Cultural misunderstandings: a case study from the British settlement of North America

I'm in the middle of reading Bernard Bailyn's latest book, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations 1600-1675, and I came across a very interesting example of two cultures talking past one another. A little background: the colony at Jamestown was founded in 1607, and over the next few years, colonists, including the now famous John Smith, undertook expeditions to map the area and to collect (or steal) provisions from the Indians (the colonists were in bad shape almost constantly during the first decades). As might be expected, both cultures were feeling each other out in order to maximize their respective advantages. On the one hand, while the Indians were interested in European trade goods, they wanted to constrain the colonists within small, coastal settlements focused on trade (rather than permanent homesteads). The Europeans were also looking to trade but, for myriad reasons, many where also looking to stay and settle permanently on land occupied by various tribes. Ok, I'll have Bailyn (2012: 57-58) pick it up at the point where he describes a cultural misunderstanding relating to power relationships (note the olde English spelling in the quotes):

In three days of elaborate ceremony and elusive conversation, fending off Powhatan's [a local chief] question of the colonists' purpose in settling, [John] Smith was urged, on behalf of his people, to acknowledge Powhatan 'as their lord' and to accept for himself the role of a subordinate chief. This, of course, to the extent that he understood the proposal, he ignored, but in the end, symbolically at least, he had no choice. After being feasted 'in their best barbarous manner' and treated like a defeated enemy about to be slain, he was brought to what appeared to be an execution block, surrounded by warriors 'ready with clubs to beate out his braines.' Then at the final moment he was suddenly released, adopted as a subordinate werowance, and by extension his people were symbolically enclosed within the constraints of Powhatan's regime. Never, of course, experiencing these events as acts of subordination, and declining the benefits offered, Smith recorded the story of his captivity at first briefly and with little drama (he 'procured his owne liberty'), then elaborated it in retelling, finally embellished it as an elaborate ceremony on the tale of how Pocahontas 'the King's dearest daughter' (who was eleven at the time) 'got his head in her armes, and laid her own upon his to save him from death.'

The parallel effort to subordinate and control barbarous and threatening people, at least symbolically, was played out reciprocally by the English the next year. Smith and Newport [describe him], on order from London, led a troop of musketeers to present Powhatan with a plethora of gifts, inlcuding copper objects, a bedstead and bedclothes  a red coat, and a copper crown, the last a gift heavily freighted with symbolism from the great King James. When with difficulty they managed to place the crown on Powhatan's forcibly bowed head, the ceremonial reduction of the chief of chiefs to the status of a vassal or local lord of King James was complete, symbolically confined within England's sovereign power.

In other words, both cultures carried out elaborate ceremonies that, while meant to subordinate each other, were perceived as meaningless rites because neither culture recognized them for what they were intended to be. The same thing happens all the time with modern cultures; sometimes these interactions can be humorous, but many times they can have serious, even tragic, consequences. For those who say that understanding other cultures is a waste of time, proceed at your own peril...

UPDATE 4.28.13

I've just finished the book, and it was a fascinating read. What struck me most was how heterogeneous the colonizing populations from Europe really were. Recent histories of colonial America have stressed, and correctly so, that Native Americans were not a single, monolithic unit but rather a diverse collection of rich cultures. So too for the incoming Europeans, whose various nationalities, religious views, and socio-economic circumstances determined to a great extent how they interacted with both native cultures and each other.

My Human Biological Variation class was recently engaged in a discussion about the biological reality of race among modern humans and, and it often does, the point that the concept's definition differs from place to place was raised. One student, originally from England, was surprised at how obsessed Americans seemed to be with their origins: people identify as African-American, German, Irish, Native American, and so on, while it is very rare for an English citizen to identify as, say, German-English or African-English. I bring this up because I came across a passage in the book that was particularly salient within this context. In his description of the complex socio-ethnic conditions of a Manhattan recently conquered by the English, Bailyn (2012: 516) outlines the response of the newly incorporated citizenry:

In the late 1660s and 1670s the new English province of New York was far different from its neighboring New England  It was a world in flux, its people caught up in complex ethnic tensions, its economy growing but shifting in organization  it government newly established and weakly related to the society it ruled. The great majority of New Yorkers in Manhattan (an estimated 76 percent of a significant sample) were Dutch, as were the settlers sin what were now called Albany and Schenectady, and they expected to remain Dutch under the English regime. In fact, their "Dutchness" was becoming more prominent  as a process of what Joyce Goodfriend has called the "crystallization" of ethnic groups set in. The various groups, she explains, now in a more open society became more self-aware and felt the need to define themselves in institutional form and to preserve their distinctive characteristics  So the Dutch, despite the differences among them, began to "coalesce"-to consciously value their distinct common ground  in the language, religion, customs  and values. So too other groups sought their own places in this province of tolerated diversity.

I'm not sure how "tolerated" all that diversity really was, but this "crystallization" really does seem to be a common response among peoples within multi-ethnic communities, and it may may go some way in explaining the desire of Americans to be so self-aware of their ancestry.

References:

Bailyn, B (2012). The barbarous years: The peopling of British North America: the conflict of civilizations 1600-1675. Alfred E. Knopf, New York.

Goodfriend, JD (1992). Before the melting pot: society and culture in colonial New York City, 1664-1730. Princeton University Press, Princeton.