features of the Indianist phenomenon is its origin in an individual’s childhood and adolescence. Attempts have been made to squeeze the appropriation of Native American cultures under the theme of “stereotypes of masculinity.” The importance of the image of the Indian warrior, chief and medicine man can hardly he overestimated, but there is consistent evidence that points to the balanced, albeit differential, involvement of sexes into Indianism. Boy Scouts coexisted with Campfire Girls. Early American feminists developed passion for Southwest Indian cultures in the 1920s. The most recent trend in aboriginal tourism is the desire of European women to beget a child from a Native American male. They subsequently return to Europe and give birth to their own Indian.

A picture of Clare Sheridan, a writer and sculptor, an admirer of Communism and a cousin of Winston Churchill, in the outfit of an Indian warrior, an “Indian maiden” flirting with an American soldier (posted on one of the Indianist websites; see Link) and an American singer Cher (father Armenian, mother claims Cherokee descent) iding a horse in full Indian gear in a video-clip for her song “Half-Breed” (”Half-Breed” album, 1973) serve as good illustrations of this theme.

The fashionable practice of tourist pregnancy can serve as a metaphor for the whole Indianist phenomenon. The appropriation of Native American cultures can be conceived of, allegorically, as the dominance of a feminine principle. Christian Feest’s dubbing of Euro-Indians as “cultural transvestites” (picked up in Katrin Sieg’s book Ethnic Drag) contains, therefore, a startling insight. (Notably, most Indianists, and male Indianists most emphatically, are masterful experts in beadwork, which, in traditional Native American societies, was a feminine pursuit.) However it needs to be emphasized that the abstract femininity of Indianism has nothing to do with Indianists’ sexuality: “femininity” and “masculinity” are simply tropes that divide and classify aspects of cultural behavior. This interpretation stands in contrast to the underlying premises of gender and gay/lesbian studies, which, in their very names, continue to assume that maleness and femaleness have something to do with sexuality, with biological sex and its transgression, and not with spirituality and its enactment.