Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

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СКАЧАТЬ presence of her people that confirmed her power.⁶⁷ Their bodies became the archive that housed the record of the sachem’s power as expressed in the land transfer.

      Southern Algonquian senses of place remained, sometimes a substratum under a Euroamerican dusting of topsoil, and often an active shaping of landscape and locality that denied the erasure attempted by whites, especially nineteenth-century historians and those who used their accounts as evidence of the vanishing of Indians.⁶⁸ Individuals and communities continued to assert their presence and ongoing interactions with each other, with their physical surroundings, and with the other-than-human persons who populated Native space. Poignant evidence of this continued interaction and re-creation of Native space exists in the charcoal and other objects Narragansetts buried at earlier gravesites in ceremonies of remembrance and communication long after they no longer lived in close proximity. In their journeys and visits, they interacted with the dead and reinscribed the land—although in ways undetectable to colonists like Roger Williams or others who came after him—with their own definitions of faithful bodies.⁶⁹

      Nickómmo, and other feasts and dances were not the only aspect of Algonquian means to access the power of other-than-human persons, who were often sought on an individual basis, but the community events were especially significant in times of crisis. While the specifics of dancing and feasting rituals differed from culture to culture as well as having multiple variations for different purposes, together they provide grounded examples of the broad ways that the indigenous peoples of New England thought about their bodies in relation to the corporate body of the community. The movements of legs and feet, the sounds of voice and embellished clothing, and the redistribution or destruction of goods reaffirmed or created bonds among the participants, connections that could be strongly hierarchical. Whether a leader called an event to respond to a crisis or to follow a more calendrically based ritual, their actions distinguished them from common participants. Religious specialists might distinguish themselves by dancing in particular ways while the sponsors of a feast often held themselves apart from much of the feasting.⁷⁰ These events also provided the means for connections among communities, as individuals sometimes traveled to participate in a feast and dance held some distance away. Communal and relational did not mean equal or egalitarian—those with the power to command resources had to share their bounty, but those without were bound to accept it and express gratitude. The nickómmo and other meals of the common pot accentuated and reinforced the relational (and sometimes coercive) acts of giving and receiving.

      The next chapter explores this question of the tension between equality and hierarchy of performing bodies in an overlapping context: English puritan iterations of the community body evoked in Williams’s statement that Narragansetts “make their neighbors partakers with them.” Partaking together lay at the heart of what it meant to be a Christian and the central ritual of communion, a common meal of bread and wine reaffirming the shared body of Christ. The meaning and significance of that common meal for the corporate body of the community of the faithful was the contested heart of puritan ideas about and enactments of faithful bodies.

      3. “Ye are of one Body and members one of another”

      The metaphor of the body of Christ organized community life as a diagram for how Christians should live together. Passages throughout the New Testament referred to the church as Christ’s body and Christians as members of that body, while the central ritual revolved around consuming the body and blood of Christ as—depending on one’s theological emphasis—memorialized by or simultaneously present in the bread and wine of a meal that remembered or reenacted Christ’s last supper with his disciples.¹ Body metaphors were ubiquitous and a point of common reference because the universal experience of being embodied grounded the relationship between the physical, human body and collective spiritual and social bodies. Yet that universality contained a nearly infinite multiplicity of individual experiences that made definitions of the body in general, and faithful bodies in particular, nodes of conflict. Exactly how corporate social and spiritual bodies should function and who should belong to them was a matter of much disagreement.

      Christians of various kinds applied the terminology of the physical or “natural” body to the community of the faithful in their efforts to confront the difficulty of how to unify disparate parts into a harmonious whole.² In “A Modell of Christian Charity,” an address John Winthrop delivered in 1630 with the hope that it would serve as a guide for the community to be founded in New England, Winthrop detailed how the disparate parts of a body might hold together: “The severall partes of this body . . . before they were united were as disproportionate and as much disordering as soe many contrary quallities or elements,” but after Christ “by his spirit and love knitts all these partes to himselfe and each to other,” they changed in nature. Christ’s love brought bodily changes: the assemblage of parts that formed a disproportionate body became “the most perfect and best proportioned body in the world.”³ In 1704, a group of elderly ministers who had refused to conform to Church of England rituals quoted part of Romans in a book-length letter to younger generations of dissenters: “Ye are of one Body and Members one of another: Wherefore like the Members of the Natural Body, ye must have a mutual Care, and be ready to help and serve each other in Love.”⁴ For Cotton Mather, the different members of the body of Christ had to “study to be Serviceable unto the people of God” who were “The Mystical Body of Christ” or they would be “worse than silver Hands, or wooden Legs, in that Body.” Failing to assist other members of the mystical body, which was more expansive than the local gathering of the godly, would make them of less help than lifeless prosthetics, poor substitutes for the living extremities.⁵ But recognizing that “Natural Body” and even those “wooden Legs” was not so simple as the comparison intimated. Unlike recognizing the limbs of one’s own body, it was not easy to determine who belonged and who did not. Defining the true body of Christ was a tricky business for Protestants dissenting from the Church of England. Draw the outline too close, and one might be succumbing to the sin of thinking that mere human reason was enough to determine whom the Christian God had saved. Expand it too broadly, and one might be eternally damaged by the spiritual corruption and disease spread by the irrepentable sin of others.

      It was a complicated matter to determine who was called and united to Christ in the one body of the church, especially in the face of alternate understandings of the workings of spiritual power. English migration to Native homelands and to Bermuda introduced practices of making community that competed for space alongside southern Algonquian, West Central African, Haudenosaunee, indigenous Caribbean, and French configurations, among others. These groups shared the basic human experience of embodiment, but each group—and, indeed, each individual—made particular sense of that experience, making the body and body metaphors a productive vehicle for gaining access to multiple and often competing perspectives.⁶ While the English drew understanding from their physical bodies as much as did anyone else, they operated according to their own particular logics of the body and body-as-community. This chapter examines key ways that those on the puritan spectrum used bodily knowledge to organize their spiritual and political lives and to define the properly faithful body.

      Figure 3.1. This early eighteenth-century French engraving of a Baptist celebration of the Lord’s Supper shows the matched vessels used to distribute the wine in a more egalitarian manner. La Cene des Anabaptistes, Jean Frederic Bernard, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, illus. Bernard Picart, vol. 4 (Amsterdam, 1736), after p. 208. For a scholarly digitized edition, see http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/picart/.

      

      Figure 3.2. St. George’s Chalice and cover engraved with the Sea Venture СКАЧАТЬ