Writing the Hamat'sa: Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance - Hardcover

Glass, Aaron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0774863773 ISBN 13: 9780774863773

Publisher: UBC Press, 2021

Synopsis

Long known as the Cannibal Dance, the Hamat̓sa is among the most important hereditary prerogatives of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ꞌwakw of British Columbia. In the late nineteenth century, as anthropologists arrived to document the practice, colonial agents were pursuing its eradication and Kwakwa̱ka̱ꞌwakw were adapting it to endure. In the process, the dance – with dramatic choreography, magnificent bird masks, and an aura of cannibalism – entered a vast library of ethnographic texts.

Writing the Hamat̓sa offers a critical survey of attempts to record, describe, and interpret the dance over four centuries. Going beyond postcolonial critiques of representation that often ignore Indigenous agency in the ethnographic encounter, Writing the Hamat̓sa focuses on forms of textual mediation and Indigenous response that helped transofrm the ceremony from a set of specific performances into a generalized cultural icon.

This meticulous work illuminates how Indigenous people contribute to, contest, and repurpose texts in the process of fashioning modern identities under settler colonialism.

About this title

About the Author

Aaron Glass is an associate professor at the Bard Graduate Center, New York City. He is co-author, with Aldona Jonaitis, of The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History; editor of Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast; and co-editor, wiht Brad Evans, of Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwa̱ka̱ꞌwakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema. His documentary films include In Search of the Hamat̓sa: A Tale of Headhunting.

Edition details

• Publisher: UBC Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0774863773
• ISBN 13: 9780774863773
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512